Religious Coalition for a Moral Drug Policy

Rev. Robert A. Sirico, CSP and rev. Joseph Ganssle,

OFM Editors, October 1990

Editors Note: Reason, Compassion, and the Drug war: A Statement by Religious Men and Women, is literally the culmination of months of effort by dozens of clergy nationwide. We gratefully acknowledge their support and endorsement of this project.

We write as religious who hold divergent theological, economic, social and political ideas. Yet we speak with one voice in decrying what is happening to our society as a result of the problems associated with drugs. The unfortunate truth is that the "war on drugs" is really a war on people, and one which we cannot support. Our purpose here is not to offer a detailed alternative blueprint for dealing with the crisis of drugs. Instead, we offfer a look at our current drug policy's impact on real human beings and at how their dignity has been affected with an eye toward alternative approaches.

THE DILEMMA

Our cities are being torn apart by the crime and corruption associated with drugs. The families to whom we minister in our local communities have found their previously peaceful lives wrecked by drug-gang violence. Children, some as youg as eleven years old, have abandoned parental authority to work for crime syndicates whose chief aim is to find targets for addiction. We have performed the burial services for scores of the tens of thousands of young men who have died in turf wars and dispotes arising within underground drug markets. And crack dealers are the most common role models for our inner-city youth. Nobody knows the extent of the corruption that infects local crime enforcement departments, but if New York and Washington, D.C. are any indication, it is quite severe. Our society is literally under siege.

HAS ENFORCEMENT BEEN TRIED?

The Federal government has psent more than $20 billion on anti-drug activities. Federal drug outlays jumped 300 percent n this decade alone. In 1988, spending (in real terms) was ten times the total spent during the first decade of prohibition. Congress has passed successively stricter anti-drug legislation in 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1990. Drug arrests nationally have escalated from 162,000 in 1968 to 1.15 million in 1989. The number of drug busts has tripled and the number of convictions has doubled.

BUT HAS IT WORKED?

There can be no doubt that the government has tried to win the war on drugs through extreme means, unprecedented in U.S. history. And many who have advocated this policy have done so with every intention of reducing drug production. Still, world production of all illicit substances is higher than ever. Cocaine seizure rose from 9,000 kilograms in 1983 to 80,000 kilograms in 1989; yet in 1989 the amount of land cultivated for cocoa jumped 12 percent. Columbian cocaine exports increased in 1989, despite a massive crackdown, as the government acknowledges. And in Mexico, authorities have found that marijuana production levels are tens times what they had previously assumed.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE IRON LAW

Drug warriors virtually never take into accunt what is called the Iron Law of Prohibition: tighter law enforcement tends to result in the production of more potent substances. This phenomenon is not difficult to understand. If you face jail for selling a drug, you want to reduce the likelihood of detection. Traffickers therefore prefer substances wich bring in the most revenue. They offer users "more bang for the buck."

The Iron Law of Prohibition becomes more intense as enforcement efforts become more effective. Past governmental interdiction efforts encouraged some casual users to shift to LSD. One narcotics officer told the New York Times, "I hate to say it, but we, law enforcement, may be driving people into the arms of the coke dealers by taking away their grass. But we have got to enforce the law" (National Review, december 5, 1986).

DRUG, CHILDREN, YOUTH, AND ETHNIC MINORITIES

Drugs have invaded schools all across America and the durg war has done little or nothing to prevent it. In 1988, 54 percent of high school seniors admitted to having tried illicit drugs. Some 55 percent of students said it was fairly easy or very easy to get cocaine, which is up from 45 percent in 1984.

Perhaps the most awful aspect of the drug war has been that it has separated families and undermined parental authority. A parent making wages barely abote the minimum cannot hope to hold authority and the respect of their teenage son who makes ten to twenty times as much, as is often the case. These kinds of profits are cearly unnatural and are not normally associated with legal markets. We need a system that gforges a solid connection between work and reward, one that helps to reinforce the habits and virtues we associate with our religious heritage, like diligence, honesty, and long-term thinking.

DRUG AND CRIME

The main problem is crime and the massive pain and suffering it causes. Today roughly one-half of all crimes in the country are durg-related, according to the American Correctional Association. Our own pastoral work confirms this tragedy. By the turn of the century, half of all federal prisoners will be serving time for drug offenses. The massive increase of crime during the 1920s was a result of the prohibition against alcohol, likewise, most of today's crime is a byproduct of the drug war. It draws law enforcement resources away from other endeavors, like protecting people and their homes against violent invation. It ties the court system up so that other victims of crimes cannot get a hearing. Ostrowski writes "in a world of scarce prison resources, sending a drug offender to prison for one year is equivalent to freeing a violent criminal to commit 40 robberies, 7 assaults, 100 burglaries, and 25 auto thefts." (J. Ostrowski, Thinking About Drug Lelalization, Cato, 1989)

SOME THOUGHTS ON ECONOMICS AND THE DRUG WAR

A basic economic tenet is the law of supply, which states that a rise in the price of a product will increase the quantity supplied. This is because higher prices generate higher profits which encourages a shift of resources into their production. By restricting the supply, the government has pushed drug prices far higher than they should be. And the results are redictable. The astronomical level of economic profits available from the illegal drug market has shifted resources toward their production and away from the production of other goods. That's why foreign aid to drug-producing contries will do nothing to help. Only a collapse in the price of drugs, and in the profits derived from them, can work to balance supply and demand.

FAILURE AFTER FAILURE

The drug war has yet to achieve its intended effects. For example, in New York in 1973, Governor Nelson Rockefeller orchestrated passage of strong new drug laws. It called for mandatory prison sentences of fifteen years, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for everyone convicted of possessing more than two ounces of heroin or selling more than one ounce. By 1976, three years later, heroin use was more widespread than ever. The dealers began employing juveniles and used more and more risky tactics for distribution. The juvenile division of the criminal justice division became overloaded and couldn't deal with the problem any longer. Finally, the New York police did the right thing and stopped arresting juveniles altogether, eased up on enforcement generally, and the problem susbsided (R. Hamowy, Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of Government Control p.6,7)

RETHINKING OUR DRUG POLICY

It is obviously time to do some serious rethinking about our nation's drug policy in general and the drug war in particular. Once politicians are fixed an a certain course of action, they tend not to reverse direction unless they are pressured to. Now is the time to force a new debate on drugs, before we lose 10,000 more young people, before drug dealers lead thousands more into drug abuse, and before the violence becomes so frightening that the United States is turned into a police state. The drug war threatens to wipe out the values, institutions, and freedoms we hold so dear.

MORALITY AND THE DRUG WAR

The family is among the most important institutions for a healthy society. Thus, we cry out against the immorality of a policy that is systematically destroying families all over the country.

Much of these grave consequences of the drug war spring form the ideological assumption that we must make everything we disapprove of illegal. We reject this notion, as it forgets the difference between vice and crime. Enforcing positive morality is our responsibility as individuals, as parents, and as clergy. To put the government in charge of all morality is to abdicate our individual responsibility, to weaken the moral authority of our religious institutions, and thus to fail in the execution of our dutues. This is consistent with the American religious tradition. part of the meaning of the idea of separation of church and state is that the state should not encroach on an area that is more properly suited to the realm of a community's faith. Our public theology should be based on a constatn recongition of the transcendent, and the best way for transcendent concerns to be translated into our public life is through social institutions like the church and synagogue, school, and the home.

A RANGE OF SUGGESTIONS

We represent a broad range of theological and political traditions. Yet, on one thing we agree: the drug war has compounded the drug problem. We call for its en. Below we have listed a variety of alternative approaches to the drug problem. While each of us may have his or her own preference for which strategy would work best, we agree that these suggestions hold out more hope than more and escalating violence (domestic and international) at the hands of our government.

One approach is to decriminalize drugs as they were during the entire 19th century. Doing so would end drug gangs, drug heroes, and drug-related shootings; restore parental authority, forge again the connection between work and reward, and cut crime by one-half to three-quarters. It would also allow us to concentrate more resources on rehabilitation, education, and on keeping drugs away from children.

One suggestion is that drugs be treated as alcohol is treated today: limitations on advertising and restrictions on sale. Others have suggested a variety of ideas about legalization, including Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, former Secretary of State George Shultz, conservative writer William F. Buckley, economist Milton Friedman, Congressman George Crockett, and moderate district judge Robert Sweet. Many more prominent people endorse some form of legalization in private. None of their suggestions for decriminalization should be ruled out. The main point is to subject the distribution of drugs to open social discipline.

Many have suggested that the drug war simply no longer be funded, since it is obviously not going to work as intended, but that drugs should remain illegal. There are problems with this view. Those who are involved in drug markets mustbe allowed access to legal channels for the settlement of disputes. They must be able to negotiate their differences openly, and with the assistance of the court system to which everyone else has access. Otherwise the killing will continue.

THE TIME IS NOW

We urge an end to the counterproductive and deadly drug war. In this we stand in a long religious anti-war tradition. Only by peaceful means can we make use of new and creative approaches in the area of treatment and education. We also stand in the tradition of St. Augustine's just war theory, which requires that a war do less harm than the evil it aims to remove. Even among those of us who have signed this document, there are differences in opinion of how that problem ought to be addressed. The fact that we are so diverse - theologically, politically, and sociologically - yet still have arrived at a consensus on the thoughts contained here bespeaks the urgent need of ending the drug war.

Before too many more youths are killed on our streets, before too many more houses are broken into or elderly people robbed, before we lose the freedoms we value, we must rethink the drug war. We must end it, not because we approve of drug abuse, but because we disapprove and want a chance to do something about it. As long as the drug war continues to escalate, we are denied that chance. We, as pastors and religious leaders, call for an end to the drug war because we have a moral obbligation to do so, because we are reasonable, and because we care. Let us make our prayer the same prayer that has helped literally millions on the road to recover from addiction to alcohol, drugs and many other addictions, the Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference."