An important birthday is approaching. The War on Drugs turns 50 years old, and experts are trying to ensure it won’t live to see 51.
The day is Tuesday, Oct. 27, 1970. The newest thing on the radio is The Jackson 5; “The Brady Bunch” and “Colombo” are just getting started on TV. The current President of the United States, Richard Nixon, does not suspect it yet, but in three years, almost to the day, his impeachment process will start. But on this day, Nixon is not thinking about answering for his numerous crimes. Today, he is signing the Controlled Substances Act that will rule how the U.S. acts towards drug possession for the next 50 years.
The Controlled Substances Act classifies illicit substances into five schedules, and it categorizes marijuana as a Schedule I drug, the hardest, alongside heroin. The act claims that marijuana has “a high potential for abuse, no accredited medical use, and a lack of accepted safety.” Despite the later admission that Nixon chose to repress drug use for political gain, the act became law. Starting in 1971, even for first offenders, possessing any amount of marijuana was punishable by one year in prison, and growing or selling the plant could mean a life sentence, even for non-violent offenders. Fought by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that Nixon would go on to create, the burgeoning War on Drugs led to tens of millions of arrests, mostly for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Countless Americans who would never have been arrested otherwise saw the inside of a cell and were subsequently treated like criminals.
The question of reform is back on the table, nowadays. Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, famously said, “Nobody should go to prison for marijuana,” and his party’s platform explicitly calls for the federal decriminalization of cannabis. To pave the way to the realization of that promise, a leading nonprofit organization, the Drug Policy Alliance, has released a drug decriminalization model, “a roadmap to effectively end the criminalization of people who use drugs and begin repairing the harm drug law enforcement has caused,” the organization said.
How to Decriminalize Substance Abuse
Decriminalizing marijuana is not as simple as the president declaring it done—nor is it as simple as descheduling cannabis, which means removing it from the list of Schedule I drugs. Prohibition is deeply entrenched in our institutions and laws, and those need to be untangled. The Drug Policy Reform Act, brought forth by the Drug Policy Alliance, addresses the multifaceted question of ending the War on Drugs as we know it.
The first promise of the Act is not to address cannabis’ schedule, but to shift regulatory authority away from the DEA, which has been directly responsible for most of the damage of the War on Drugs. The DEA has a long and violent history of treating substance abuse as a crime to be fought rather than as a health issue requiring help. Instead of the DEA, the nonprofit suggests that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should be responsible for the classifications of drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. The people in charge of a public health issue should have a medical degree, not a gun.
In a time where defunding the police has become a popular rallying cry, the Drug Policy Alliance recommends defunding the War on Drugs enforcers and reinvesting the money thusly saved in more productive endeavors. Agencies that must be defunded include the DEA, the Office of National Drug Control Strategy (ONDCP), the Bureau of International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement Affairs (INCLE) and other agencies that play a part in drug prohibition. Programs that facilitate the militarization of these agencies, such as the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which fast-tracks the obtention of excess military equipment to these agencies, should be ended.
“Because of federal funding and defense equipment transfer schemes directly tied to drug arrests, the drug war incentivizes and funds the kind of militarized policing that has led to the overwhelming demand for reform in recent months,” said Queen Adesuyi, policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance.
The second step would be to shift the legal apparatus surrounding substance abuse towards harm reduction instead of repression. Of course, the most important step would be to repeal all criminal penalties for simple possession of a controlled substance, as well as penalties for distributing small personal use quantities—too often, those laws are used to escalate the charges against people who don’t traffic drugs but give small quantities to relatives and loved ones. That means removing minimum sentencing and sentencing enhancements for drug charges. The Drug Policy Alliance identified numerous passages in a large number of bills passed in the past century that all need to be repealed in order to truly end Prohibition.
Shifting the focus to harm reduction also includes drafting rules based on current, peer-reviewed research to define personal use thresholds, as well as measures allowing addicts to come forward and receive help instead of a prison sentence. Currently, access to substances that can help with addiction treatment, such as methadone and buprenorphine, is extremely restricted, and it should be made more widely available. Procedures such as no-knock warrants and civil asset forfeiture have been shown time and time again to be easily abused by law enforcement in drug-related cases, and they should be prohibited entirely.
Even when someone has been convicted of drug charges, their voting rights should be protected, they should still be able to access federal benefits, employment and housing. Anyone who has been convicted solely for drug possession or minor selling charges should be released from prison immediately and have their records automatically expunged without needing to petition for it.
Just removing laws that currently criminalize drug use is not sufficient—not by a long shot. It is up to the federal government to create new laws to cement these new procedures into law and force states to cooperate. Congress needs to actively prohibit state funding that is used for drug prohibition. Instead of using funds to crush drug use, that money would be better used in positive programs, such as programs providing social and health services, affordable addiction treatment, drug research and evidence-based drug education.
All these proposals are included in an all-encompassing bill that the Drug Policy Alliance intends to present to Congress ahead of the Controlled Substances Act’s 50th anniversary.
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