Illegal and prescription drugs: “Impossible Situations”

are only people who think they’re impossible.”

Fast forward, and after more than thirty years of pouring significant national resources into Reagan’s War on Drugs and, indeed, the philosophical stance of Reagan’s French soldier seems at best idiotic: there are few places throughout our vast country in which illegal drugs are not now both omnipresent and cheap.

But wait!  If we would but pay attention to it, there is a shred of good news.  From the recently released “2010 National Survey on Drug Use,” we learn that cocaine use shows a steady decline since 2002, to 1.5 million users. At the same time fully seven million Americans, “non-medical users of psychotherapeutic drugs,” reported taking prescription drugs including xanax (alprazolam) and oxycodone. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration, Results from the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings). In short, while cocaine and methamphetamine appear to have peaked, now Americans are much more likely to overdose-and to die-from prescription drugs than illegal drugs.  Meanwhile marijuana usage dwarfs all other illegal drugs and prescription drugs at a steadily rising seventeen million users, approximately 7 percent of every citizen over twelve years of age.

Drug policy has in fact shifted somewhat since the Reagan years as reflected in the current federal drug budget.  But still the majority of funds are directed to drug interdiction rather than the “demand side” of the budget allocation. The demand side?  That’s an economic, rather sanitized reference to include all those Americans who by choice and their addiction use illegal or prescription drugs, the ones who are most frequently criminalized for their behavior and addictions, the ones who overcrowd our jails and prisons in previously unheard of numbers.

In Mexico, to give credit where credit is due, there is increased attention by our government to the reform of the police and the judicial system. But these attempts, however well intentioned, remain infinitesimal in budgetary terms and will take years to demonstrate positive benefits.

The War on Drugs has fostered other unintended consequences. It’s easy to point the finger at a combination of federal law enforcement agencies, the military, defense contractors and related institutions and services, all of which have come to rely on federal largess since 1982 and which, three decades after Reagan’s War on Drugs, have all been tainted by graft, scandal, incompetence, and hubris.  But while our 2012 version of the War on Drugs should have fostered an all-out offensive against the abundance of prescription drug, it is our major pharmaceutical companies who still deftly manage to escape public attention from their role in our failed national drug policy.  A case in point is their unwillingness, except in corporate rhetoric, to make it more difficult for criminal producers of methamphetamine to gather the essential chemical ingredients found in a number of non-prescription drugs that the pharmas manufacture.

It’s hard to believe where Reagan’s War on Drugs has led us, but we now run the risk of justifying an increased military presence in an expanding number of foreign countries in the name of Reagan’s failed War on Drugs.  An ever increasing global policing in the name of curtailing international criminal drug cartels may in fact create more national security risks than it allegedly stifles. 

There are solutions to these dilemmas that do not involve massive infusions from a Great Recession economy or budget-busting research and development of new security technologies.  But any chance of a thoughtful national conversation about Reagan’s War on Drugs and our increasing involvement in the name of drugs with the internal affairs of Central and Latin America and, most recently, West Africa, has become lost in the bipartisan mud ball attacks leading to the November national elections. 

Our ability to face up to and resolve our massive drug consumption at home, the “demand side” for both prescription and illegal drugs, seems beyond the pale of our two presidential candidates as their campaigns continue to grow increasingly loud and incredibly close.  Lost in this political chatter and blather are proven remedies, therapies, and other solutions and alternatives for drug-shattered families torn apart by abundant and cheap drugs, drugs which are both crossed illegally from Mexico as well as prescription drugs produced within our own borders.  The electioneering supported by the new Super Pacs temporarily will abate after November, but the consequences of our current national drug policy, including its impact on national security, will continue to gravely damage and threaten our country.

Robert Lee Maril, a professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and founding director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research, is the author of The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.-Mexico Border. He blogs at leemaril.com.