Put These Guys in Rehab

The war on drugs has now gone on Three Times as long as Vietnam war, with no end in sight and no good reason to believe it can ever be won. Richard Nixon declared the war in 1971, and its aim, as stated Later by an act of Congress, was a drug-free society by 1995. If that is still the Objective, Plainly we have lost. In 1980 there were 50,000 people in custody for Drug-Related Crimes. Twenty years later, the number was 400,000. The price of locking up all those people climbed above $8.5 billion. In 1980 some 580,000 people were arrested on drug charges. Almost 1.6 million individuals were arrested in 2000 for alleged drug offenses, and some of them have, no doubt, joined the ever-expanding prison population. Nevertheless, drugs are more available, cheaper and purer in content than ever. Inevitably, the drug warriors say they are fighting hard but they don't have the resources. What they need is more money. In this sense, the war on drugs has come to resemble many other big-government programs and bureaucracies whose raison d'être cannot be found in any mission statement. Why? Because they are interest groups, and the real reason for their existence, their true mission, is to exist. And to grow. More often than not, the best way to grow is to fail.

It works for Amtrak, the Postal Service and the Department of Education (the worse kids do in school, the more lavishly Congress funds this agency), so why not the war on drugs? The drug warriors are, in a paradoxical way, fortunate to be fighting an unwinnable war. After a real war, troops are demobilized, weapons programs are canceled and generals are sent into retirement on half pay. But in an endless war, the money to carry on the fight—more and more of it—keeps rolling in until the end of time.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the federal government will spend more than $19.2 billion waging the war on drugs in 2003. That sum is $7.6 billion more than what it spent 10 years ago, and has increased by 7 percent in the past two years. State and local governments will spend at least $20 billion more. That buys a lot of enforcement. A drug-sniffing dog—with handler—runs between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. A police cruiser equipped to handle dogs goes for about $25,000. A DEA agent starts somewhere between $25,000 and $40,000.

Money creates its own constituencies, and those lucky recipients tend to favor the status quo. No interest group has ever voted itself out of existence or asked Congress for less money than it received in the previous year. The people who depend on the war on drugs for their livelihood are no different. Consider, for example, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association—a union of prison guards that contributed more than $2 million to the campaign of the present governor of California. It has more political muscle than any lobby in the most populous state in the union. The CCPOA campaigned vigorously against a plan to send nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison. The union has a big stake in the war on drugs and an incentive to push for its escalation. More drug busts means more convicts, and that means more jobs for prison guards and a larger union membership and war chest. The longer the war on drugs fails, the better the union likes it.

Before drug offenders can be jailed, they must be arrested and prosecuted. That, of course, costs money. Like prison guards and DEA agents, a lot of judges and prosecutors owe their livelihoods to the war on drugs. Their salaries, pensions, health insurance (which includes drug rehab, no doubt) and all the rest are picked up by the taxpayer who, in turn, may be picked up himself if he is suspected of fooling around with the wrong kind of drugs. Because a lot of the people who are busted for drugs can't afford to pay for their own legal defense, the state (i.e., the taxpayer) picks up the bill for the lawyer who tries to keep the drug offender out of jail, as well as for the one who is trying to send him there. Just about the only people involved in a routine drug trial who are not on the government payroll are the jurors who get $30 a day and a ham sandwich for lunch. The time lost to jury duty on drug cases by otherwise productive citizens is just one of a profusion of hidden costs of the drug war.

When you begin to consider these hidden and ancillary costs, you come to realize the true magnitude of the waste. The official, on-the-books cost of this war is $609 a second. The real cost is much greater and, because the economic distortions are so large, not really determinable.

For example, the zealous pursuit of drug criminals leads inevitably to a lot of bad arrests. Consider the case of the woman who was strip-searched at O'Hare airport and later collected $129,750 in damages when she took the narcs to court. There will be large judgments coming in favor of the people who were stopped under racial-profiling policies used to make drug busts. The drug war's failures can some times be too expensive to calculate in dollars and cents. Consider, for instance, the death of a seven-month-old girl named Charity who was a passenger, along with her missionary parents, in a plane shot down by the Peruvian Air Force as part of the U.S.-financed war on drugs.

In daily life, the drug war imposes more-mundane costs of inconvenience on everyone. Those long lines of cars at the Mexican and Canadian borders are a cost, in terms of time lost. Time, after all, is money, especially if you are in the transportation business. There is also cost of the fuel burned by all those idling engines. Not to mention the pollution they produce.

Drug tests are required by many companies that conduct business with the government, and the drug test industry is worth some $5.9 billion. Does that money represent an efficient use of resources? If you're smoking a powerful substance, the answer might be yes. The fact is that in 1990, 38 federal agencies spent $11.7 million on tests—for 0.5 percent positive results. Each drug user, then, cost about $77,000.

We also have to consider what is not done with the money that goes to wage war on drugs. If you spend money on a prison instead of a school, the long-term cost comes in the form of uneducated, unskilled kids who might just turn to selling drugs to make a living. Or using them to ease the boredom. But, hey, you have a prison, so you'll have someplace to put them when the bill comes due.

And there is the cost of wasted opportunities and undeveloped resources. It costs about as much to imprison someone as it does to send him to a good college. But factor in the lost wages (and taxes) of what might otherwise have been a productive citizen. Add in the cost of welfare for the dependents of the jailed person and the salary of the parole officer who will supervise that person after he is released. Taking someone prisoner in the war on drugs costs a lot of money (as much as $450,000, according to one estimate), and it is not a one-time expense. In the most extreme case, society loses a taxpayer (a productive resource) and gains at least one, and maybe several, long-term dependents. This may be good for prison guards and social workers. But it isn't much of a bargain for the remaining taxpayers who pay the bill.

Then there is the cost of crimes committed by the violent felons who should be in prison but are released early because the space required to house them (concluded on page 135)Rehab(continued from page 68) is taken up by drug offenders serving mandatory minimum sentences. A few years ago, the state of Florida released murderers, among others, according to a formula called gain time, because it needed the beds to handle drug offenders serving long sentences. Gain time isn't always the same as good time. In some cases, in fact, it was nothing more than time served. Some of the murderers who were released returned to violent crime, including murder.

Finally, there is the cost of putting our law enforcement energies into the war on drugs instead of, say, the war on terrorism, where the return could have been much more satisfying. Between 1992 and 1998, the FBI increased its number of convictions by almost 70 percent. After September 11, one could reasonably ask if the FBI might have been fighting the wrong war. If the priorities of the FBI had been different, perhaps events might also have been different on September 11. That is one of those imponderables, like the actual economic costs of that terrible day.

One small cost of the drug war that has been documented is the more than $3 million that went for ads during the Super Bowl. Rather than concede the possibility that a full-scale war on drugs might not be the best use of the nation's will and resources, the drug warriors spent all that money to propagandize for their war and piggyback on the public's support for the war on terrorism. According to the ads, if you do dope, the money you spend on drugs goes into the pockets of terrorists.

Ah, yes. And marijuana is a gateway to hard drugs, LSD causes birth defects, and so on. The $3 million-plus is chicken feed in the big scheme of things (and the war on drugs is a big scheme, if ever there were one). The heavy-handed pitch is pretty much in line with what we have come to expect. Of course, you could point out that Osama bin Laden is a Saudi of considerable wealth. Saudi money comes, directly or indirectly, from oil. So maybe someone should have created an ad about how if you drive a gas-guzzling SUV, you are financing terrorists. Such an ad would have provoked outrage, and rightly so. But the drug warriors didn't take much criticism for their Super Bowl spots. Probably because we have all grown weary. The drug war has been going on so long that we expect it, like farm subsidies, to go on forever.

The difference, of course, is that when you pay farmers not to grow crops, you are just wasting money. When you pay for a war on drugs, you waste lives. If we are going to pay so extravagantly for such meager results (the drugs keep coming in and people keep using them), then maybe it is time to pay off the drug warriors. Give them the money, but only if they do nothing.

The only other solution, after such a long exercise in futility, is to recognize that what we really need to do is declare war on the war on drugs.

Like prison guards and DEA agents. a lot of judges and prosecutors owe their livelihoods to the war on drugs.