Opioids are fitting the latest serious addiction problem in this country. Among these drugs manufactured from opium,heroin is the most serious, uncertain, and cheap and available everywhere.
In April's edition of Harper's Magazine,Dan Baum has examined a novel response to this latest addiction problem: the legalization of drugs.
NPR's Linda Wertheimer asks Baum about how he began to delve into the topic of America's war on drugs and why he calls attempts at legalization a big risk based on our approach to solving the widespread problem.
Interview HighlightsYou go back, covering the war on drugs, and I wonder if you could order us the memoir which kicks off your article. I was starting a book on the politics of drug enforcement. And in 1994 I got word that John Erlichman was doing minority recruitment at an engineering firm in Atlanta. Well,I'm 60. Erlichman was one of the great villains of American History, a Watergate villain. And he was Richard Nixon's drug policy advisor. And Richard Nixon was the one who coined the phrase, and "war on drugs."And he told me an extraordinary thing. I started asking him some earnest,wonky policy questions and he waved them away. He said, "Can we slash the B.
S.? Can I just order you what this was all about?" The Nixon campaign in '68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: black people and the anti-war left. He said, or we knew that if we could associate heroin with black people and marijuana with the hippies,we could project the police into those communities, arrest their leaders, and break up their meetings and most of all,demonize them night after night on the evening news. And he looked me in the eyes and said, "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."If that really was the beginning of the war on drugs — if it rose out of politics, and not out of need or concern for people's health or safety. If Mr. Erlichman was serious about what he said,then obviously the results of that decision have been immense.
Catastrophic. And, you know, and he's not the first and Richard Nixon was not the first. The first drug laws in America were the opium laws in San Francisco in 1912,obviously passed to punish the Chinese. I found transcripts of state legislature debates from the 1930s where legislators in the South were talking about the menace of "cocainized negroes" threatening the white womanhood, terrible language against Mexicans and marijuana going back to the 30s. We have demonized racial and ethnic groups by the drugs that they effect or don't use for a long time. Nixon brought it to a tall art. The drug war that we are suffering under now really begins with him.effect you think that the "drug industrial complex, or " the production and distribution of drugs,and the incredibly big law enforcement effort to contain it — effect you think that actually could or should be backed down by making illegal drugs legal?I effect. gawk, we're Americans. We know how to effect regulation. We know how to effect taxation. Thank goodness we're not very reliable at repression — and that's what we've been trying to effect for a long time. Drug use is not the problem, or it is the Americans who become dependent on them that is our drug problem ... It is tragic for the people involved,it is tragic for their family members, but it is a small problem.
What effect you mean it's a small problem? I think everyone in this country is accustomed to thinking that this is a huge problem.
Depends how you define the problem. If you define the problem as drug use it's big. But I don't define it that way. I define it as problem drug use — people who can't handle it, or people who become dependent. And we're talking about maybe 4 million people in a country of 319 million people. I am not being flip about this,this is not something to disregard, this is something to manage better than we effect precisely because it's so serious.effect you think we are headed toward more attempts at partial legalization? ... Marijuana is a pretty uncertain drug. A person can effect himself a lot of harm with marijuana and I think we need to acknowledge that.Legalizing drugs though, and you say in your magazine piece that it's a terrible risk.
Of course. As a very smart guy in the piece says,gawk at our alcohol distribution system. We would not call it a total failure because we have some drunk drivers and because some teenagers get ahold of alcohol. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than prohibition — none of us wants to go back to that. Problems are tough to solve, and they are easier to ameliorate. We could effect a better job of living with these uncertain substances if we changed the way we think about them. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: onthemedia.org