"Undone by its Own Metaphor": The Failure of America's War on Drugs

About two weeks ago, NPR's Talk of the Nation took up the issue of America's War on Drugs. Featured in this discussion was Ben Wallace-Wells, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone who recently authored a damning account of U.S. drug policy entitled "How America Lost the War on Drugs".

I don't typically consider Rolling Stone to be a source of hard-hitting investigative journalism, but listening to Mr. Wallace-Wells' interview I was impressed and intrigued by the extent of his knowledge about the War on Drugs. When I finally sat down to read his article (linked above), I found it to be a fascinating and fairly comprehensive analysis of contemporary American drug policy. I know some of you may balk at this, but I would totally consider assigning this article in class, so impressive is its scope. (It's very lengthy; divided into twelve chapters, it took me over an hour to read.)

What I appreciated most about this article is that it recognizes, and sharply criticizes, the utter disconnect between contemporary American drug policy, on the one hand, and the findings of empirical drug policy evaluation research on the other:

Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

This article also examines many criminal justice policies and initiatives that developed as a consequence of the War on Drugs: The Boston Gun Project and Operation Ceasefire, community policing efforts in Boston, High Point, NC, and elsewhere, drug courts, mandatory minimums, and so on. It also offers a cogent political analysis, deftly illustrating how thoroughly efforts to appear "tough on crime"-- by Republicans and Democrats alike -- have influenced and shaped contemporary drug policy, even while academic research has been largely ignored:

The federal budget that [former Clinton-era drug czar Lee] Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed. Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman."

...But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. [Criminologist and pioneer of the Boston Gun Project David] Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs - an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

Indeed, from an academic perspective, this is perhaps the most dispiriting observation of this article: that U.S. drug policy has been, and continues to be, woefully uninformed by criminological and governmental research and instead is shaped largely by political concerns:

But despite their evident success, the most forward-looking programs remain buried at the fringes of drug policy, featured not in the president's budgets but in academic journals and water-cooler talk in cities like High Point....Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the most promising ­programs continue to be shunted aside by Washington's unswerving emphasis on law and order.

I would love to hear others' thoughts on this article, given that I am not a drug researcher. What do you make of the author's conclusions? How can his research be used to inform discussions about the extent to which academic research matters to policy-makers? What does that mean for us as criminologists? I am left with many questions...not the least of which is: would I lose all credibility if I assigned a Rolling Stone article for my students?