The words of our second hymn (“I Had a Dream”) were written by our ministerial intern, Tom Rosiello, and I think you’ll agree that they’re quite nice. They raise the hope of a world without war or hunger, and cities free of fear, drugs, crime, and hate.

And yet one of those words fits less easily than the rest into a list of social ills. Few people would hesitate to welcome a world without war, hunger, fear, crime, and hate. But a world without drugs? No aspirin? No shots before the dentist drills? Operations without anesthesia? No morphine for the dying?

And even if we put aside such medical uses, do we really want a drug-free nation? That is not how people have lived through the history of our species, as far as we know. In almost every culture we know of, people have found ways of altering their consciousness by substances they ingested, injected, smoked, or chewed.

They have eased their pain, anxiety, and boredom. They have heightened their alertness, pleasure, and spirituality. Of course, people have also embarrassed themselves, squandered their lives, and harmed themselves and others. Some of the substances were fairly innocuous, others were dangerous, even deadly.  We have our own such substances – psychoactive substances, they have been called. Foremost among them in terms of use are caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, followed by marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. But we all know Tom’s hymn isn’t longing for a nation free of coffee, tea, and cola; and indeed, although it is an psychoactive stimulant, caffeine is not considered by anyone as a drug with potential problems like those of, say, cocaine.  (I should note that these days, nicotine and alcohol are thought of like cocaine. As one team of writers note, “A few generations ago, not many Americans thought of tobacco or alcohol as ‘drugs,’ yet today virtually all who have professional interests in drugs do so…. Were they nor specifically exempted by federal law, they would both be controlled as dangerous drugs.” [Duke and Gross 13] The same authors argue that “By far the most serious drug problem in the United States – and in the world – is the tobacco problem.” [22] The Surgeon General determined that “the most additive drug known is nicotine,” much more so than even crack. [Benjamin and Miller 3])

However we define a drug, I want to return to Tom’s dream of a country free from the ill effects of drug abuse and addiction and the associated crime. Like many a dream, this one almost certainly won’t become reality in any pure form, but it might serve as an ideal toward which to work. How can we best deter the abuse of drugs and the crime that drug use creates? Our national answer has been the War on Drugs. Many European countries have much more liberal policies, while in some countries of Southeast Asia the battle is conducted even more ferociously. Has our own effort worked? Should alternatives be considered?

We have a denominational mandate to ponder those questions as part of a two-year process initiated at last June’s General Assembly in Nashville, where “An Alternative to the ‘War on Drugs’” was selected to be the new Study/Action Issue. Our personal and congregational feedback will be welcomed by the UUA’s Commission on Social Witness, which will report at a workshop at next June’s General Assembly in Cleveland. Thereafter the Commission will try to incorporate all the feedback into a consensus statement to be offered as a resolution to the General Assembly in 2002 in Quebec City. A two-thirds vote will be required for final approval.

The issue is, and I quote, “How can Unitarian Universalists contribute to a reformulation of drug policies which would reduce drug use without infringing on civil liberties, scapegoating minority communities, interfering with the internal affairs of other countries, or dehumanizing drug users?”

The process begins today, but it will continue as we talk among ourselves, research the subject, argue, change our minds, and share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It is a subject about which nearly all of us have personal stories, about us or people close to us, some of the stories positive, even euphoric, some negative, even nightmarish. Perhaps you were the victim of a drug-related crime, or you really enjoy the occasional use of a controlled substance and so far that works just fine for you, or it took you three hard years to break a drug addiction, or your deepest faith is grounded on the revelation you had back in college, high on LSD.

Most of those stories are rarely shared, and I suspect that will continue to be largely the case. But our reserve contributes to the problem. Because most of us know more than we are comfortable telling, between us myths and misinformation persist, like drug use is something that happens somewhere else, and it’s only evil, or it’s only sublime.

Maybe we can begin a process here of becoming more aware of the how complex the subject really is; what the response has been in our country, which I don’t think is what we want; and what our options are. I know some of you are already quite knowledgeable on the topic, more so than I, and others already more so because of the pbs special series this past week, which you can find on the pbs website.

To do my part, I checked out six books from the library and began surfing the internet. I have turned up experts on every side of this issue. It is an interesting endeavor, by the way, and if you are on-line you can begin at the UUA’s website by clicking on the General Assembly.

Among the experts I found, diverse as their outlooks were otherwise, there was widespread agreement that the war on drugs has been a failure. Now partly that may reflect the fact that people who believe in a policy that has broad bipartisan political support have little need to write books and articles, compared to those who see a need for change. But the background statement to our UUA proposed resolution says over 500 world leaders agreed in 1998 that “the war on drugs was doing more harm than the drugs themselves.”

The statement goes on to cite the many deleterious effects of the so-called war. But you can hear the same statistics, the same woeful analyses all around these days. This past summer, Anthony Lewis wrote,

“Imagine a country, a democracy, with a domestic program that is increasingly costly and socially disruptive. The problem that it is supposed to solve has actually grown worse over the years – but neither major political party will talk about changing the policy.

“That is a picture of the United States and its drug policy. By any rational test the war on drugs, with its use of the criminal law and harsh sentences to solve the problem, is a costly failure. The number of Americans in prison for drug offenses has multiplied by 10 since 1980, from 41,000 to 458,000. But drugs are more available than ever, and more young people are using them….

“The 458,000 men and women now in U.S. prisons on drug charges are 100,000 more than all prisoners in the European Union, whose population is 100 million more than ours. The annual cost of incarcerating them is $9 billion.

“Nearly 80 percent of drug arrests in 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available, were for possession. Of these, 44 percent were for possession of marijuana.

“Blacks are overwhelmingly more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.… Just 13 percent of regular drug users in this country are black, but 62.7 percent of drug offenders sentenced to prison are black….”

Another writer who has written a history of the War on Drugs notes that “by the time that Ronald Reagan left office, the prison population had not only doubled in size, it had changed complexion. Though only an eighth of the U.S. population was black, blacks now outnumbered white prisoners for the first time…. The drug war had evolved into a race war.” [Gray 110] After numerous interviews, a reporter wrote that “around the country, politicians, public officials and even many police officers and judges say, the nation’s war on drugs has in effect become a war on black people.” [in Duke and Gross 161]

Anthony Lewis closed his column with a one-sentence summary of the situation by The Economist of London: “That misguided policy has put millions of people behind bars, cost billions, encouraged crime and spread corruption while failing completely to reduce drug abuse.” [New York Times, 7/29/00 A27]

Numerous writers echo that assessment: “the costs of today’s drug wars in America include not merely the $20 billion or $30 billion we are now spending each year in our efforts to interdict drug suppliers and users. The costs of the drug wars also include rising violent crime; the paralysis of our legal system; corruption; adverse health consequences of epidemic proportions in our nation’s inner cities; and the erosion of civil liberties.” [Benjamin and Miller 14]

“For more than a quarter century the United States has been on a rampage, kicking in doors and locking people up in the name of protecting its citizens from illegal drugs. Hundreds of billions of dollars into the Drug War, nobody claims victory. Yet we continue, devoted to a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government gets…. Costly, destructive, and failing in its stated mission, the War on Drugs is government lunacy…. Yet we soldier on….” [Baum xi,xii]

“Not only has America nothing to show for this monumental effort, but the failed attempt has made everything worse. After blowing hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, the drugs on the street today are stronger, cheaper, more pure, and more widely available than at any time in history…. The fallout from this misadventure cannot be looked upon simply as one of our many problems. It rains down on everything, blanketing the nation in a smog of delusion so pervasive nobody can see it, even as it warps U.S. foreign policy, corrodes the Bill of Rights, and successfully reverses years of progress in race relations.” [Gray 189]

These observations are fleshed out in book after book. Particularly harrowing are the accounts of the attacks on civil rights perpetrated in the name of the drug war, homes broken into and people killed in mistaken raids on the innocent; property and other assets seized before any trial, indeed before any indictment, and kept until the person proves his or her innocence, and then at sizable legal cost, if they haven’t already been bankrupted or driven out of business.

And then there is the destruction visited upon the social structures of Latin American countries, the enrichment of violent thugs there, huge payments to eradicate crops, and for what? Momentary disruptions in drug deliveries? The acreage now under cultivation represents 4/100 of 1 percent of the land available for coca production in South America [Benjamin and Miller 3]. Kill it here, it will grow somewhere else.  Meanwhile, as a former Colombian high court judge said in 1993, “The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget…. We are threatened with a return to the Dark Ages.” After citing this quotation, an author notes that “it’s important to realize that this particular impending catastrophe can be avoided with the stroke of a pen … by simply closing the black money tap.” [Gray 190]

And then there is our bizarre incarceration rate, benefiting no one but the burgeoning private prison industry. I remember my friend and colleague Bill Jones, a professor at Florida State, telling the General Assembly that the crime rate could be cut in half tomorrow just by deciding that minor drug infractions weren’t crimes. If we were not paying to keep all of those small-time drug users in prison, thanks to the misguided strategy of minimum mandatory sentences, think where all that money could go – for instance, to programs of drug education and treatment, which actually work, as opposed to our current strategy of making people convicted of mere possession, even of a substance as innocuous as marijuana, keep company with convicted criminals for months or years.

We could even allocate some of the billions we now spend in jailing young black men into, and I quote, “putting drug-control money where it would do some good.” The author, a Yale Law School professor goes on, “The surest way to deal with the problem of drug abuse in this country is to do something about the hopelessness felt by a large portion of the American population. Instead of wasting its resources on futile drug prohibition, America needs to invest in economic development … and in rebuilding our educational infrastructure. Every dollar spent on Head Start is worth five dollars spent on drug prohibition.” [Duke and Gross 274] But as to the question of how to deal with the problem of current drug abuse and the crime that surrounds it, are there alternatives to our current war?

At this point, there seems to be a thoughtful argument going on over the decriminalization or legalization of now-illicit drugs. But on both sides are people who are arguing for pragmatic, measured changes in our current policy. On the one side are those who believe that prohibition always fails, that it only empowers criminals and deflects money away from programs of education and treatment that actually work.

“Drug prohibition has not worked in the past, does not work now and will not work in the future,” writes one pair, adding that “Recognition of that truth eventually will force drug-policy makers to legalize or at least de facto decriminalize the drugs now prohibited.” [Duke and Gross 231] On the other side are those who believe that the dangers inherent in allowing more people ready access to cocaine and heroin, some of whom will become addicted, outweigh any possible gains. One writes, “legalization looks like a bad deal. Even the various attempts to qualify legalization or otherwise fancy it up … cannot escape the fundamental problem that … freely available cocaine is likely to give rise to self-destructive habits for an unacceptably large proportion of users.” [Kleiman 307]  Likewise, “The case for heroin prohibition is simply that a number, probably a large number, of persons who now lead reasonably satisfying, dignified, and useful lives would, if heroin were legal, find themselves leading, and regretting, lives with a narrowed range of satisfactions, impaired dignity and self-command, and reduced usefulness to their families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens.” [Kleiman 365] This author is especially aware that no solution is perfect, and concedes that the price of heroin prohibition includes “increased misery for those who become heavy heroin users despitwe prohibition, and increased external costs: the spread of disease, user crime, black-market crime, neighborhood disruption from open dealing, and the expenditure of law enforcement resources that could be used instead to suppress predatory crime.” [Kleiman 365] The author thinks it worth the price. Others disagree. At least there is a respectful dialog. People on both sides want to be seen as avoiding an extreme position. Writers urging decriminalization, for example, may also argue for strict regulation, keeping drugs out of the hands of minors, and reversing any program that doesn’t succeed. Writers opposing legalization may also oppose continuing the current tactics of forfeiture, mass incarceration, racist application of the law, and the attempt to eradicate crops in foreign lands.  And everyone (except for most politicians) argues for more money for education and treatment. “Treatment and education … constitute … the only strategy that offers any possibility of fundamentally altering America’s appetite for chemical euphoria and therefore the only strategy that contains the slightest basis for optimism.” [Duke and Gross 228] Another author says, “Apparently the one surefire way to cut down on drug use is to give the people the facts and let them use their own judgement.” [Gray 194]

In the middle ground between the two sides are a few small, tentative steps that have wider support than full-scale regulated legalization of all now-illicit drugs. One is the medical use of marijuana, already winning elections. Next might be a statewide decision not to enforce marijuana laws, as will be on the ballot next month in Alaska.

I know some clergy who think that drug use, ecstasy, spirituality, and religion are all bound up so intimately that we should care about such decisions more than I in fact do. For me, what makes the subject religious in the end is the matter of justice, and the degree to which our current practice persecutes the poor, people of color, the people of Colombia and elsewhere, the innocent whose goods are seized, and those guilty of nothing so awful that they should be behind bars.

Our dreams may never come true all the way, but talking together in all humility, we may find our way toward a far greater measure of justice and kindness than our country has been practicing of late.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).
Daniel Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller, Undoing Drugs (New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Eva Bertram at al., Drug War Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Steven B. Duke and Albert C. Gross, America’s Longest War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993).
Mike Gray, Drug Crazy (New York: Random House, 1998).
Mark A. R. Kleiman, Against Excess (New York: Basic Books, 1992.
 

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