The House That Drugs Built

Eugene Jarecki’s documentary.

The following quotes have been excerpted from "The House I Live In," the recent documentary about drug addiction and law enforcement written and directed by Eugene Jarecki.


“We like to look at the war on drugs as black hats and white hats, and good guys and bad guys, and victims and offenders. And on the ground, it’s a lot more mixed up than that.”
—Criminal justice professor

“There’s no question that there was a passion with which the early narcotics enforcement culture pursued black America, even though the addict population was always distinctly biracial.”
—TV producer

“Because they’re addicts, they find themselves committing the same crime that just put them in jail, say, a week or so prior.”
—Police officer

“We’re locking up everybody just because we’re mad at them. We need to lock up people that we’re afraid of.”
—Drug offender in prison

“There are more African Americans under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the civil war."
—Writer, historian

“Sometimes I think you can trace any crime you want to drugs.”
—Police officer

“Everybody involved hates what’s going on.”
—Attorney

“Today the average person I sentence in a drug case is a non-violent blue collar worker who lost their job and then turned to manufacturing methamphetamine to support their habit. And we treat them like they’re kingpins.”
—Federal court judge

“People want to lock people up and then when their sentence is over, they expect them to be reformed, or a different person. If you haven’t given them skills or trained them, how can they be?”
—Corrections officer

“Nobody respects good police work more than me. The drug war created an environment in which none of that was rewarded.”
—TV writer

“I don’t think people fully understand, in the inner city, these kids are making rational choices.”
—Journalist

“Historically, anti-drug laws have always been associated with race.”
—Historian

“Prisons are almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. You build a bed, they fill the bed. It starts sucking in money at an astronomical rate. And it just grows and grows of its own accord.”
—Corrections officer

“Whenever you have a new drug introduced in society, you can say incredible things about that drug, and people will believe you.”
—Psychology professor

“I’d like to see empirical evidence be used in our shaping of public policy.”
—Ex-addict

Deputy Drug Czar Goes His Own Way

Doctors are part of the problem, says McLellan.

In a March 15 cover story titled “The American Way,” Drink and Drugs News  of the UK ran an insightful interview with America’s “deputy” Drug Czar, Thomas McLellan. Professor McLellan, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, is not a cop, like his boss Gil Kerlikowske, or a retired Army general, like former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. McLellan is a rare breed, a treatment specialist, and brings an entirely different viewpoint to an office that has traditionally been strongly oriented toward law enforcement.

“In the US we’ve been thinking about addiction as just a lot of drug use,” McLellan told a group of addiction specialists and policy professionals at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. “And as a result we’ve been purchasing [treatment] stupidly. We can’t decide if addiction is a crime or a disease so we’ve compromised and given them treatments that aren’t any good.”

McLellan singled out doctors for special attention: “Most physicians are not trained in how to treat substance abuse. They don’t see it as a disease and don’t see why they should look for it.”

Treating addiction like any other medical condition is still a goal rather than a reality. “You may know that the relapse rates for diabetes, hypertension and asthma are almost identical to the relapse rates for any addictive disorder…. And no one puts their hands on their hips when a diabetic comes back and says, ‘I ate half a bucket of fried chicken and I forgot to take my insulin, and now I’m back here.’ They just treat them.”

If there are doctors who don’t believe in the disease model of addiction, we can’t be surprised if members of the general public—and addicts themselves--often feel the same way.  McLellan said that less than 3 % of all referrals for addiction treatment and specialty care originate with doctors. Moreover, roughly half of 12,000 smaller treatment programs in the U.S. have no doctor, nurse, or psychologist on staff. And counselors, who make up the majority of treatment staff, suffer from a 50 % turnover rate.

In addition, McLellan took on the traditional British aversion to methadone treatment for heroin addicts: “That this has been a battle, that you are either on methadone or you are on the path of truth, beauty and light, is artificial and unfortunate…. I’m now officially wagging my finger and saying not just to Britain, but to the whole damn field; get past this, this is an artificial contrivance. People ought to have the opportunity to get the medications and other services they need.”

McLellan also had choice words for politicians and policy makers who see incarceration as the only acceptable response to drugs and drug-related crime.  He referenced studies that “suggest very clearly that in a prison situation, when you release somebody with a drug problem, they are back and you’re going to do it all over again. It’s a bad business deal.”

Ongoing care—after prison, or after treatment—is essential to success. “I think residential care is important and necessary, but not sufficient,” McLellan maintained. “It is like having a very good junior high school education.”

Photo Credit: http://www.csam-asam.org/

The Economics of Legalization

British study sees annual savings of $20 billion.

Legalizing heroin and cocaine would save Great Britain as much as $20 billion a year, a British drug reform group claims in a 50-page report issued this week. The Transform Drug Policy Foundation said the savings would come primarily in the form of reductions in the cost of government enforcement.

The report, “A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness of Prohibition and Regulation,” purports to be the first cost-benefit analysis ever undertaken with respect to drug prohibition in Britain. According to an analysis in the Drug War Chronicle, “the British government has relied on mere assertion to justify maintaining prohibition and to argue that the harms of legalization would outweigh its benefits.” The drug reform foundation examined criminal justice, drug treatment, crime, and other social costs, and concluded that “a regime of regulated legalization would accrue large savings over the current prohibitionist policy.”

The Drug War Chronicle reported that the reform group “postulated four different legalization scenarios based on drug use levels declining by half, staying the same, increasing by half, and doubling. Even under the worst-case scenario, with drug use doubling under legalization, Britain would still see annual savings of $6.7 billion. Under the best case scenario, the savings would approach $20 billion annually.”

Specifically, the report says that “even in the highly unlikely event of heroin and cocaine use increasing 100%, the net benefit of a move to regulation and control remains substantial. The economic benefits of regulation identified are also of a magnitude to suggest that even with significant margins of error we can assume that legally regulated markets would deliver substantial net savings to the Treasury and wider society.”

In addition, the report notes that “The Government has also repeatedly failed to acknowledge that prohibition is a policy choice, not a fixed feature of the policy landscape that must be worked within, or around.”

“The most striking conclusion from the analysis of current costs,” the report concludes, “is that prohibition of drugs is the root cause of almost all drug-related acquisitive crime, and that this crime constitutes the majority of drug-related harms and costs to society.”

The full report from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Photo Credit: http://thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com

addiction drugs

Meth to the West, Cocaine to the East, Pot in the Middle

The geography of drug use.

To paraphrase an old tune by Gerry Rafferty, we got meth to the left of us, cocaine to the right, and here we are, stuck in the middle with pot.

The National Drug Threat Survey of 2007, a product of the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) at the Department of Justice, illustrates the stark nature of regional variation when it comes to illegal drugs of choice in the United States. The map at the right represents the responses of state and local law enforcement agencies to the question: "What drug poses the greatest threat to your area?" Blue indicates cocaine, red indicates methamphetamine, and green stands for marijuana. (Click map for larger image.)

According to the Oregonian in Portland, reporting on similar numbers from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: "The politics of methamphetamine have been shaped by geography. Lawmakers from the East, Midwest and South focused on cocaine--the most heavily abused drug by far in their home states. By contrast, more than 90 percent of people treated for meth abuse live west of the Mississippi River."

The NDIC's stated mission is "to provide strategic drug-related intelligence, document and computer exploitation support, and training assistance to the drug control, public health, law enforcement, and intelligence communities of the United States...." NDIC obtains its data through direct surveys of federal, state and local law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as information from court documents, news sources, and public health agencies.

The NDIC has produced a National Drug Threat Survey annually since 2000, and began deriving state-level estimates in 2003. Federal, state and local government agencies use the statistical estimates as guidelines for promulgating drug legislation and enforcement strategies.

Graphics Credit: National Drug Intelligence Center