It is commonly stated that illegalizing drugs is the "moral" for a government to do, since drug use is thought by some to be immoral, even to degrade the moral fortitude of citizens. But the governments taking this "moral" stance mostly sanction and support the use of drugs like alcohol and nicotine, as do the vast majority of those citizens "morally" opposed to illicit drug use, the bulk of who themselves are drug users. As an American and a Canadian authority on drug addiction research stated in a recent article:
The time is long overdue to recognize officially, publicize, and incorporate into common speech and legislation the fact that tobacco (nicotine) and alcohol are potentially hazardous addicting drugs. We need to expunge from the language the phrases, "alcohol and drugs and "tobacco and drugs." This is not mere semantic nit-picking; language influences the way we think. (Goldstein & Kalant 1990)
I had already made this same point five years before (Ott 1985; Ott 1993b), in a book on chocolate addiction which treated our provincial and prejudiced attitudes toward drugs with ludibry. As Princeton Professor Nadelmann put it in his well-conceived "moral" arguments for the legalization of all drugs (Nadelmann 1989):
"Moral" condemnation by the majority of Americans of some substances and not others is little more than a transient prejudice in favor of some drugs and against others.
I might add that this holds true for the "moral" condemnation in some Moslem countries of alcohol, and the corresponding prejudice in favor of hashish and opium (Gelpke 1966a)- this is a universal, not a peculiarly American tendency, although the drugs socially accepted vary from one society to the next, as of course the drugs scorned. So firmly rooted is our tendency to ignore alcohol and tobacco when thinking about "drugs," that the American Society of Pharmacognosy (which should know better) announced in 1992, 33rd annual meeting featuring two symposia, one of which was about "Drugs of Abuse," under the sponsorship of Phillip Morris- USA- one of the country's leading tobacco companies and pushers of one of America's most-abused drugs!
As for the immoralities of drug prohibition, the most obvious of these involve the above-mentioned perversion of law enforcement the drug laws inevitably foster. Since the nebulous alleged victims of drug law violations (our children? our schools? the public health?) do not file charges with the police, in order to enforce the drug laws the police have to become criminals themselves (some would argue that in many cases, this is a seamless transformation). Thus our tax dollars are used to buy and sell drugs, as the police disguise their true employment and act as though they were everyday illicit drug merchants, hoping to get close to "Mr. Big." Then they will try to sell him some of their "dope," or buy from him some if his, then... surprise! Out come the guns and badges. Not only do the police immorally become liars and drug dealers and drug dealers, but this type of operation invites corruption, and there are innumerable instances of police freelancing on the side. Annually in the U.S. some 100 police officials are indicted in federal courts on corruption charges related to drugs (Nadelmann 1988). Should "Mr. Big" come up short of cash for the big buy, no problem... some other "undercover" agents will step in and provide financing. There have even been cases in which reluctant individuals were provided with government money to buy government drugs, and then arrested! This is law enforcement... or manufacturing ersatz crimes? Not content to be ludificatory dope dealers, the "moral" police become spies and snoops, "Peeping Toms tapping phones, espying windows, hiring criminals to spy on their associates, cajoling people to inform on their spouses, children to inform on their parents, even sifting through garbage in search of "evidence." Not only do we have shootouts between rival "gangs" of police fighting over turf and mistaking each other for the "enemy," but there was recently a case of illegal computer hacking by the police. During confirmation hearings for former "Drug Czar" W. J. Bennett, Delaware Senator J. Biden, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, described a case in which personnel of an unnamed federal agency involved in the "War on Drugs" "surreptitiously lifted another's budget by altering a computerized file" (Marshall 1989(! o wonder Bennett went back to his nicotine habit!
Another immorality of the "War on Drugs" involves questions of emphasis. Grossly exaggerated attention has been directed toward apprehending and convicting drug offenders, many of whom become subject to compulsory sentencing. Although the staggering number of annual drug arrests in the U.S. represents only about 2% of the true number of "offenders," trying and punishing those convicted is clogging our criminal justice system. In Washington, D.C., for example, 52% of the felony indictments were for drug law violations in 1986. In New York the following year the number was 40% (Nadelmann 1989). Vital police resources which ought to be destined for arresting and processing violent criminals are being squandered on drug users and the occasional merchant. Worse than that is the fact that already convicted, violent criminals are being released from jail early, to make room for the compulsory-sentenced drug offenders (Marshall 1988c). When the second "Drug Czar" R. Martinez was governor of Florida between 1986 and 1990, Florida spent more money than any other state on drug enforcement, and had in place strict mandatory-sentencing laws mandating three-year-minimum sentences for using, buying or selling illicit drugs within 310 meters of schools, public parks or college campuses. During this tenure, the average sentence served by Florida murder convicts decreased 40% and the average robbery sentence served declined 42%. The overall average sentence for all Florida convicts declined 38%, to the point where the average Florida convict was serving 32.5% of his sentence before release... less than a third (Keil 1990). The bottom line is that some luckless student caught sucking on a joint after school serves three years (if not more), while the armed criminal who knocks off the convenience store gets three years and walks in one. A society that coddles murderers and armed robbers in order to "get tough" on potheads is not walking the moral high ground.
Another egregious case of the immorality of drug prohibition involves the infamous "Operation Just Cause." In the name of police activity and drug law enforcement, the sovereign nation of Panama was invaded by a large American military force, hundreds of innocent bystanders were killed [transcriber's note: some cite a figure close to 9,000. J.T.], hundreds of millions of dollars of private property were destroyed, and a couple of dozen of "police" were killed in the line of duty, mostly by their own troops. Is it any wonder former President Bush was practically tarred and feathered when he foolishly dared to set foot in Panama in spring of 1992? The ostensible purpose of the invasion was to arrest Gen. Manuel Noriega and "Shanghai" him to the United States to stand trial. We've all seen Hollywood "shoot-'em-up" cop fantasies, but by what standard of "morality" does any "police" operation justify such massive carnage and monumental property destruction? Never mind that Gen. Noriega who was later tried as a prisoner of war, not as an arrested criminal) was a longtime U.S. government employee in various covert operations involving immoral attempts to destroy one sovereign government and prop up another. It is a basic tenet of police work that the innocent must be protected. "Just Cause" indeed... "Just 'Cause Uncle Sam says so"! Later, the government went to all lengths to convict Noriega to "justify" the operation. It is significant that former heads of the U.S. DEA were subpoenaed to testify on Noriega's behalf, and the drug convict Carlos Lederer, considered by U.S. officials to have been one of the world's major international drug traffickers, led the hit-parade of criminals testifying against him. Lederer was all but pardoned in exchange for his turncoat testimony against Noriega, and will apparently be released from prison into the Witness Protection Program (Cohn & Reiss 1992). Once again, the "big fish" goes free in order to get the "small fry" into the skillet.
Is it "moral" to launch aerial herbicide spraying programs in South America against coca cultivation, indiscriminately destroying crops and forests; polluting watersheds and in general causing untold ecological havoc It is significant that the Eli Lilly Company, manufacturer of the herbicide Tebuthiuron which the U.S. government wished to spray in Peru, refused to sell the product for this purpose, citing "practical and policy considerations" (Sun 1988). The herbicide is so persistent in the environment that it is not approved in the U.S. for spraying on cropland, and the area in which the coca spraying was to be carried out is interspersed with plots of food crops. We will see in Chapter 2, Note 15, that in the 1950s the Eli Lilly Company went to bat for the U.S. government in illicit LSD synthesis, but not this time, and a State Department official told Congress that the department was exploring ways to compel Lilly to produce the herbicide for the government! So this is how "free trade" works... In the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru, 1.5 million liters of Paraquat have already been sprayed (Brackelaire 1992), while massive spraying of Paraquat, 2,4-D and Glyphosate in Colombia have already provoked health problems in the indigenous population (Bourgetau 1992). A successful non-government crop substitution scheme in Colombia's Cauca Valley, involving planting of mulberry bushes for cultivation of silkworms (offering prospective legal incomes even higher than illicit coca cultivation; unlike government-sponsored substitute crops) has been frustrated by U.S.-backed spraying of Glyphosate directed against illicit coca and opium poppy crops in the region (Liounis 1992). Is it moral to tell poor Peruvian and Bolivian peasants that they must cease to grow their traditional and most lucrative crop, coca, which is perfectly legal in their countries, in favor of some substitute acceptable to bureaucrats in the U.S. which will yield them a much lower return, perhaps only a third of their already meager income (Morales 1989)? It is immoral and a fundamental violation of their human rights (Boldo' i Climent 1986; Ott 1992a)! Furthermore, how does a rich well-shod, well-fed city-slicker explain this drastic pay cut to a poor, possibly malnourished and barefoot Indian... that (s)he must cease to grow her or his traditional crop (Martin 1970; Mortimer 1901; Plowman 1979; Shultes 1981), the legal stimulant coca, and substitute instead coffee, another legal stimulant acceptable to the gringos? Moreover, inasmuch as coca is considered to be one of the most nutritious vegetables available in the Andes, and an integral and nourishing part of native diets (Burchard 1975; Burchard 1979; Duke et al. 1975), and coffee, apart from a decent amount of the B-vitamin niacin, is virtually worthless as a food (Ott 1985; Ott 1993b), forcing this substitution in the "moral" struggle against drugs will increase malnutrition and hardship for these poor Indians. Furthermore, there is a glut of coffee on world markets, and coffee prices continue to fall, with no relief in sight for beleaguered growers (Frankel et al. 1992). Finally, although coca monoculture, like any mono-culture, causes ecological damage, at least the plant is well adapted to the environment of the Andes and Amazonia, while the substitute crops require even more energy and agrichemicals than do coca, resulting in yet greater ecological damage (Brackelaire 1992).
Of course, the chorus goes, we must explain to them that cocaine is destroying the health of our children a continent away, although we do need some of their coca to flavor our Coca-Cola (which is our accepted caffeinated stimulant, that we give to children as a matter of course; Ott 1985; Ott 1993b) and to produce cocaine for the pharmaceutical industry. But how would we feel if an expeditionary force of morally outraged South Koreans descended on Virginia and nearby states and began to spray herbicides on the tobacco crop and adjacent food crops, and to insist that out farmers instead plant ginseng? What an absurd idea, and anyway, what has that to do with the subject? It happens that our government recently coerced the Korean government into accepting American tobacco in exchange for computers and stereos (yes, and ginseng, too)... help balance the payments, you see. And there are Koreans who are justifiably outraged morally, and claim that our tobacco and "Marlboro Man" propaganda for use of this pernicious addictive drug (Schelling 1992) is destroying the health of young Koreans! What if a renegade band of hell-raising Mexican police swaggered into the U.S. and kidnapped an American citizen, dragooning him to Mexico to be tried and punished under Mexican laws? American police have done precisely that in Mexico (and more than once!), despite protests from the Mexican president and ambassador, and the Mexican government has threatened to banish American police, who are acting illegally, from national territory. How can it be possible that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American police operating outside of American territory are not bound by constitutional limitations on their power? That came as a shock to the Mexican government, which knew all too well that the DEA myrmidons were not operating under Mexican law, and a formal diplomatic request for a policy statement ensued. How can it be possible that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that kidnapping a Mexican citizen in Mexico did not violate bilateral U.S./Mexican extradition treaties? This decision has made the U.S. justice system the laughing-stock of the world, and provoked a serious crisis in U.S./Mexican relations. The Mexican government reacted by suspending temporarily DEA activities in Mexico and demanded renegotiation of bilateral extradition treaties (Anon. 1992a). Is it "moral" that American tax monies be used to finance in other countries police tactics like indiscriminate roadblocks and searches which are illegal in the U.S.? The only "moral" principle being followed here is that "might makes right"!
Pursuant to the Americanism "money talks," there is another flagrant immorality in drug prohibition. The "false profits" generated by illicit drug trade create all sorts of "false prophets in our society. Try though the government may to convince America's poor that "crime doesn't pay" and "drugs equal slavery" (a bizarre and insulting message to African-Americans whose ancestors were brought to America in chains in literal slavery with the sanction of the very government making the statement), children in America's ghettos see that the people who are upwardly mobile in dead-end neighborhoods, the people who have the cars, friends and fancy clothes are the drug dealers. Many of the successful members of predominantly poor minority groups are living in the suburbs and gentrified urban neighborhoods with Whitey, out of sight, and don't set much of a day-to-day example. But the happy drug dealer on the corner is doing obviously much better than the guy flipping burgers for minimum wage or sweeping up at the supermarket. The lure of the free market in drugs, and the profit to be made brings out the entrepreneurial instinct in people who haven't fair and open access to the legitimate business world. By making drugs a lucrative business open to all, prohibition sets bad examples for youth and there's the rub- young ghetto children can see where the opportunity is, and in the ghetto, it's not at the burger joint... it is in drugs.
I have already had occasion to detail the anti-scientific nature of drug prohibition and its adverse impact on public health. I need not mention that laws contributing to the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, laws which keep valuable medicines from sick people whose suffering could be alleviated by them, laws which hamper medical research, laws which lead to deaths by poisoning from contaminated and adulterated drugs the government is responsible for overseeing, that laws like these are immoral. Moreover, if we study the history of these laws, we find them to be grounded in racial prejudice and discrimination against minorities. As J. Helmer has thoroughly documented in his study Drugs and Minority Oppression (Helmer 1975), the first American drug laws were a thinly disguised attempt to cripple Chinese immigrants in their all-too-successful economic competition with Americans. The first American drug law was passed in San Francisco in 1875 and illegalized opium smoking, a Chinese pastime, although opium was commonly used orally and such use remained legal. A law was passed in 1887 prohibiting importation of smoking opium, which only the Chinese used, and Congress formally endorsed the true intent of this "drug" legislation when it passed the "Chinese Exclusion Act" in 1901, which prohibited importation of Chinese. Later a similar pattern was repeated with cocaine, which was seen as a drug of America's blacks. In countless lurid stories in the press, the message was driven home that "cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by Negroes of the South" (Helmer 1975). Such racist and immoral charges exacerbated racial tensions and led to many lynchings. History again repeated itself in the thirties, as the spectre of marijuana, the "Assassin of Youth," a drug then associated with poor Mexican immigrants, was employed to discriminate against Mexicans, leading to the infamous "Marihuana [sic] Tax Act" of 1937 (Helmer 1975). Racial discrimination is immoral and drug legislation, used as a cover for official discrimination, is morally tainted thereby.
But this litany of immoralities of drug prohibition, which by no means exhausts the subject, is perhaps less significant than the glaring and fatal flaw in the supposititious "moral" campaign of the United States government against "drugs"- it is a case of the filthy pot calling the tarnished black kettle black. For the U.S. government, like many other governments in the world, is and has ever been earnestly engaged in the drug business. According to U.S. government figures, recent annual direct tax revenues to federal, state, and municipal governments in the U.S. from alcohol sales (excluding real-estate and income taxes on the companies engaged in manufacture and sale of alcohol), amounted to $10.3 billion ($10,300 million; Anon 1987). In other words, all levels of government in the U.S. are engaged in the drug trade, making about $50 per year in alcohol income from every adult American, teetotalers included. Federal, state and municipal governments in the U.S. also profit from taxes on tobacco feeding American's nicotine habits, and the U.S. federal government has in place crop supports subsidizing the cultivation of this most deadly of all drugs (recall that tobacco use causes 320,000 premature deaths per year, in the U.S. alone). Congressman H.A. Waxman from California rightly called the tobacco industry a "multi-billion dollar drug empire" (Byrne 1988). Thus all levels of government in the U.S. are earnestly and profitably engaged in the drug business, even monopolizing the sale of alcohol in many states and fixing the prices. The "moral" campaign against illicit drugs is thus exposed for the hypocritical exercise it is: for "moral" reasons we won't let you use this or that drug, but we'll be happy to profit from your use of alcohol or nicotine! Hell, we'll even help guarantee profits of our tobacco growers, and help them push their dope on unwilling customers overseas. This is no moral campaign, it is the basest hypocrisy. It has also been argued that agricultural subsidies to industrialized countries tend to drive Third World farmers to produce illicit drugs, which at least don't have to compete against the subsidies (De Rementeria 1992).
Furthermore, as outlined in Chapter 2 (especially Note 15) and Chapter 3 particularly Note 2), the United States government itself is guilty of massively abusing LSD and other drugs. Since these entheogens are not habit-forming, and because tolerance develops so quickly to the drugs' effects that it is impossible to experience these with regular use (many days, perhaps a week, have to elapse between doses or little or no effect is felt; and in animal experiments the entheogens serve as aversive, not habituating agents; Hollister et al. 1991), one cannot "abuse" the drugs oneself- "abuse" consists in giving drugs to unwitting or unwilling subjects. In the decade of the 1950s, the "Cold War" raged, and the overzealous activities of the U.S. government during this time have been characterized as the "American Inquisition" (Kutler 1982). One fruit of this institutional paranoia was MKULTRA, an insidious domestic "research" and spying operation run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and similar "nonconventional chemical warfare" studies conducted at the U.S. Army's Edgewood Arsenal. In a program of research into interrogation drugs and illegal chemical warfare agents, LSD and other entheogenic drugs were given to at least 1500 American military personnel and countless civilians (Lee & Shlain 1985; Marks 1979). Some of the troops were coerced into "volunteering" for the tests, and some of the civilians were given the drug without their consent or knowledge. One such dosing of a civilian employee of the CIA, Frank Olson, led to depression and suicide. The government kept secret the circumstances of the death ("national security" of course, but when a "Freedom of Information Act" lawsuit forced public disclosure of the MKULTRA files, then-President Gerald Ford was forced publicly to apologize to Olson's family. Canadian citizens subjected to psychological torture (including repeated doses of LSD) as part of this "research" later sued the U.S. government and were paid compensation. One civilian subject of the Edgewood Arsenal tests was killed by a massive overdose of MDA, an Army doctor commenting: "we didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him" (Lee & Shlain 1985; Shulgin & Shulgin 1991). The CIA employed prostitutes and surreptitiously filmed U.S. citizens unwittingly drugged by the prostitutes, as they disported in bed. Helpless "mental patients" in a New York institution were almost killed by murderous injections of bufotenine and DMT combined with electroshock and "insulin coma" (Turner & Merlis 1959). Over 800 drugs, including LSD and bufotenine, were tested on prisoners in the federal government's Lexington, Kentucky "Addiction Research Center Hospital." In this publicly-funded institution (officially a penitentiary) which existed to "cure" drug addiction, prisoners were given injections of heroin and morphine as payment for cooperation in the "experiments" (Lee & Shlain 1985). When Sandoz Ltd. of Switzerland, owner of the patents on Delysid (LSD tartrate), refused to cooperate with the U.S. government's desire to stockpile huge quantities of the drug for military purposes, the government ordered Eli Lilly Company of Indiana to make the drug in violation of international patent accords. Yes, Eli Lilly Company and the CIA became the first illicit manufacturers of LSD, more than a decade before the drug was illegalized! It goes without saying that dosing people with experimental drugs without their consent or knowledge, especially helpless "mental patients" and prisoners, is highly unethical and immoral, not to mention the immorality of employing prostitutes with taxpayer's money to dope unwilling "Johns" while perverse CIA agents made stag films behind whorehouse mirrors! There is no doubt the MKULTRA "research" was instrumental in spreading the extra-scientific use of LSD all over the United States and in many other countries as well (Lee & Shlain 1985; Stevens 1987), while the publications by phony CIA "front" research foundations (such as the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation) were fostering scientific, popular and clinical interest in the drug (Abramson 1955; Abramson 1960). This immoral "research" and consequent promotion of ludible use of LSD was conducted by the same government which later presumed to illegalize entheogenic drugs on the grounds of "morals" and to protect the public health!
Not only is the U.S. government engaged in trafficking legal inebriating drugs, and guilty of abusing LSD and other drugs in secret experiments, but there is abundant evidence that at times the same government itself has been engaged in the illicit drug trafficking to raise money for covert military campaigns. Under the pretext of aiding the Hmong people of Laos, our "democratic allies" in the "fight against communism" in Vietnam, secret CIA "front" companies such as "Air America" were engaged in smuggling opium to Saigon from the "Golden Triangle" area of Southeast Asia (McCoy 1972). Since the major cash crop of the Hmong was opium poppies for illicit heroin production, the government secretly went into the opium smuggling business to help our "allies" get their product to refineries in Saigon. In a gruesome twist, the Criminal Investigation Division of the United States Army discovered that cadavers of U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam were being gutted and stuffed with as much as 23 kg of heroin each, then transported on government planes to Norton Air Force Base in California (Kwitny 1987). This pattern of smuggling activity again was repeated in the shameful "Iran-Contra" affair during the administration of Ronald Reagan. In violation of a Congressional ban on military assistance to the Contras, a CIA-organized and funded band of anti-Sandinista contrarevolucionarios (the Sandinistas ran the legally-elected government of Nicaragua at the time), the Reagan covert warriors organized secret shipments of weapons and ammunition to the Contras. Some pilots engaged in the illegal gun-running later testified that once munitions were unloaded from the aircraft in Central America, cocaine or marijuana was loaded for the return trip. In testimony before a U.S. Senate committee, pilot M. Tolivern described transporting 15 tons of weapons from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to Aguacate, Honduras in a DC-6, which he flew back to Homestead loaded with 25,360 pounds of marijuana (Labrouse et al. 1992). This cocaine and marijuana no doubt contributed greatly to the off-the-books financing of the sleazy operation. When protesters broke into a session of the Congressional investigation of the mess, demanding that the subject of cocaine smuggling be probed, leading to questions by one panel member, panel Chairman Senator D. Inouye of Hawaii called a secret session on the grounds of "national security," away from the cameras and the hearing of the public. One protester was given three years in prison; the cocaine smugglers working for President Ronald Reagan were never brought to trial (McCoy & Block 1992; Marshall 1991; Scott & Marshall 1991). One of the most famous black-market LSD chemists of the sixties, R.H. Stark, credited with having made as many as 200 million doses of the drug, was later exposed as a U.S. CIA "contract agent" in a sensational Italian trial (Escohotado 1989a; Lee & Shlain 1985. Was this man freelancing, or was the CIA purposefully distributing LSD among radicals and "hippies" in a harebrained sort of "unconventional chemical warfare" attack? After all, the CIA had pioneered underground LSD synthesis, and had fomented use of the drug in "research" sponsored by phony CIA "front" organizations!
I submit that a government like that of the United States of America, which is running a profitable, multi-billion dollar legal drug-pushing operation, which kills hundreds of innocent people in order to "arrest" one of its former operatives (employed during four presidential administrations over a 15-year period in covert military operations); a government which has secretly poisoned countless civilians including helpless mental patients and prisoners with LSD and other drugs and surreptitiously filmed doped taxpayers cavorting in bed with government-paid prostitutes; a government which has driven one of its own employees to suicide by secretly doping his cocktail with LSD; a government which has not hesitated to smuggle narcotics and cocaine to raise dirty money for illegal military campaigns in violation of Congressional bans; that such a government has no "moral" basis whatever for prohibiting any drug. The actions of this government, not its words, show a callous disregard for public safety, and a willingness to stoop to anything to further its domestic or international political aims.