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| Moral Poverty and Body Counts |
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Posted by FoM on May 02, 2001 at 10:40:41 PT By Mike Males, AlterNet Source: AlterNet 
John Walters is a veteran of drug policy shambles. As the deputy director under former drug czar William Bennett, he helped craft drug war policies that have shattered millions of lives, wasted billions of dollars and exacerbated America's drug crisis. He's a hard-core ideologue who misrepresents the facts and spouts tough-on-crime rhetoric. In other words, John Walters is the Bush administration's perfect choice to be the next drug czar. If Walters wins confirmation as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), as he is expected to do, don't expect many concrete changes. Like the recently departed drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, Walters is dedicated to more drug testing and zero-tolerance regimens, misrepresenting drugs as "an affliction mostly of the young," and funneling ever more cash to public relations, interdiction, police, prisons and -- if Walters has his way -- churches. But unlike McCaffrey -- a dutiful soldier, but one who bumbled when off script -- Walters has a sophisticated understanding of drug issues and articulating them skillfully. This, combined with his unyielding ideology, makes him more dangerous than his predecessor. ONDCP's goals, established in Bennett's 1989 National Drug Control Strategy when Walters was his deputy director, specifically targeted drug "use itself," not abuse or addiction. Policies stigmatized and punished "casual users ... because it is their kind of drug use that is most contagious." Conversely, the Strategy de-emphasized treating addiction because drug addicts are "a mess" who "make the worst possible advertisement for new drug use." Bennett's strategy of neglecting drug abusers while punishing casual users worked exactly as designed. In the 1980s and early 1990s, arrests and imprisonments for drug-law violations skyrocketed, self-reported drug use fell, and drug abuse exploded. Federal Drug Abuse Warning Network reports showed overdoses and hospitalizations skyrocketing, especially for those drugs most targeted by the drug war. In 1980, when Reagan took office, 28,000 Americans were hospitalized for abuse of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. In 1992, when Bush left office, the number was 175,000. In 2000, the latest figures available, 250,000. Normally, such a monumental policy disaster would invoke calls for fundamental reform from the highest levels, especially after voters in a dozen states have signaled their support for reform. However, because drug abuse is financially and politically profitable for drug-war interests, the czar's only permissible role is promoting tougher policies and further escalation. Walters' record reveals the consummate doubletalk skills necessary to fulfill the office's task of redefining disaster as success while simultaneously warning that worse disaster looms. Walters' claims of success, like McCaffrey's, selectively invoke indexes of drug abuse and rely heavily on the most unreliable measure, self-reporting use surveys. From 1979 to 1992, the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported, the percentage of people who said (truthfully or not) that they used illicit drugs in the past month dropped from 16 percent to 5 percent among teenagers and from 14 percent to 6 percent among adults. In a 1996 Heritage Foundation critique of Clinton drug policies, Walters credited "strong presidential leadership" for "a decade of consistent progress during the Reagan and Bush Administrations" that "helped rescue much of a generation." Yet, in President Clinton's first term, "the United States is losing -- some would say surrendering -- in the prolonged struggle against illegal drugs." Drug use is rising, and "the number of cocaine- and heroin-related emergency room admissions has jumped to historic levels" driven by falling prices and "increased availability of such relatively cheap drugs." Walters' czarist capabilities are shown when he cites trends to indict Clinton's policies without mentioning how they equally discredit the Reagan-Bush drug war. From 1980 to 1992, heroin and cocaine prices dropped by 60 percent, heroin-related emergency admissions tripled, cocaine ER cases jumped 1,200 percent, and drug-related murders quadrupled from 400 to 1,600. The Reagan-Bush era spawned the very "adolescent superpredators" Walters later mythologized to inflame national panic. His 1996 book, Body Count, coauthored with Bennett and John DiIulio, blamed "the alarming rise in teenage violence" on "a population of teenagers with a higher incidence of serious drug use, more access to powerful firearms, and fewer moral restraints than any such group in American history." Walters qualifications to captain ONDCP are further revealed in his evasion of the role Reagan-Bush drug policy played in stoking inner-city violence. It is clear now, as it was then, that increased homicide and violent crime by young urban men in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not caused by their own drug use or what Walters labeled "moral poverty." In fact, adolescents, including inner-city youth, showed low drug abuse rates. Rather, the spike in gang violence in impoverished inner cities suffering high unemployment represented rational entrepreneurship among drug suppliers and gangs competing to reap immense profits from rapidly increasing demand for cocaine, crack, and heroin. Who created that demand? While Walters and other "experts" capitalized on deploring the violence by young black and Latino men at the street level of drug supply networks, none mentioned the customers: several million addicts, mostly middle-aged, suburban, and white. The ranks of aging addicts soared amid the deliberate neglect advocated by Bennett drug strategy. During the Reagan-Bush reign, the number of adults 35 and older hospitalized for heroin and cocaine overdoses surged from 7,000 in 1980 to 130,000 in 1992, while hard-drug deaths leaped 800 percent. Given his backwards definitions of "progress" and "rescue," it's not surprising that Walters' 1996 critique lambastes Clinton's "ineffectual...focus on hard core drug users at the expense of stronger law enforcement and interdiction." Wrong in any case. Clinton's former drug czar, Lee Brown, belatedly advocated more treatment of addicts, but 70 percent of Clinton's drug budget went to law enforcement. Drug arrests rocketed from 1.1 million in 1992 to 1.6 million in 1996, the year Walters falsely accused Clinton of abdicating policing. Drug casualties continued to soar. The latest federal reports show that after Republicans and Democrats spent hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoned millions over the last 15 years, America now suffers its worst drug abuse crisis ever -- more annual drug-involved arrests (1.6 million), imprisonments (300,000), overdose deaths (16,000), and emergency treatments (600,000) than ever. But ONDCP thrives on policy shambles. In Walters, the office will have a drug czar experienced in presiding over them. Mike Males, senior researcher for the Justice Policy Institute and sociology instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, authored Kids & Guns: How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth -- http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales/ Source: AlterNet Related Articles & Web Site: Justice Policy Institute Record of Bush Nominee Anchored in Losing Strategy A Draco of Drugs Tough Conservative Picked for Drug Czar Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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| Comment #4 posted by dddd on May 02, 2001 at 23:18:54 PT |
| Yea J.R.Bob Dobbs,we are only one "l" off from having a much more realistic czar.John Waters would be a much more appropriate person to hold the position.....dddd [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #3 posted by dddd on May 02, 2001 at 23:14:34 PT |
| Kap brings up one of my favorite peeves,,,polls. If you have noticed,recent "polls",have reportedly shown that bush has a favorable rating amongst those who were "polled". I think that these "polls",are perhaps one of the largest,hot,peices These "polls",can be twisted in any way necessary.When the "news" The way polls are used in the media,they are less than complete heresay, Polls should be outlawed,unless they are documented,and backed up by fact. [ Post Comment ] |
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Comment #2 posted by kaptinemo on May 02, 2001 at 12:09:02 PT:
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| "Bennett's strategy of neglecting drug abusers while punishing casual users worked exactly as designed. In the 1980s and early 1990s, arrests and imprisonments for drug-law violations skyrocketed, self-reported drug use fell, and drug abuse exploded." As many here have pointed out repeatedly, who answers polls about performing an illegal activity honestly? Many lie, either in denial or (out of a braggadocio attitude) will admit that they have. And any statistical analyses stemming from such numbers are little more that SWAGs - Scientifically Wild-Assed Guesses. But of course, this has never troublede the antis, any; just look at Barry's claim that 52,000 people die each year from illicit drugs. When dealing with the media in all it's forms, a little paranoia is a healthy thing. After all, if some international news correspondents have been 'outed' as having had very cordial relationships in the past(?) with the CIA, then how many more of them on the local level almost certainly enjoy even warmer relations with Officer Boot? Makes you wonder how many of their tips are based upon information gleaned from supposedly confidential sources? [ Post Comment ] |
| Comment #1 posted by J.R. Bob Dobbs on May 02, 2001 at 11:09:29 PT |
| There was a comic strip years ago which wondered, "what if, by some mistake, the US election in 1992 went to... George Clinton!" And we became one nation under a groove, if I recall. Heck, it couldn't have been any worse than the last eight years, could it? So right now, I'd like to endorse Baltimore filmmaker John Waters for US Drug Czar. True, he does blame most of his early, stupid, and dangerous scenes on marijuana use - but he's certainly no hypocrite. He's a well-established member of the counter culture, who doesn't mince words, and who knows a lot about drugs not through personal experience but because he likes to listen to people talk about their drug experiences. Can you imagine a drug czar actually listening to people talking about their experiences with drugs? It'd be nice, wouldn't it? [ Post Comment ] |
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