DRUGS OUR SECOND CIVIL WAR : Cut the Chain of Greed, Poverty, Self-Indulgence : America’s leadership class culturally and socially blessed casual use. Now we have a war on our hands and we must raise taxes to win it.
“Temperance” is defined as drinking in moderation or total abstinence. Many would favor expanding the definition to include drug use, with the implication that using drugs in moderation is acceptable. Despite the misery and death that drugs have brought to our homes, neighborhoods and schools, some still favor this permissive approach. They urge the government to go ahead and bomb the Colombian drug plantations and clean out the ghetto crack houses, so long as the weekend cocaine and marijuana user is left in peace to unwind in whatever manner he or she pleases. This approach was proved wrong 20 years ago. It would compound the tragedy to let the elite, casual user off the hook again.
America’s leadership class will be remembered for the role it played in helping lose two wars: the war in Vietnam and, at least so far, the war on drugs. The leadership class is made up of highly educated and influential people in the arts, the media, the academic community, the government bureaucracies and even business. They are characterized by intellectual arrogance, obsession with style, fashion and class and a permissive attitude on drugs. In Vietnam, they felt more comfortable criticizing the United States for trying to save South Vietnam than criticizing the Communists for trying to conquer it. In the drug war, they simply went over to the other side. For years, the enemy was them.
Now that polls show a majority of the American people fear drugs more than war, poverty, crime or the deteriorating environment, being against drugs is as fashionable as being on drugs was two decades ago. Every politician who admits taking a puff of dope in the ‘60s is talking tough on dope in the ‘80s. But for years the elite class accepted and even celebrated “recreational” drug use. Some still say that the casual user is not the problem. But when the casual user is a powerful movie director, a millionaire rock star or an influential columnist, he or she is more dangerous than a hundred Brooklyn dope pushers.
Drug users in the leadership class helped create a climate of social, cultural and political acceptance that permitted the drug plague to take root. As it began to spread through our colleges and schools, attempts to contain it were condemned in leadership circles as paternalistic efforts by the older generation to suppress the creative urges of its children. Those who did not openly condone drug use coyly looked the other way.
When I rejected the recommendation of a presidential commission that called for the decriminalization of marijuana in 1972, one liberal columnist scoffed. “There is no real cause for panic about drug abuse and its effect on crime,” he wrote in the New York Times. “There is no evidence that a crackdown will be the answer: quite the opposite.” Under the leadership of Dr. Jerome Jaffe, we did adopt a tough, coordinated policy, ranging from diplomatic pressure on Turkey to stop exporting heroin to establishing the first treatment program for inner-city addicts. But even more crackdown in those years might well have meant less crack now.
Even today, when most of the prestige media have managed to crowd onto the anti-drug bandwagon, they could not help indulging in a revolting orgy of nostalgia during the 20th anniversary of Woodstock last year. The smarmy retrospectives glossed over the fact that Woodstock’s only significant legacy was the glorification of dangerous illegal drugs. At least the seven Woodstock performers who eventually died from drugs got obituaries in the newspapers. Thousands in the audience who also became victims of drug abuse weren’t even that lucky.
To erase the grim legacy of Woodstock, we need a total war against drugs. Total war means war on all fronts against an enemy with many faces. Some, such as the South American drug barons, are easy and even appropriate targets. But making the drug war largely a foreign-policy issue is a convenient way to blame others for our own domestic problems. Some people do not want to admit that the enemy is also as near as the face they see in the mirror--the inner-city or suburban father who walks out on younger children who need his influence to avoid drugs, the Wall Street broker buying a couple of grams of cocaine in the subway station, the columnist smoking marijuana or snorting coke on Saturday night and then going to the office Monday and writing that drugs are really just a problem for poor blacks.
All are links in a steel chain of greed, poverty, neglect and self-indulgence that is being drawn tighter and tighter around our throats. All must be fought and stopped before the chain can be broken and our country finally freed of its chemical, economic and cultural addiction to illegal drugs. But nothing can be accomplished, no anti-drug initiative will be successful, if our society does not face the hard fact that any tolerance of any use of any illegal drug is wrong.
For this reason, calls for legalization of drugs are totally misguided. Police, parents and teachers in the inner cities, the soldiers on the front lines in the drug war, know that if drugs were legalized, they would be cheaper and easier to get. As a result, there would be far more people on drugs. The way to win a war is not to give all the ammunition to the other side.
The war also cannot be won on the cheap. If Abraham Lincoln had been worried about the budget in 1861, George Bush would need a passport to visit Atlanta. Instead, Lincoln spent what he needed to win the Civil War and ran up a $500-million deficit.
The war on drugs is our second civil war. If winning it requires a tax increase, so be it. In that event, the Bush Administration should seriously consider proposing a new tax on cigarettes and alcohol, with the funds earmarked for drug interdiction, prosecution, treatment and education. Timid advisers who warn the President that the political heat will be too great if he proposes such a tax are wrong. The American people expect him to do what is necessary to win the war no matter what the cost, so long as his measures are bold enough to have a chance to work. The war cannot be won without strong leadership from the top.
Today, 58 government agencies share responsibility for fighting drugs. Too often they end up spending more time fighting each other for turf than fighting the enemy. A drug czar who has little more than the symbolic power of a British king will not be able to knock heads together to end the civil war in the bureaucracy and make a victory possible in the civil war against drugs.
A tough policy can also be a compassionate one. When I visited the Daytop Village drug rehabilitation center in Swan Lake, N.Y., in 1988, I met scores of young people who had fallen into the drug trap. With guidance from Msgr. William B. O’Brien and his dedicated colleagues, they were now on the road to productive, drug-free lives. Daytop offers 24-hour-a-day supervision, stiff punishments for patients who stray, and regular follow-up testing after they go home.
Because many such programs rely solely on private donations, only a fraction of those who need them can get in. No matter what else President Bush does, he should make it a national goal to ensure that no one who really wants to beat drugs is ever excluded from treatment. Any American who saw the hopeful faces of the young people at Daytop Village would gladly open his heart and his checkbook if it meant saving even one more child from oblivion.