Dole Backs the Big Lie in Drug War

Bob Dole will win the drug war. Bob “My Word Is My Bond” Dole says he will not “go AWOL” like that pansy Clinton: “When I’m president of the United States, we’re going to use the National Guard and whatever sources we need to stop some of the drugs coming into America. If you stop the drugs, nobody’s going to use the drugs.”

Way to go, Bob. Great stuff. Just seal the border and if the drugs can’t come in, why of course nobody will be able to buy them and, voila, no drug problem. It’s so simple, why didn’t Clinton think of that?

Actually, he did, spending $3 billion more a year than his predecessor did in the futile war on drugs. But the bipartisan effort, spanning three administrations, aimed at drying up the foreign supply and interdicting the flow of drugs through our borders, hasn’t worked--and won’t, ever. Federal expenditures to control the supply of drugs have increased fivefold in the past 10 years, but cocaine and heroin are cheaper, purer and more available today.

No politician has the guts to admit it, but the supply of drugs cannot be effectively controlled because they are too easy to grow and smuggle. As a report by the respected, nonpartisan Washington policy research institute, Drug Strategies, points out: “A single DC-3 flight can bring a year’s supply of heroin into the U.S. and 12 trailer trucks can bring in a year’s supply of cocaine.” A 25-square-mile area is sufficient to grow enough opium to feed the U.S. market, so burning poppy fields won’t turn the trick. Dole can draft every adult American into the National Guard and it won’t accomplish a damn thing.

Even if you stopped drugs from coming into the country, that wouldn’t affect the supply of marijuana, which is primarily home-grown and accounts for three-quarters of drug use. And it doesn’t speak to the synthetic stimulants produced in domestic laboratories, or prescription drugs, which together represent a rapidly growing share of the drug market.

Nor does arresting people in this country do anything at all to cut the supply. We now arrest three times as many people for drug possession and sale as we did in 1980, but despite 1.3 million arrests last year, the availability of drugs only increased. Drug convictions now account for two-thirds of the inmates in the federal prison system. Dole brags about carrying a copy of the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the U.S. . . . are reserved to the states . . . or to the people”) in his pocket but seems blissfully unaware that the drug war represents a most irrational federal intrusion into our lives.

The only way to impact drug use is to cut demand through education and treatment, but no politician wants to talk about that because it makes for a wimpy sound bite. In the best study of the cost of comparative strategies for cutting cocaine use, the Rand Corp. concluded that money spent on treatment is 10 times more effective in lowering usage than funding for interdiction at the border and 23 times more so than going after foreign producers.

Yet the Clinton administration has continued the practice of its Republican predecessors in expanding efforts to control the supply of drugs while devoting only modest resources to cutting demand. With two out of three federal dollars still wasted on futile efforts to control the supply, treatment programs, including those designed for prisoners, go woefully underfunded. Federal prisons can treat only about 10% of prisoners who have drug habits.

More important, it is not possible to educate about drugs while being dishonest. Young people in particular need to be taught about the relative risks of all drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, but the deliberate misinformation campaign built into the anti-drug war has only backfired. Smoking marijuana is not the same as shooting up heroin, and insisting that they are equally destructive only increases cynicism toward authority and a desire to experiment on one’s own. The undifferentiated drug war hysteria perpetuated by Dole in the presidential campaign continues the big lie by once again treating all drugs as one and the same.

Someday a major candidate will emerge with the courage to challenge the assumptions of drug war and announce a program to treat dependency as a complex medical problem rather than a simplistic military matter. In the meantime, we will have to suffer the costly foolishness of those like Dole who seek to exploit drug dependency for rank political purpose. Here’s a man who in his 35 years in Congress never once dealt seriously with this issue; now he suddenly discovers its uses in the waning days of a desperate campaign. Yet another reason not to trust Bob Dole.