By Reverend Kathleen McTigue, A sermon preached to the Unitarian Society of New Haven, CT, March 18, 2001.

A week and a half ago I went to see the movie about our current drug war, called “Traffic”. Michael Douglas plays the newly appointed drug czar, filled with idealism and energy. Being a man of integrity he quickly realizes that he needs to understand the problem as it plays out in the real world, outside the beltway. So he takes himself off to California and gets a first-hand tour of the border with Mexico, where customs police tell him glumly about all the ways in which they’re losing in their efforts at interdiction.

There is a scene on the airplane flying back to D.C. from that experience. Gathering a dozen or so of his best policy thinkers around him, Douglas announces energetically that he wants a bona fide brainstorm session to unfold, with no self-censoring. He says, “Now I want you to really stretch — think outside the box. Blue-sky scenario, cost aside, what are the directions we ought to be going in? Come on, anyone?…” He is greeted with silence: prolonged, uncomfortable silence. There are no new ideas; no one speaks. Thinking outside the box is literally impossible: these best minds have nowhere to go.

I have been worried about the so-called war on drugs for a long time, but I haven’t ever dared to tackle the topic in a sermon because it’s such a multi-headed hydra. Where in the world do we begin? We could start with the inherent contradictions in any laws about drugs: there are those we declare legal and those we declare illegal: who decides, and what is the decision based on? We could look at the disparities and racism, both in the structure of the drug laws and in the ways that they’re enforced. African Americans are 15% of the country’s cocaine users, but about 40% of the people charged with powder cocaine violations and 90% of those charged with crack. What do we do with those figures from the drug war?

We could look at our overstuffed prisons and the fact that nearly one and a half a million of our fellow citizens are arrested every year on drug charges, with nearly a half-million of them now in prison. We could look at the growing military dimension of the drug war, especially the enormous escalation of military aid to Columbia. We could wonder what’s in store next year or the one beyond as we slide ever more deeply into a complex civil war in that country, touting simplistic drug war rhetoric.

We could look at the inflated rhetoric directed at the illegal drugs, and wonder about the psychology involved here. Our last president admitted to using marijuana and our current president refuses to answer rather well-founded questions about his past cocaine use. Huge numbers of American citizens of their generation and younger also experimented with the very drugs against which we’re supposedly waging war. What do we do with that fact? And of course we could choose to notice that despite billions of dollars spent in the last thirty years, illegal drugs are cheaper and more easily available than ever. We could look, in other words, at the fact that we are not winning the war on drugs.

The truth is that each of these dimensions of current drug policy is worthy of our attention. This is not an issue that can be reduced to a sound bite or tucked away with a slogan like, “Just Say ‘No’”. As daunting as it may be to say out loud, the truth is that the war on drugs in this country is tangled up with some of the most daunting dimensions of our national life together. These include racism, military policy, prison overcrowding, the inequities of the legal system, poverty, and the conflicts between private morality and public laws. Its complexity is not a reason to avoid it, but a reason to tread carefully and thoughtfully as we explore.

As a starting place I want to offer a real-life example of the silence that greeted Michael Douglas as drug czar in the movie, when he asked his policy people to think outside the box. In 1994, when the Clinton presidency was still young, the White House and the U.S. Army together commissioned a study by the Rand Institute to assess different strategies for reducing cocaine consumption in our country.

It was an exhaustive study of the four primary methods to combat cocaine: drug treatment programs; domestic enforcement, through police and prison sentences; the policy of interdiction, or seizing drugs at border entry points; and the policy known as ’source country control’, when we operate as we are doing in Columbia, seeking to destroy the drug at its source.

The Rand study concluded that drug treatment programs were the most cost-effective strategy in reducing cocaine consumption. Drug treatment programs — out-patient and residential taken together — were not found to be just slightly more effective than other strategies. They discovered that treatment was seven times more cost-effective than domestic enforcement, eleven times more cost-effective than border interdiction, and a whopping twenty-three times more effective than source control. In other words, the report showed us in clear and quantified terms that the drug war as currently structured is being run backwards, and that vastly more money should be put into treatment than into all the other efforts.

You would think that such a report, with such decisive and dramatic conclusions, would immediately cause our leaders to change direction. Instead, both the White House and the U.S. Army tried to get Rand to soften its conclusions. When this failed, they simply rejected the findings of the study that they had commissioned. And then eight months ago the same administration declared a massive escalation in funds, equipment and personnel dedicated to eradicating coca fields in Columbia. In other words they sent us marching energetically and en masse down precisely the path that had been proven least cost effective in the war on drugs.

What’s going on here? As complex as this issue is, we have to look for ways to think about it, and there are two broad directions that my own thinking has taken. The first has to do with our society’s ambivalent attitude toward drugs. An example: a week and a half ago in the Hartford Courant there was a headline: “Substance Abuse Emerges As Top Health Problem”. The first paragraph read, “Substance abuse is the nation’s top health problem, causing more deaths, illnesses and disabilities than any other preventable health problem today…” Seven paragraphs later came these details: Use of illegal drugs in our country causes around 16,000 deaths every year. But the use of alcohol and tobacco — blessed by the law and no doubt used by a majority of our law makers — cause around 531,000 deaths every year.

My brain tends to go numb when the numbers get up that high, so I try to think of things a little more concretely. If we take off the zeros, what this study tells us is that for every person in our country who dies each year from abusing illegal drugs, there are 33 who die from the use of alcohol and cigarettes. These figures do not include any of the deaths each year due to overdose or misuse of prescription drugs. Even over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol, Advil and aspirin cause an estimated 7,000 deaths every year.

Which drugs are the problem? Which problem is it we’re after? We could say that our policy is to attack those drugs with no medicinal value — but then to be consistent, we’d have to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana. We could say we want to protect people from mind-altering substances — but then of course we’d have to ban alcohol, from the oldest and most sophisticated wine or scotch to the rot-gut sold on the corner. And what about the mind-altering substances our doctors prescribe for us? I suspect we would see a lot of hands go up if we asked for a show of how many had used Prozac or its cousins, Xanax or its cousins, sleeping potions in all their infinite variety, designed to close our busy minds down for us because we’re unable to calm down enough for sleep.

My point here is not to equate Prozac with heroin; there is a difference between necessary medicine and substances we use for recreation. But the difference is not as stark as we like to pretend. These substances are on a continuum, with something like aspirin at one end and something like crack or heroine at the other. We know some things about this spectrum. We know that even innocuous drugs like aspirin can be overused and can cause damage or death. We know that even strong hallucinogens have been used by people without causing them lasting harm or turning them into addicts. We know that millions of people use alcohol without becoming alcoholics.

Abuse of any drug is always a possibility. We must be willing to admit it is not the only possibility, or we will keep ourselves in a box of denial and we will not be able to find a coherent way out. Aldous Huxley, who experimented with mescaline and then wrote about it, once said, “The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is a principle appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates.”

If we look with more honesty at our attitudes about drugs and see the contradictions, then we will also begin to look more honestly at the problem of addiction. That shift in perception has already happened in what we’ve learned about alcoholism. We don’t moralize about it, scorning the alcoholic as a person of weak will or corrupt values. Instead we have learned to name alcoholism an illness, and we recognize that through treatment, compassion and support, an alcoholic can find a way back to the land of the living. But when it comes to marijuana, cocaine, crack or heroin we are still trapped in the limited universe of morals. We speak about all of these drugs as though they were in the same realm of danger and damage, even though they affect people in vastly different ways, and we moralize about them, equating their use with evil.
In her ‘Just Say No’ campaign against drugs Nancy Reagan was fond of saying, “If you’re a casual drug user, you’re an accomplice to murder”. When he was still the Los Angeles chief of police, Daryl Gates told a Senate panel, “Casual drug users should be taken out and shot.” We haven’t yet adopted that policy, but we have created a legal system in which drug dealers often receive longer prison sentences than people who murder or rape.

This is how we got lost in a war on drugs: through seeing the drug and the user as an enemy to be destroyed. In the essay I used for our reading, Walter Wink writes, “[We must] switch from regarding addiction as a legal matter to regarding it as a medical matter. It should be treated as a public health issue, not as grounds for punishment. The correct moral position is to quit moralizing about drugs and instead to regard addicts with compassion.”

The current drug war began in the early 1970s with Richard Nixon. But in that era both the language and the actual policies had a lot more to do with compassion and treatment than they do today. During Nixon’s administration fully two-thirds of the budget dedicated to the war on drugs went to treatment programs; today it’s less than two-thirds. Every year government language and focus have turned further from the model of disease and treatment, to embrace ever more radically the metaphors of war. The metaphors beget the reality we now have, complete with enemies, prisoners, casualties, guns, bombs and military personnel. Today, one of the most glaring and inhuman dimensions of our drug policy is that while we pour our resources down the rat-hole created by the war metaphor, nearly two-thirds of the addicts in our country who seek treatment cannot find it.

I actually tested this out in a tiny and uncontrolled experiment on Friday. I opened up the New Haven phone book and looked in the yellow pages under ‘drug abuse and addiction’. I called the first six programs listed and asked whether they had a program available for someone without insurance and with limited resources. After long periods on hold listening to Musack, two of them said ‘no’. The others said they had a sliding scale available but they didn’t know what it would cost. None of them had immediate openings for such a person and none of them had an estimate of how long it would take. They all confirmed that there was no such thing as a central drug addiction hot line in our area, through which a person hitting rock bottom could learn, easily and immediately, where to go for treatment.

It is clear from every study we have available that the medical lens is the one to which we must return if we want a clear view of the problem. The medical lens shows us illness, not moral failure. The medical lens zeros in on the demand side of the drug problem, and calls for hot-lines, treatment programs, out-patient follow-up and support groups so that treatment on demand could become a reality. The medical lens would lead us to decriminalize most dimensions of drug possession so we stopped the ludicrous practice of filling our prisons with nonviolent offenders. It would lead us to needle exchange programs and other dimensions of harm reduction.

Nine months ago, when the Clinton administration first proposed its enormous aid package to Columbia in the name of the drug war, a proposal came up to take $100 million of this amount — less than 10% — to use for treatment of U.S. addicts. This proposal was shot down, and one of the loudest opponents was Barry McCaffrey, the ‘drug czar’.

This rigid march down a losing path is so dramatic that it forces us to ask: What else might be going on here? What’s going on when the top people in drug policy argue against money for treatment? What other motivations, conscious or unconscious, must be operating in order to keep us on this failing campaign? This is the second area to which I think we need to turn our attention. Our leaders are not fools. They can study the statistics as well as we can. They know we absolutely cannot win with these tactics. So what else is driving this addiction to the drug war?

One possible answer was spoken by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He said, “We are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities.” It’s very difficult to disagree with these chilling words. Think about our minimum sentencing laws, so radically skewed toward harsher penalties for drugs more often used by blacks. The minimum sentence is 100 times more severe for possession of crack than powder cocaine. Think about the gutted public funding for prison drug treatment, and the dwindling numbers of treatment programs for those without insurance, despite all we know about the cost effectiveness of treatment. Think about the racial profiling that leads to proportionally more blacks being searched for drugs than whites. Think about the color of our prison populations, and remember that nearly half a million residents of our prisons are there on drug charges.

The question, “What’s really going on here?” can’t stop with the domestic policies. What’s really going on with our military aid to Columbia? Few of us would have cause to know that when ‘Plan Columbia’ was being drafted, some of those pushing most fiercely for the huge military package were companies with nothing at all to do with drug policy. They included oil companies and weapons manufacturers, like Occidental Petroleum, Enron Corp., BP Amoco, United Technologies Corp. and Bell Helicopter. They have an interest here — but it doesn’t have to do with curbing the drug trade. It has to do with profits.

Columbia is now the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, topped only by Israel and Egypt. What’s the setting into which this money is being poured? Columbia has been engaged in a civil war for the last forty years fed by the extreme inequities in wealth and land distribution. Unemployment in the country is 20%, and more than half of the people live below the poverty level. For the last ten years Columbia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, in the form of kidnappings, massacres, murders and disappearances. Right-wing paramilitary groups work closely with the Columbian army, and according to a U.N. study these groups are responsible for the worst human rights offenses. Every year around 3,000 people are killed and as many as 300,000 are displaced by the fighting. Both the entrenched guerilla army and the Columbian military benefit from the profits of the drug trade.

This is the setting into which our country is now committing massive amounts of military aid and at least several hundred military advisors. Last month a New York Times article said, “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is preparing to make the case not only for a sustained project in Colombia but for vastly increasing aid to its neighbors…. This is needed, the logic goes, because as military pressure builds in Colombia, the war could spill over and destabilize the region.” Our government scoffs at comparisons to Vietnam, but the parallels are glaring — and we should not ignore them.

As I said in the beginning, our current war on drugs is a many-headed hydra, which makes it difficult to see clearly, much less challenge and change it. But a central tenet of our religious faith is that we are agents of choice in our world, not passive observers. Our denomination has chosen to grapple with U.S. drug policy as one of our study issues this year. We owe it to ourselves to take the time and apply the energy to shift our collective focus back toward something that looks a little more like sanity. Sanity is what I hear in Walter Wink’s words from our reading: “It is high time we addressed the problem of illicit drugs not as a war to be won, but as an epidemic to be checked, a disease to be curbed, and an opportunity to see ourselves in the faces and mutilated veins of our addicted brothers and sisters.” AMEN.