>>> Part 8 of 9...
* For sources identified by first name only, names and circumstances
have been changed to protect anonymity.
Smoke Screen
Who's for the War?
Two decades into the War on Drugs, prisons are filled, the deficit is
ballooning and people still do drugs
Pro-drug-reform organizations like the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws and the Drug Policy Foundation have long
hinted that there's more to the drug war than a benevolent interest
in the nation's well-being. More than one activist I interviewed made
a point of noting that the Partnership for a Drug Free America's main
funding sources are, in order of importance, pharmaceutical companies,
the tobacco industry and the alcohol industry - their inference being
that legal drug industries, by denouncing illegal drugs, might
increase their market share.
"We do take some money from Anheuser-Busch and RJR Nabisco, but they
also make cookies and crackers," says Steve Dnistrian, vice president
for Partnership. "That [funding] makes up less than three percent of
our annual budget." The bulk of the money, Dnistrian asserts, comes
from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, named after the founder of
heath-care giant Johnson & Johnson. Pro-reform groups say the Johnson
Foundation represents the interests of pharmaceutical companies, a
claim the foundation disputes.
"Our top funders are health-care and health-insurance organizations,"
Dnistrian asserts, adding that the amount of money received from
legal-drug lobbies "hardly supports the conspiracy" advanced by
reformers.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that decreased marijuana use
leads to increased alcohol and other drug consumption. _The New York
Times_ reported in 1992 that in studies by UC-Irvine in conjunction
with Princeton, and by graduate students at Harvard, data showed that
as penalties for marijuana use increased, alcohol consumption did
too. And as marijuana penalties decreased, so too did other drug- and
alcohol-related emergency-room visits.
Another theory advanced by reform advocates is that organizations like
the Drug Enforcement Agency and even treatment centers and clinics
have been the beneficiaries of windfall budgets and profits from the
sale of confiscated property and possessions with each attack in the
war on drugs (Bill Clinton has requested $14.6 billion for the anti-
drug budget in 1996). As such, they have little interest in actually
solving the drug-abuse problem.
This view is supported by a somewhat obscure Rand report, released in
1994 and titled "A Systems Description of the Marijuana Trade." The
report was contracted by the U.S. Army to assist with drug
interdiction efforts. Yet, the report observes that if current
estimates by various government drug agencies on marijuana imported
into the U.S. - combined with domestically grown dope - are correct,
then all reported current users (the figure used was 20 million for
1991, as estimated by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse)
would have to smoke almost *one and half joints every day* to consume
all that marijuana. According to the Household Survey, most regular
users report not smoking within the week and many not within the
month.
Governmental figures, then, on marijuana imports and domestic
production may just possibly be wildly incorrect. Rand's attempts
at constructing an analysis of the drug market, including margins
of error and reasonable use-rates, landed all estimates of
marijuana-smoker numbers somewhere between 100 million and 160
million. Rand asserts that if estimates of marijuana availability
are correct, the amount of users in the United States falls around
130 million, or over half of the U.S. population.
Granted, marijuana trade and use, because it is covert, is hard to
assess. But given these reports, it's safe to assume that
governmental agencies are vastly overestimating the amount of drug
flow into the U.S. "for their own bureaucratic purposes," according
to Michael Childress, author of the study.
"People can draw their own conclusions," he says. "My guess is that
those agencies inflate their figures in order to justify and
rationalize their budgets." The statistician drew no hard or
embarrassing conclusions in the report, except to point to the
"great incongruence" between numbers.
Childress, who now works for the Long Term Policy Research Center
in Kentucky, says the report never got much publicity. "You are the
first reporter to call me," he says.
Conspiracy, you ask? "There are vested interests," says conservative
Hoover Institution fellow and former San Jose Police chief Joseph
McNamara. "It's not a conspiracy, but the government always promotes
government growth. There are vast programs springing up for mandatory
treatment; there's the drug-testing industry as well as the DEA and
other enforcement agencies. The military is involved as well. Then
you have the prison industry, which is the fastest growing government
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