Under Reagan, a new wave of racialized mass incarceration began in the United States, one that continues today. “Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people in US prisons and jails on drug charges increased by 1,100 percent. By 2010 there were 2 million people in prisons and jails across the country,” according to writer John Gibler.[16] “The use of prohibition for racialized social control is the genesis of the modern drug-prohibition era,” he concludes. According to Michelle Alexander, a law professor and author of The New Jim Crow, “The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.”[17] As of February 2014, 50.1 percent of all federal inmates in the United States were imprisoned on drug charges.[18]
The number of prisoners in the United States soared along with increased budgets for the drug war. So have the number of drug users. The DEA admits as much, noting in a 2008 report that “in 1960, only four million Americans had ever tried drugs. Currently, that number has risen to over 74 million.”[19] Meanwhile, the DEA enjoys a budget of over $2 billion (up from $75 million when it was created) and employs over 5,000 agents (compared with its 1,470 agents in 1973).[20]
Drug users are sentenced to prison on the pretext of protecting communities from the impact of drug use. But in his groundbreaking work on drug abuse, Dr. Carl Hart emphasizes that drug addiction is not in fact what is devastating communities, as we are often led to believe. “The problem was poverty, drug policy, lack of jobs—a wide range of things. And drugs were just one sort of component that didn’t contribute as much as we had said they have,” he said in an interview in January 2014. “One of the things that shocked me when I first started to understand what was going on, when I discovered that 80 to 90 percent of the people who actually use drugs like crack cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana—80 to 90 percent of those people were not addicted. I thought, ‘Wait a second. I thought that once you use these drugs, everyone becomes addicted, and that’s why we had these problems.’ That was one thing that I found out. Another thing that I found out is that if you provide alternatives to people—jobs, other sort of alternatives—they don’t overindulge in drugs like this.”[21]
Experiments in ending prohibition are taking place around the world: from legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington states in the United States, to full decriminalization of narcotics in Portugal, and supervised safe injection sites, including one in my long-time home of Vancouver, Canada. In 2014, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize the production, sale, and use of marijuana, in an open challenge to the United Nations’ international drug control conventions. Time and again evidence shows that addiction is a health issue, and that criminalization of drug users and people dependent on drugs exaggerates social and personal harms. There is virtually no compelling proof that the war on drugs has worked to cure addiction or meaningfully reduce the supply of narcotics over the medium or long term. A comprehensive study by The Lancet found that crop eradication did little to reduce the supply of cocaine in the United States, that expensive interdiction campaigns only provide a temporary reduction in supply, and there was “some evidence but diminishing returns from imprisonment beyond specific levels.”[22]
Rather than actually dealing with controlling illegal substances, the war on drugs is a concept invented and promoted by the US government, and a motto that has also been adopted by other states to serve their interests, both domestically and abroad. According to drug historian Paul Gootenberg, “Although its genealogy has not been rigorously researched, the contemporary metaphoric idea of a ‘war on drugs’ followed: a universal progressive reformist version before World War II; a socially rooted, hard-nosed Cold War ideology version of the 1950s through 1970s (akin to containment); melding into the Reaganesque total victory ‘Star Wars’ drug war fantasy of the 1980s and beyond.”[23] As mentioned, the Obama administration has made an effort to move away from the terminology of the war on drugs, and Gil Kerlikowske, the former director of the White House’s National Drug Policy, disavowed the term in his first interview on the subject. Though discourse has shifted, and the Holder memo modifies mandatory minimums in certain drug cases, little has yet concretely changed in terms of US federal policy.[24]
When it comes to the drug war and militarization domestically, it is worth pointing out that it was Colombian drug cartels that served as a pretext for the 1981 modification of the US Posse Comitatus Act, which forbade the military from participating in domestic policing. Amendments to the Act “allow [the Department of Defense] to support civilian law enforcement agencies and the Coast Guard. Although not explicitly stated, congressional intent was clear: the military needed to support law enforcement officers in combating drug smuggling.”[25]
Outside of the fifty states it is clear that the drug war is the means by which states are waging a war against poor people, workers, migrants, and others. The drug war model inside the United States provides a mechanism of social control through criminalization and mass incarceration, which targets communities of color. In Mexico, Central and South America, the drug war model relies on the use of terror in order to impose social control.[26]
Empire and the Drug Trade
Leaving aside the concept of the drug war for a moment, even the word “drug” on its own poses challenges. In his book Forces of Habit, David Courtwright uses the word “drugs” “as a convenient and neutral term of reference for a long list of psychoactive substances, licit or illicit, mild or potent, deployed for medical and non-medical purposes.”[27] Courtwright goes on to write about what he calls the big three (alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and the little three (opium, cannabis, and coca). Trade in the first three was an essential plank in the European colonial project—by 1885 taxation on booze, tobacco, and tea made up half of the revenues of the British government.[28] “Historians of commodities know that key stimulants—exotic spices, coffee, tobacco, chocolate—played defining roles in consumption and class styles in the construction of European capitalism,” writes Gootenberg.[29]
Courtwright sums up the connections between narcotics and the colonial project succinctly. “The elites most responsible for promoting drug cultivation and use were European. They could not have overspread the world so rapidly, nor brought it so completely under their dominion, without the large-scale production of alcohol and the cultivation of drug and sugar crops, the latter commonly used in, or made into, potent drinks. With these psychoactive products they paid their bills, bribed and corrupted their native opponents, pacified their workers and soldiers, and stocked their plantations with field hands.”[30] In the Americas, the introduction of sugar by the Spanish went hand in hand with the enslavement of millions of African people throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean. The colonization of North America was made possible in part through the introduction of alcohol into Indigenous communities. Today, coffee covers 44 percent of arable cropland in Latin America.[31] And tobacco smoking spread from Hispaniola through European traders, eventually gaining a foothold as a cash crop in colonized lands around the world. But it is not to these substances, so vital in the creation and maintenance of empire, to which our minds turn when we hear of drugs, and especially not in the context of a war against them.
Instead, within the state framework of the drug war, the public is made to fear the by-products of what Cartwright calls the little three: opium, cannabis, and coca. Each of these substances was used for a long time by Indigenous peoples around the world. Opium was used for curing illness in Europe and North Africa before Arab traders