Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: The Drug War Tar Baby
From: dgross@polyslo.csc.calpoly.edu (Dave Gross)
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 19:01:19 GMT
Reply-To: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross)
Organization: Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet,                 Looseliver, Vendetta & Pang

                      Escaping the Drug War Tar Baby

                              by Dave Gross

I'm sure you've heard about the ingenious monkey trap.  It's a jar, fastened
to the ground, containing some trinket monkeys are fond of.  The opening of
the jar is big enough for the monkey to reach into, but not big enough for
the monkey to get her fist out when she grabs hold of the trinket.

The idea of the trap is that the monkey reaches in to get the trinket, grasps
it, and then can't convince herself to let go of her prize even though that's
the only way to escape.  Another version of this trap is the tar baby legend,
in which the struggle to detach yourself from the tar baby just succeeds in
getting you more stuck.

And it's not just monkeys and folkloric characters who fall for this sort of
thing.  I just read about a case in which a one-dollar bill was auctioned off
for over three dollars.  It was an auction in which the rules were this:  The
winner gets the dollar bill.  The second-to-last bidder loses the amount of
her last bid.

By the time the auction participants get suckered in to the auction, they can
only come out ahead by getting collectively further and further behind.

These examples all display a certain short-sightedness.  The monkey
concentrates on fulfilling a short-range goal (getting the trinket) and her
inflexibility leads to the non-fulfillment of a long-range goal (not getting
caught).  Similarly, the person wrestling with the tar-baby finds that a
direct assault on the thing he wants to defend himself from actually only
mires him deeper in the tar.  And the poor auction bidders find that the more
they bid, the worse the consequences of reining in the bidding.

Each of the examples requires the participants to step outside the game they
THINK they are playing and note the larger circumstances of the game they ARE
playing.  The monkey clearly would be better off dropping the trinket and
escaping, but explain it to the monkey and she'll respond (in her monkey
language), "but then I'd LOSE it!"  The man stuck to the tar baby is in bad
shape, but may not accept that struggling will only make things worse.  And
the bidders will take a while to be convinced to bow out -- "If I stop now, I
lose money!"

Public policy is run by similar rules, and can be similarly short-sighted.
Remember the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, in which certain political
figures were so certain that Reds were plotting to destroy the American
System that these figures plotted to destroy the American System in order to
protect us.  Or similarly, in the Vietnam War, in which our military was told
that they must destroy villages in order to save them.

Or for a more recent example, take the case of the war on drugs.  We are
fighting this war (and have been for a duration longer than that of the
Vietnam War) ostensibly because drugs make society a dangerous place.  The
objective of the drug war is to eliminate drugs and to therefore make the
country safer.

But because the drug warrior sees eliminating drugs as priority number one,
and making the country safer as priority number two, some paradoxical results
of the drug war take place.

For instance, the New Times recently reported a case in which a man who
killed somebody in a head-on auto wreck while driving drunk was given no time
behind bars so that he could help the drug warriors by participating in sting
operations against collegiate marijuana farmers, who may very well spend time
in prison.

Clearly, if the goal of the drug war was to make the world a safer place, the
drunk driver would be the targeted menace.  But since the drug war targets
drugs themselves, and not whatever harm is supposedly caused by drugs,
marijuana plants are ranked above manslaughter on the drug warriors list
of evil.

The monkey believed she was playing the game "get the trinket" and didn't
realize until too late that the real game was "get away!"  The monkey, to
escape, had to first escape her conceptual boundaries -- to expand her vision
of the game involved to include larger, more important concepts.

Similarly, an enlightened drug policy might start by listing the reasons
drugs are considered bad:  health, crime, decline of puritan ethic, violence,
gangs, organized crime, etc.  Then the next step would be to reach one level
outside the war on drugs, to declare war on those negative things.  To ask
questions like "if we can't eliminate drugs, can we instead eliminate the
link between drugs and crime?  can we eliminate the link between drugs and
gangs?  can we eliminate the link between drugs and AIDS?"

Holland has taken a limited version of this approach, attacking links instead
of attacking drugs and drug users.  They haven't been completely successful in
eliminating drugs (although they certainly haven't been less successful than
any other country) -- but they have successfully severed many of the links
between drugs and social problems.  In the 1970s, when the Netherlands stopped
marijuana prohibition in their country, 3% of 15-16 year olds were using
marijuana, as were 10% of 17-18 year olds.  A decade later, after years of
legal marijuana, the numbers had actually dropped -- to 2% and 6%.  Use of
hard drugs, like heroin, also dropped in the Netherlands after marijuana
decriminalization, and Amsterdam was the only major European city to see a
decline in hard-drug addiction over the past five years.  (In the United
States, however, the use of hard drugs has actually increased.  The Department
of Health and Human Services says that cocaine and heroin use have risen to
levels higher than those when George Bush took office).

Holland's drug policy is to make drugs as little of a burden to society as
possible -- compare this to the U.S. drug policy to eliminate drugs entirely.

In many ways, our drug war has been as much of a burden to society as drugs
ever were.  There has been a nontrivial erosion of our civil liberties, but
the drug war never promised to make us freer.  The drug war did promise to
make drugs less of a problem -- and it hasn't.  In fact, many people believe
the drug war is a major, if not the major, cause of society's drug problem.

For instance, a recent study by researchers at U.C. Irvine and Princeton
University suggests that the drug war has more than a superficial resemblance
to the tar baby.  They found that when the drinking age nationwide was raised
to 21 years, the percentage of high school seniors who smoke marijuana
increased by 10 percent.  Similarly, one Harvard researcher discovered that
emergency-room admissions for people on hard drugs and alcohol decreased by
12% in states that decriminalized marijuana.  Currently, marijuana
prohibition is at an all-time high, and college- and high school-age binge
drinking is out of control.  A cocaine high used to cost more than 10 times
what a marijuana high cost.  Today, with marijuana more costly and less
available, cocaine is competitive -- and crack cocaine has become an epidemic.

In other words, the more you strike out at one class of drugs, the more
another class grows to fill in the vacuum.  The more you struggle to pry
your right hand out of the tar baby, the more your left hand sinks.  Unless
the drug warriors can promise to eliminate drugs altogether, they can't
promise to make any real progress.

Needle distribution programs are another way of trying to sever links.  A way
to make drugs less harmful to society is to keep addicts from spreading AIDS
by reusing needles.  But those who are more concerned with trying to stop
drugs than with trying to stop the harm caused by drugs just don't see the
forest for the trees and insist that distributing needles to addicts is bad
because it encourages drug use.  In Holland, where addicts not only are able
to receive clean needles but also access to medical care and counseling,
intravenous drug use contributed to about 8% of the nation's AIDS cases.  In
the United States, on the other hand, the number is about 26%.

There will always be drugs -- a fact that even the most persistent drug
warrior must admit.  One way to make drugs less of a problem for society is to
try to reduce their numbers.  But it's not the only way -- and it's not
necessarily the best way.  And the ways governments go about reducing the
supply of drugs or the demand for drugs are sometimes cures that are worse
than the disease -- or in some cases they are even cures that worsen the
disease!

If this country wants to get serious about solving the drug crisis, it must
step outside the bloody and pointless skirmishes of the drug war and take
steps to define what the REAL goals of our drug policy should be.
-- 
************************ dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU ***************************
"The casual user, if there is such a thing as a casual user, ought to be taken
 out and shot, because he or she has no reason for using drugs..."
	-- Daryl F. Gates, Los Angeles police chief.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs