With a Drug Czar like John
Walters, Who Needs Osama?
Mike Males, c Youth Today,
June 2004
Nothing enrages Office of National Drug Control
Policy zealots--especially its current director, John Walters--like a teenager
who smokes marijuana and doesn’t suffer.
Unfortunately for Walters, teens who smoke pot
moderately and don’t flunk out, disown parents, become heroin junkies, and
overdose behind dumpsters comprise the vast majority of youthful drug users. Of
the 100 million Americans who first tried marijuana as adolescents, 97
million-plus never gatewayed into dope fiends--or even regular pot smokers.
Since most teenage marijuana users aren’t hurting
themselves, ONDCP’s obsession is finding ways for government to harm them--by
arrest, school expulsion, college loan bans, needless addiction treatment, ads
branding them baby killers and terrorist accomplices... and now, mandatory drug
testing.
ONDCP’s School Drug Testing Summit in Fresno,
California, in March--which permitted only advocates of student drug-testing to
speak--conjured images of hordes of pupils self-destructing on drugs. Ignored
were federal reports show low rates of teenage deaths, crime, and hospital
emergency treatments caused by illicit-drug abuse.
In fact, these reports’ figures strongly argue
that school should leave students alone and test parents, teachers,
administrators, coaches, and other role models instead. A 40 year-old is three
times more likely to suffer serious illegal-drug abuse problems than a 16
year-old is.
But ONDCP has never cared about reality. Its
speakers freely admitted testing wouldn’t catch hard-drug users (heroin,
cocaine, and speed metabolize too quickly for tests to detect) or deter
hardcore potheads (who drop out or devise ways to beat tests) anyway.
No, ONDCP’s prey is occasional teenage users of
marijuana, whose residue remains detectable for weeks. Why? Because they AREN’T
suffering. Monitoring the Future surveys find students who use only marijuana
are virtually indistinguishable from abstainers. Dammit, we can’t even tell
whether they use drugs at all unless we make them pee in a bottle.
For when it comes to wrecking the lives of
moderate, non-suffering, non-problem drug users--while letting hardcore junkies
keep on shooting up, robbing, killing, and dying--Walters is king.
During Walters’ first tenure as a top federal drug
policymaker from 1985 to 1992, he and drug czar William Bennett declared that
stopping drug “use itself” was ONDCP’s policy priority. Addicts? Let ‘em suffer
for their sins.
Their mean-spirited idiocy launched 20 years of
drug-war calamity. While other Western countries contained drug problems with
sensible social and health measures, America’s drug abuse skyrocketed. During
Walters’ reign, drug-related hospital emergencies rose 30 percent, deaths
jumped 53 percent, and murders soared 132 percent.
The drug-war ideology Walters perpetuates has
inflicted unspeakable suffering on aging Baby Boomers. Today, 80 percent of
illegal-drug death and hospital ER cases are over age 35. The never-mentioned
history of today’s middle-age drug crisis is ugly.
In the 1970s, the Nixon administration’s crackdown
on Vietnam troops’ marijuana use (including thousands of arrests and
discharges) provoked a wholesale switch to heroin--more concealable, no smoke,
less detectable in tests.
Returning troops, four in 10 heroin-addicted, were
discharged without treatment. They formed the core of escalating 1980s and ‘90s
heroin, cocaine, speed, polydrug, and drug-alcohol scourges. Today’s drug abuse
crises were not caused by young, casual marijuana smokers taking up harder
drugs, but aging hard-drug abusers whose relapses stem from Vietnam-era
stresses.
Since dogmatic deception and massive failure are
key qualifications to be drug czar, Walters is back at ONDCP’s helm--and with
him, more addiction and death.
Federal figures show drug-related deaths jumped to
22,300 and hospital emergency cases to 670,000 in 2002, both record peaks.
America now suffers our worst drug crisis ever, with fatality rates three to 10
times higher than Canada’s and Europe’s.
Unsatisfied with the damage his warped policies
caused older generations, Walters now seeks to extend his destruction into the
next one.
Initial evaluations of modern school drug testing
show history repeating itself. Monitoring the Future’s research team studied
900 schools over five years. Their updated October 2003 report found school
drug testing worthless, with one troubling exception: Students subjected to
random drug testing reported a bit less casual marijuana use but significantly
more use of other drugs.
If Congress continues allowing Walters to wreak
ideological incompetence on drug policy, he may well create something we don’t
have now--a genuine teenage drug crisis. Because more suffering is exactly what
drug-war hardliners want.
Mike Males teaches sociology
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales
Mike Males
Sociology Department
214 College Eight
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
tel 831-426-7099
email mmales@earthlink.net
homepage http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales