THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
A DRUG IS A DRUG, RIGHT?
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, August 26, 2001In 1978 I was a juvenile probation officer in Los Angeles County. One of my kids got arrested. I said, "What happened?"
He said, "They arrested me at six o'clock this morning. About three months ago a guy came up to me and wanted to buy drugs from me, and he kept bugging me for three weeks. Every day he kept wanting to buy drugs from me. I decided to teach this clown a lesson. I went home and I got an Alka-Seltzer tablet and I carved it down into the size and shape of a crossbones Dexedrine pill. The next time he asked me I sold it to him for $2.00, and I had fun imagining him belch for a week. I figured that would teach him a lesson. So this morning, it turns out he was an undercover narcotics officer pretending to be student at my high school. They arrested me for drug sales. But it was an Alka-Seltzer tablet."
There is a law called "sales in lieu of" a controlled substance. It is one of the few consumer protection laws for drug users, and he was busted.
We have for years in our culture behaved with respect to drugs as crazy as that story illustrates.
Let me establish my bona fides for you. You have the right to know my point of view up front. I was Campus Minister at Stanford University from 1965 to 1969, through the height of the Haight-Ashbury and all of that. I spent a lot of time rescuing failed hippies, stashing them in communes until I could send them home to their parents. I spent 13-1/2 years in Juvenile Law Enforcement in Los Angeles from 1969 until 1982. I carried a Drug Testing caseload for part of that time and I was trained as a Drug Educator for school and parents' groups. I was on the police chief's Community Advisory Committee for the City of Tampa from 1986 until 1993, and I am currently on the State of Hawaii Health Department's Citizens Advisory Committee for the Needle Exchange Program.
I am prejudiced! I am not an advocate of drug abuse. I have seen the damage it does to people's lives, their families and their communities, up close and personal. I have also seen the War on Drugs up close and personal. I have seen it turn the victims of that war into prisoners of war without even the protections of the Geneva Conventions. I am an advocate of public policy that actually works, as insane as that may sound, and nothing in the Drug War remotely belongs in that category.
The Unitarian Universalist Association is currently in the process of drafting a statement of conscience on alternatives to the Drug War. I'm on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Drug Policy Reform Group, which has been organized to help draft that document.
What I want to share with you here is not the details of that document; it's still forming. It will contain a whole lot more data about things that are going on in other parts of the world, lists of alternate responses in great detail with some of the data as to whether or not they work. I will not bore you with that. What I wish to share with you is the basic orientation from which that document is currently being written.
In the Best of All Possible Worlds
The document is not about the legalization of drugs. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be no drug laws except for the consumer protection sort. People would be liable for imprisonment for providing a drug that did not do what it said it would, or that did what they said it would not do. That is, for fraud, truth in advertising or concealed dangers. This would apply to all medicines, substances, chemicals, food supplements, etc. Individuals -- adults -- could take any that they wanted, knowing the risks. Users of any drug or substance would be liable for the consequences of their own behavior.
That might well be the law in the best of all possible worlds. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. There is no great likelihood on the near horizon that we will live in the best of all possible worlds.
One of the things that will have to happen, however, before we begin to live in such a world is that Americans will have to change their very bizarre attitudes toward drugs. At the moment, for example, it is legal to sell very dangerous hormones over the counter, so long as you call them food additives or dietary supplements and say very fast at the end of your ad that they are not for the treatment or cure of any disease.
But you may not provide, possess or use a benign plant material that is safer than tobacco, caffeine, alcohol or, for heaven's sake, a Big Mac because it is naughty. Not even if it is prescribed by your physician. If caught, you can be sentenced to a term in jail longer than if you had raped, robbed, or even killed another person.
In order to stop people from using arbitrarily forbidden substances, we have dedicated as much as one third of all Law Enforcement resources, subverted the political process of foreign countries, violated the civil rights of our own citizens -- wholesale; and created the most lucrative industry on the face of the earth, and have had virtually no effect on the drugs.
"The" SolutionCurrent drug war practices benefit no one except the dealers' profits. I want to remind you that throughout all of this, there is no "The" solution to the problem. In fact, the whole orientation that we have taken in attempting to draft this Statement of Conscience for the denomination is to acknowledge that the problems are various and different and that they require specifically targeted responses that stand some chance of affecting the situation presented to us. There is no "The" solution. A part of the problem presented to us is that we have approached it as if there was and anything other than "The" solution that would solve the whole problem is not to be countenanced. A significant piece of the problem before us is that anyone who, as I will do here, advocates some other attitude toward the problem of drug abuse in our culture is immediately labeled "soft on drugs."
Making DistinctionsThe first thing that we must learn to do in responding appropriately to the problem of drug abuse is to begin making distinctions. Drugs are not all alike. They are not all used alike. They are not all used by the same portions of the society. The distinctions between drugs and drug uses must be made if our responses are to be remotely sane. Ironically, there is really only one significant distinction drawn in current law on the various drugs. If you happen to be upper middle-class and snort powdered cocaine your sentence, when caught and jailed, is relatively mild. However, if you happen to be in the lower socio-economic strata of the society and you use crack cocaine, the penalties are as much as ten times larger. We do make distinctions, but not ones that are terribly useful for intelligent response to the problem.
We don't even make distinctions between the different drugs when it comes to research. At the moment there is a great deal we do not know about many of these drugs because the research that might give us the answers is not permitted. That research might indeed give us some handles on how to respond much more effectively and appropriately to the misuse of these drugs. You have, over the last couple of years, seen the interesting game that has gone on over medical marijuana. Finally, after years, the FDA okayed a series of protocols for research into the medical uses of marijuana. The DEA said, "No, we will not provide any marijuana for the research and we are the only legal supplier in the country. We won't let any marijuana out for research until it has been demonstrated that there is some research that medical marijuana works." That is the logic!
We also don't make distinctions between the ways and reasons people use drugs. It seems to me that there is a difference between those who use drugs and are addicts. They simply are trying to stay comfortable, having become addicted to the drugs. As a result, they end up involved in serious threats to your person and property in the community. As opposed to those who are or have used a drug as a part of their own internal exploration. I am not the only person that has taken a psychedelic drug under very carefully controlled circumstances with the specific purpose of doing some exploration of our own insides.
Another distinction that we do not make in law is that between the responses we make that work and those that don't. Nobody tests to see whether a drug rehabilitation program is, in fact, effective. If they say it's against drug abuse then they're doing a good thing, no matter whether what they're doing is in fact effective with the clients. Being opposed to drugs is simply not enough. One of the demands that will be in our Statement of Conscience, is that every piece of the nation's response to the problem of drugs and drug abuse must have a research module attached to it. It must make predictions as to what its success rates are going to be. It must measure to see whether those success rates are, in fact, turning up. If they are not turning up, what is being done must modified. We must learn how to learn more effective responses.
Harm ReductionThe very first concern in all of the laws against drugs or in dealing with the drug problem should be harm reduction. Granted that drugs are seriously abused in our society, how do we minimize the damage that drug use, drug users, and the damage that our attempts to control it do to our society? The collateral damage that drugs do to our society must be our first concern. To protect persons, property, your family, our community, harm reduction must be the very first concern. It is absolutely a necessity that the orientation from which an intelligent response to drugs be done is the acknowledgment that human beings are going to modify their consciousness. We have run the war on drugs from the assumption that the goal is to stop human beings from modifying their consciousness. I have news for everybody: Human beings have been modifying their consciousness since we took our first bite of those funny looking leaves over there and liked it. The species is not likely to stop doing this.
One of the most effective drug programs going on in our community is the needle exchange program. The needle exchange program, so far as I am aware, does not stop anybody from using drugs. What it does do is make the odds significantly better that those idiots who stick stuff into their veins with needles have clean needles to do it with, so that they not pass diseases amongst themselves and then on to you. Harm reduction.
One of the harm reduction programs that has been impossible to successfully pull off in the drug war has been accurate information. You've all seen the hysterical articles in the newspaper over the last year or so about how horrible Ecstasy is. If the articles had been turned in as term papers in a pharmacology course, the authors would have gotten F's for just plain false information. Ecstasy is not a perfectly safe drug that everybody should go out and take. But our children aren't stupid! After a while they begin to realize that we are telling them lies. Then, on the rare occasions when we actually tell them the truth, they still don't believe us.
The refrain I hear again and again: "But if we change our drug laws, what message will we be giving to our children?" The message we'll be giving them is that we're still sane. This is not the message that is currently being passed out to them.
Treatment on DemandA major piece of our Statement of Conscience will be the insistence that we absolutely must expand treatment for drug abuse. Not because they deserve it, but because it is cheaper and more effective for us. The state of California is in a wonderful conundrum at the moment. They passed a referendum last November that says that first time offenders and non-violent drug offenders, must be put into treatment, not into jail. There's one little problem: they have about 25% of the necessary drug treatment programs and trained people available to do that job. And yet, it is clearly by far the more economical way to respond to the problem. It is way cheaper to treat, even at the relatively ineffective levels of treatment that we have, than to continuously cycle people through the prison system, which we know is not effective. One of the wonderful ironies of the War on Drugs is that one of the easiest places to get drugs is while you're in jail. Now, if you can't stop drug use in jail, what kind of hope do we have of being able to totally and permanently remove the drug menace from our society out here amongst the rest of us?
We need drug treatment on demand. We need programs that permit users who realize they have a problem and want to deal with it to register and be supplied less harmful substitutes for the drugs. Methadone maintenance is one example. If they let the research be done, others might well be found. Many drug abusers out there are sick and tired of being drug abusers; but the only way that they can get help is to volunteer to be arrested as a crook.
Taking the Profit OutThe emphasis needs to be on lowering the impact of the behavior on the society as a whole. The only way that we're going to do that is by seriously addressing the problem of how you take the profit out of an exceedingly profitable industry. Much of the damage to society is the consequence, not of drug use or of drug abuse itself, but a consequence of the fact of its illegality and the incredibly lucrative business that we have created by the ways in which we have made it illegal. We must find ways to co-opt the pushers, to lower not raise the prices, to get the money out of the business.
Internationally, the problem is profit. As long as the profit is high it will continue. That money flowing freely undermines law enforcement, attracts entrepreneurs, distorts economies especially in the Third World, and is distorting the whole fabric of this society in the process, as well. I had a long conversation, some years ago in Florida, with a recently retired DEA agent about the whole interdiction process.
Multiplying Entry PointsThe current interdiction program is allegedly designed to diminish the supply of drugs in the United States. He said its actual result has been to drive the street price up, therefore increasing crime by users who have to pay for their drugs, increasing the flow of money throughout the whole illegal system, making it therefore more attractive to entrepreneurs willing to take the risks involved, increasing the competition amongst suppliers resulting in more crime -- drive-by shootings, etc., that catch innocent people in the crossfire.
Ironically it results in multiplying the entry points of drugs into the United States because when they close down one entry point, two more open up. They can't keep all of the entry points equally well-covered.
It also results in pushing users and suppliers into trafficking in more concentrated forms of the drugs--the more concentrated the more dangerous-- and into cheaper forms of the drugs, or both.
The War on Drugs created the barbiturate problem that we had to deal with when I was a Juvenile Officer in Los Angeles. There was a massive attempt, in the 1970's to shut off the supply of marijuana to Southern California. And for a few months it was largely successful. You know what happened? Kids discovered that you could get barbiturates, "reds," for 25 cents apiece. Except that you can die from the withdrawal symptoms from barbiturates. We almost lost two kids before the cops got hep to the fact that when you bust somebody you've got to find out whether they're on "reds" and get them to a hospital. It took us six months after the supply of marijuana returned to normal to remove or at least dramatically diminish the barbiturate problem amongst juveniles in the Los Angeles area. We could only do that because some of us had built up enough rapport with kids on the streets that when we said, "Hey, dummy, this'll kill ya !" they actually believed us.
The epidemic of crack cocaine was almost entirely created as a result of the interdiction processes. Another side effect, collateral damage, has been the creation of the methamphetamine, the crystal meth, cottage industries all across the country.
The result of our international interdiction attempts has been to make the problem worse, to inject more and more money into it, and to increase the supply. Yet, any suggestion to do something else is attacked as "soft on drugs." In the War on Drugs we have an analog to the Military Industrial Complex -- a War on Drugs, Law Enforcement, Government, Prison Complex with strong incentives to keep doing more and more of what is clearly not working. This particular collateral damage will only change when we drive the money out.
AlternativesThere are a number of other proposals that are being worked on. Some of them are being tried on small scales in various places around the world to attempt to drive the money out. One of them involves recognition that some of you idiots are going to continue to use drugs. Come and get them at the "government store" for free. Would there still be a "black market" in drugs? Of course, there would. But it would drive the price down, the money out, a significant piece of the crime out, and cause less collateral damage. In fact, the wonderful irony is that if you include the cost of the collateral damage that drugs do to our society we could buy the whole international crop and destroy it for what we are currently spending!
We are going to have to get the message out to the larger community. Anyone who does not demand effectiveness ought to be seen as "soft on drugs." Anyone who settles for appearing to disapprove ought to be publicly identified as "soft on drugs." Those who insist that public policy ought to, in fact, be effective are not soft on drugs. They are asking for sanity, the only thing that is likely to produce significant change.
Finally, I want to repeat, I am regularly accused of sending the wrong message to our children. The message we have been sending to our children, and they hear us loud and clear, is "This is dangerous stuff so we're going to tell you lies and do things that we know won't work to protect you." It is long past time to send them a different message !