Radley Balko notes that drug warriors see people as Better Dead Than High:
Over the years, drug warriors from former Drug Czar William Bennett to current Czar John Walters to recent DEA Administrator Karen Tandy have defended the efficacy of alcohol prohibition. All three have called the experiment a “success,” and the notion that it failed a “myth.”They insist alcohol prohibition was a success because it reduced alcohol consumption. That assertion itself is debatable, but even assuming they’re right, the argument itself is revealing.
Americans didn’t pass prohibition because there’s something inherently evil about alcohol. They passed it because of the alleged deleterious effects associated with drinking.
To call Prohibition a “success,” you’d have to ignore the precipitous rise in homicides and other violent crime during the period; the rise in hospitalizations due to alcohol poisoning; the number of people blinded or killed by drinking toxic, black-market gin; the corrupting influence of Prohibition on government officials, from beat cops to the halls of Congress to Harding’s attorney general; and the corresponding erosion of the rule of law.
Of course, the 18th Amendment was passed because prohibitionists convinced the country that their movement would alleviate many of these problems. But once Prohibition was in place — and still today among its defenders — it became not about the negative effects of alcohol, but about preventing people from drinking as an ends unto itself. Stop people from drinking, and we’ve won. Never mind that the cure was worse than the disease.
In December 2006, the ONDCP put out a triumphant press release celebrating a five-year decline in the use of illicit drugs among teens.
“There has been a substance abuse sea change among American teens,” Walters said in the release. “They are getting the message that dangerous drugs damage their lives and limit their futures. We know that if people don’t start using drugs during their teen years, they are very unlikely to go on to develop drug problems later in life.”
But the following February, the Centers for Disease Control reported that deaths from drug overdoses rose nearly 70 percent over the previous five years.
Half the overdose deaths were attributable to cocaine, heroin, and prescription drugs (the number of overdose deaths caused by marijuana — the drug most targeted by the ONDCP — remained at zero). One of the biggest increases (113%) came among aged 15-22, those same teenagers Walters was celebrating just three months earlier.
To look at those two figures and conclude that the drug war is moving in the right direction betrays a near-religious devotion to preventing recreational drug use, at any cost.
Prohibition advocates are again measuring success not on how well the drug war is preventing real, tangible harm, but simply on how effectively they’re preventing people from getting high.