The Drug War Is Corrupt and Criminogenic, Part 1
Jailhouse Nation
I’m not going to say “welcome to Jailhouse Nation.” There’s nothing welcoming about it. The Drug War is criminogenic, and the more the War escalated, the worse our problems became. The prisons got overstuffed.
Eventually, “drug courts” were initiated for offenders charges with “personal use” possession, in the interest of “diversion” from the expenses of hearings, prosecutions, jail maintenance, and civil order, priorities like not sticking more millions of people with criminal conviction records. Drug court “diversion programs” were essentially one-time get-out-of-jail cards; for a second offense, prosecutors were often not as forgiving. A few interesting but little-noted features of “diversion”; 1) the program treated everyone charged with a possession offense as an “addict”, no matter the substance, and no matter whether or not someone actually had a drug habit; and 2) then the State required them to attend meetings and programs in physical promimity to actual confirmed hard drug addicts. This had a way of backfiring, particularly in the case of young un-addicted first offenders exposed for the first time to the most reliable drug connection middlemen of all, for all sorts of substances; confirmed drug addicts. There was also the fact that 3) the prosecutorial discretion for a drug possession conviction was known to include the ability to order diversion for people arrested for larger quantities of drugs than what one might intuitively think of as “personal use.” Some of the people being treated for their “addiction” by a diversion program didn’t even use the drugs found in their possession. Instead, they sold them.
Drug dealer culture. Funny about that; no one ever mentions that there is such a thing. It has its own values, its own social status hierarchy, its own political economy. The supposed “treatment and rehabilitation” goal of Drug Courts and diversion is to “cure the addicts.” But under Drug Prohibition, many of those places incidentally serve as places for users to to develop sources and connections. And “drug court” does nothing to address Drug Dealer Culture. Because as long as the illicit markets are paying cash daily in a retail market as big as the fast food industry the drug dealers are going to be out there making that fast money. Unless, perhaps, the US intensifies Drug War to the point of totalitarianism, like the surveillance state of the People’s Republic of China. For those who for those who yearn for an American-style version based on “economically libertarian” Singapore, I’d venture that the fact that Singapore is only about 1/4 the size of Rhode Island probably has something to do with its vaunted effectiveness. So even if one can get beyond the loathsomeness of living under a panopticon surveillance state, it’s questionable how effective it can be. The PRC has suppressed its own domestic drug culture, the way it’s suppressed practically everything that the Great Fathers of the CCP don’t like. But only a naif would imagine that drug use has been eradicated there. That isn’t how it works. Historically speaking, the way it works is that matters of mind-altering drug use and supply simply become a more restricted privilege.
Speaking of Law Enforcement Crackdown Solutions: is there still an illicit drugs market in the Philippines, in the wake of the recently departed demagogue in chief, Rodrigo Duterte, with his militarized drug war death squads? Yes, the illicit drugs marketplace still exists in the Philippines. Nobody told you? Maybe nobody told you know that Duterte has candidly admitted that he was a heavy fentanyl user for a while, either. Duterte on Fentanyl
Supposedly- according to Rodrigo Duterte- he isn’t on fentanyl any more, although the question remains open as to what else he might be on instead. As for the connections of the Duterte regime to the illegal drugs trade, that history is even more colorful. Duterte On Corruption, September 2021 (the drug corruption material is about halfway down the page.) 2021 Study of Philippine Drugs and Corruption under Duterte
The Drug Dealer thing. This is the hole in the analysis of social problems offered by Daniel Moynihan and William Julius Wilson, Ken Hamblin and J. D. Vance. And also the hole in the analysis offered by Hillary Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman and Joe Biden. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, tried to tell them, but our national political class is still fronting and punting and desperately ransacking their way through irrelevant policy solutions in order to not have to face the answer: we need to overhaul American- and global- policy toward the market in some drugs that are currently legally forbidden.
Speaking of Kurt Schmoke, he wrote the Foreword to this book, which was first published over 30 years ago:
Drug Policy and the Decline of American Cities, by Sam Staley
For future reference:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/just-facts-many-americans-have-criminal-records-college-diplomas
many more article links to post. yes, indeed. Data and interpretation. If you’re going to give up on any article longer than 5 minutes, be forewarned. While I make exceptions, that isn’t my style.
And, yes, “criminogenic” is a real word.
criminogenic
krĭm″ə-nə-jĕn′ĭk
Adjective
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Bruce Bagley, reporting on his researches into the cocaine trade in Colombia in 1985:
…I want to raise some of the implications I have observed in various stays in Colombia. Conspicuous consumption is an importantly new phenomena [sic] in Colombian society; it is manifested in a variety of ways ranging from the importation of Mercedes Benzes to the purchase of a variety of goods which are not normally consumed in Colombia. Many often dismiss this kind of cultural phenomena, but I think it is related, at the cultural level, to aspects of the dependency theory Kevin Healy discussed. Foreign status items establish consumption patterns in which the rewards the drug traffickers reap and ostentatiously display in places like Bogota have a profound effect on the way people perceive their society and the kinds of rewards or disincentives which are provided for various types of endeavors, including the concomitant use of violence by the drug traffickers. What we see is that drug trafficking has been rewarded; by being rewarded and being closely associated with violence, violence is emphasized increasingly in Colombia. Throughout the 1970s and already violent society (one in which the civil war known as the Violencia between 1948 and 1958 took 200,000 peoples lives) became increasingly more violent; it also became a society in which it is difficult to distinguish drug-related violence from petty crime and guerrilla activities. While little research has been done on these kinds of, if you like, psychological implications, they are independent issues… (1)
From a few years later, another observer of Colombian society, reporter Simon Strong:
…Earning ‘fast’ money had become an obsession that touched all classes. The paisa work-and-save ethic had been rocked by the cocaine bonanza. There was a tendency to scorn an average wage, to want everything now or never. Cocaine had touched everybody’s lives. Few families came out undamaged; few businesses turned the money away. And, worryingly for the future, it was as if the level of educational prowess in Antioquia had deteriorated in direct relation to the influence of investment by the drug traffickers. Until the 1970s, the department [i.e., “province” ed.] had led the country in the ICFES university entrance exams. By 1993, Antioquia had sunk to twenty-second place; it was followed by the Amazon departments, the most backward in Colombia. The lure of fast money had helped to drain schools and universities of their talent…(2)
That’s the way the illicit drug economy was playing out in Colombia, over 30 years ago. Does any of that sound familiar, readers?
1. (Bruce Bagley, article “The Colombian Connection…” in Coca and Cocaine, Pracini and Franquemont, eds. 1985. pp. 92-93.)
2. (Whitewash, by Simon Strong. 1994. p.279.)
[to be continued]