I M P R E S S I O N S

Casualties of War
America is losing much more than it bargained for

by Steven C. Day

The shooting down of a plane carrying Baptist missionaries in Peru and Steven Soderbergh’s Academy Award-winning epic, Traffic, each reveal, through very different means, how the war on drugs is changing the foundation of American culture, creating images more characteristic of a nation at war.

As happens in all wars, the quest for victory has become the one great imperative. Niceties, like respecting the sanctity of human life and protecting civil liberties, have had to take a back seat.

The death of Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, shot down in their unarmed aircraft over Peru when their plane was mistakenly believed to be carrying drugs, has forced us to confront a series of troubling questions — not the least of which are the moral principles behind killing those who are only suspected of committing a crime. Make no mistake; this is official United States policy. The Defense Authorization Act of 1995 provides express immunity to United States personnel who provide information that leads to the shooting of a civilian aircraft suspected of drug activity. When did this become ‘the American way”?

The law of civil forfeiture provides another example of the betrayal of American principles. Whoever would have guessed 30 years ago that one day the government would be free to seize private property and permanently dispossess its owners based upon nothing more than suspicion that the property was used to “facilitate” a drug crime? Moreover, who would have believed that the Supreme Court would hold such practices to be entirely constitutional, even when they are enforced against totally innocent parties? If you had suggested such a thing three decades ago, people would have laughed in your face. “That’s the sort of thing that’s done in the Soviet Union, not here,” would have been the response. And yet, here we are today, the forfeiture capital of the world.

We are also now the prison capital of the world, with more than two million people currently serving time. That’s more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of Russia, and six to 16 times more than are held in most other industrialized nations. Sixty percent of the inmates in federal prison are there for drug offenses. Even aside from the horrific financial and personal costs associated with this high rate of imprisonment, it raises troubling issues for our standing as a functioning democracy: A true democracy governs by consent, not by incarceration.

Then there’s the damage the war on drugs has done to the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures. While all civil liberties have taken something of a beating under the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, Fourth Amendment rights have fared particularly badly. Through a long series of decisions, the Supreme Court has greatly expanded the power of police officers and other government agents to intrude into the private lives and property of American citizens. 

This is hardly surprising. The Fourth Amendment is where the rubber hits the road in the war on drugs — to effectively ferret out drug traffickers, government agents need to peek into private places. Giving them greater power to do so is just one of the compromises we’ve made in the search for the elusive victory.

What have all these compromises to our national principles and character bought us? Have we ended drug abuse? Not even close. Illegal drugs are still readily available pretty much everywhere in the country. It’s debatable, in fact, whether the war on drugs has accomplished much of anything of value. An important recent report by the National Academy of Sciences — "Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us’ — raises serious concerns about the effectiveness of our current drug control policies. 

Most interestingly, the study “found drug prevention efforts are hampered by a lack of information about their effectiveness.” The report also noted: “[E]xisting research seems to indicate that there is little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use, and that the legal risk explains very little in the variance of individual drug use.”

This is a story of good intentions gone terribly wrong. It began when we declared a just war to end the evils of drug abuse, but then chose combat tactics that had no chance of succeeding. Our rules of engagement were straightforward — toss the bastards in jail and throw away the key. What we failed to foresee, however, was that the supply of bastards is inexhaustible, as is the number of innocent victims (such as the mother facing eviction from public housing because her son is caught dealing drugs) whose lives are also irrevocably ruined.

This is also a simple matter of supply and demand. There is just so much money to be made in the drug trade that interdiction of the supply can never work. No matter how many “big busts’ the police make, no matter how many planes our government helps to shoot down from the sky, we will never destroy the profitability of the drug racket — the markup is just too high. Likewise, no matter how many mules and pushers we lock up, there will always be others who are foolish or desperate enough to take the chance for a big payoff.

Plainly, what is needed is a new approach to fighting drug abuse, one that greatly reduces the emphasis on drug enforcement actions while increasing programs aimed at prevention and treatment. But instead, we have followed an all-to-common response to a failed policy, which is to do twice as much of the same thing. 

As frustration has grown over the failure to “win” the war on drugs, our reaction has been to become ever more punitive — a process that seems certain to continue under George W. Bush’s new drug czar, John P. Walters. And with each step in that direction our society becomes a little less open, a little less compassionate and, ultimately, a little less free.

Of the many casualties stemming from the drug war, that may be the saddest of all.

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Steven C. Day is an attorney practicing in Wichita, Kansas.

Related Sites
- From Salon, a nice package of stories on the drug war. Feed has a dialogue with four experts on the issue.
- George Washington University maintains an electronic briefing book on National Security Archives. Here is an article on the downing of the civilian airplane in Peru, and previously classified documents pertaining to the U.S. debate over intelligence sharing in Colombia and Peru.
- Watch the Drug War Clock to see how much money is being spent on the drug war this year, then visit the Office of National Drug Control Policy for a breakdown of where it all goes.