In Which I Rant With Great AbandonLast Wednesday, Time Magazine published
an essay from the writers for The Wire (Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pellecanos, Richard Price and David Simon) condemning the U.S. drug policy that has given that show so much fodder. Go read it, it's short. I'll wait.
Though I don't necessarily agree with their argument that jury nullification is the way to go, I do agree with their point of view. The War On Drugs is one of the most ill conceived, badly implemented, piss-poor excuses for an actual policy that the U.S. government has ever enacted. And the reason is simple. The whole thrust of it boils down to destroying supply, rather than attacking demand.
Historically, that doesn't work. Prohibition is probably the example we're most familiar with, but if you want to dig around through the poppy fields of Afghanistan, Colombia, China (Boxer Rebellion, anyone?), you'll find a lot of examples.
It's not the supply of drugs that's the problem, it's the demand for them.
As long as a demand exists there will be a supplier. Destroying existing supplies jacks up the price, which creates more profit, which leads to more people willing to get into the supply chain. The more people in the supply chain means, you guessed it, more supply.
"But what about all the folks that are getting locked up for using?" I hear you say. "Doesn't that attack the demand?"
Well, no. That's a supply control strategy, too. The supply in this case is the users. The point of it is to destroy and shove aside the user base, rather than get the user base to change. With a strategy like that the demand will continue to exist unless you actually, you know, kill them.
If anythying, the War On Drugs has made the problem worse.
Now, I think this same thinking can be applied to other things as well. Guns and gang violence, for example. We approach the problem with a "get rid of all [fill in the blank]" mentality. If you take away guns you're not going to take away violence. The problem isn't the supply of weapons, which, let's be honest can be anything (I like an oak axe handle wrapped in barbed wire, myself), it's the desire to use them.
Thing is, attacking demand is hard. You can't track it except by its results, and it takes time for those to manifest. Changing a community's mindset, changing an addict's habits, all of these things are hard work.
Attacking supply, though, is stupid easy. Easier, certainly than trying to figure out all the reasons people want to get high in the first place, or addressing the issues that drive people into uncontrollable addiction. Easier than improving the economies of the hardest hit areas, the poverty and broken homes that sends people to look for some way to tune out. It's bullets you can check off in Power Point, numbers you can crunch to show you're tough on crime. An easy way to further your political career.
It's a policy that sacrifices the effective for the easy. It's much simpler to wrap our minds around numbers and statistics than people. That A+B=C instead of the psychological, economic and medical nuances of each individual that creates the whole cascading problem. It's the same mindset that lumps people into Us vs Them, Black vs White, Bad Guys and Good Guys. We, as a general rule, don't like to think in shades of gray. We're all so much better at stereotypes.
Of course, it's easy for me to stand up and make noise. I'm good at that. You should see me drunk at karaoke some time. I do a mean Folsom Prison Blues.
I don't have a solution, and I don't believe that just one exists. We need a critical mass of solutions that all support each other. I think we're on the right track with things like medical marijuana. It opens the conversation, gets people to accept its medicinal uses. Gets across that maybe it's not the demon drug Reefer Madness makes it out to be. Acceptance is the first step to legality.
Once it's legal I think the people who are getting into it for the taboo aspect will dip. And then if you tax it, not so much that it creates a strong black market for it, you'll pull out a lot of other people.
That's what I mean by policies that attack demand. Things that change a mindset, control the thinking in ways that aren't quite so heavy handed.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a solution, but it's a start. Chip away at all those reasons people want to do it, because there's rarely just one. We're not that simple after all.
Now, my thinking isn't to get drugs or violence off the streets. I don't think it's possible. No matter how legal something is, there's always going to be someone who can get it to you cheaper or better or tax free. There's always going to be someone who pisses you off. But if we can change enough of the thinking of enough of the people, then maybe we have a chance to turn around a stupid policy that's incarcerated 1 out of every 100 people in this nation.
And that's a tall order, I know. You have to change hearts and minds, as the Army says, and they're not exactly famed for their successes. Sometimes the hearts and minds that have to be changed are our own, because we are the policy makers, whether we choose to believe that or not. Nothing's going to change unless we make it happen.
