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Topic: Viewpoints - Should illegal drugs be decriminalized?

In the Czech Republic last week, Vaclav Havel, true to his history, took a courageous stand for liberty, human rights, and the rational ordering of society when he vetoed a bill which would have criminalized the possession of drugs for personal use. In doing so, he cited not only the cruelty of punishing the victim, but also the absurdity of driving up prices, fostering crime and empowering the forces of the black market. Havel, a writer and intellectual, played an active role in the democratization and renewal of culture that took place in 1968, helping to usher in a brief moment of freedom in Czechoslovakia before the Soviet tanks rolled in to reassert their dominance and put an end to that now- legendary Prague Spring.

Much has changed since 1968. Havel, who was jailed by the Communists as a dissident, is now the President of the Czech Republic. And although its dominance over Havel and his compatriots lasted for another twenty-one years, the Soviet Empire, unable to maintain their control over information in an age in which walls could no longer keep out words, is no more. But in vetoing that bill, in refusing to subvert the rights and the well-being of people to the dictates of ideology, Havel, and the world, may very well find that it is 1968 once again, and that the tanks are gathering at the gates, preparing to crush a rising rebellion.

Across the globe, the movement to end the Drug War is growing. And just as Alexander Dubcek, Vaclav Havel and a generation of Czechs were responding to the failures and the oppression of Communist rule, so too today's dissidents are responding to the failures and oppression of the Drug War. But now as then there is much at stake for the ideologues: money, careers, power, control. And now as then, dissent itself poses a real threat to an ideology without intellectual or moral legitimacy.

In June, the United Nations will hold its first-ever Special Session on Narcotics. Far from an open discussion of the impact and effectiveness of the global war, the agenda will be tightly controlled. Its mission, as stated, is to encourage greater international cooperation and wider participation in the war effort. Vaclav Havel's writings during his years under Communist rule often spoke to the intellectual contortions of people striving to function under an obviously flawed and illogical system. At the UN, a similar display is in the offing as the Session's attendees attempt to ignore the fact that the enemies in their war -- a global criminal network, legions of corrupted officials and institutions, and the proliferation of dangerous and addictive substances -- have all been either exacerbated or created entirely by the very system that the session is designed to perpetuate.

Ironically, it is the United States, arch-enemy of the old Soviet empire, that is the driving force behind the global Drug War. Domestically, the war has made the U.S. the world's number one per capita incarcerator, highlighted by an astounding one in three young African-American males under criminal justice supervision. That such oppression has failed to reduce the availability of drugs has only made the prohibitionists more determined. According to America's Republican Congressional leadership, legislation will be introduced this spring which will outline "a World War II-style" effort to replace the "half-hearted" and "weak" status quo. Internationally, the prosecution of the war has led the U.S. to steadily increase its military involvement in Latin America, including arms and personnel sent into a 35 year-old Colombian civil war -- a war which has grown exponentially as the native coca crop has been alchemized by prohibition -- and a planned "Hemispheric Anti-Narcotics" military base in Panama.

It is illustrative that Drug War dissenters within the U.S. have often faced Soviet-style silencing. In 1993, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was first marginalized, and ultimately forced to resign after suggesting that the legalization of drugs be studied. In 1994, Representative Gerald Solomon sponsored a bill which would have stripped the tax-exempt status of any non-profit organization advocating the legalization of drugs. In 1996, California Attorney General Dan Lungren held a press conference to urge that the nation's newspapers refuse to run a Doonesbury comic strip supportive of a state medical marijuana initiative. And over the past two years, Barry McCaffrey, dispensing the powers of the aptly named office of the "Drug Czar", has met several times with American media executives to lay out the government's views on the proper and improper depiction of drugs and the people who use them.

Despite, or rather because of the escalating and heavy- handed methods of the U.S.-led Drug War, voices of dissent are rising up not only in America but around the world. It is becoming quite apparent that this dissent, and the obvious failure to which it points, have made the prohibitionists desperate to prove that their system can work. Their only possible response, given their lack of success at the current level of repression, and their steadfast support of the prohibitionist model, will be to escalate.

This week, Vaclav Havel stood up once again for the rights, the freedoms and the dignity of Man. As in 1968, his action comes amidst a growing spirit of reform, and a sense of hope that an age of repression is ending. But now as then the ideologues cannot allow the reform movement to grow, and the forces of repression, this time American-led, will undoubtedly respond. But instead of the Czechs, standing in the path of the coming onslaught will be the peoples of Central and South America, of Central Asia, of the United States, and of any nation that follows her lead.

Make no mistake, the current ascendancy of reform is but another Prague Spring, and the tanks are even now gathering at the gates. But unlike the last time, Vaclav Havel and the rest of the world will not have to suffer for a generation before the ideologues fall. Because this is 1998. And today, unlike thirty years ago, we are living in an age of electronic communication and the free flow of information. And information is the single most potent weapon in the fight against repression. Just ask the Soviets.

Adam J. Smith
Associate Director

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The news from the Drug War front this week is both illustrative of the depths to which we have fallen, and informative as to where we might be heading. The evidence of the former points to a malignancy of the soul typical of a nation at wrongheaded conflict with itself. The evidence of the latter points to a slippery slope toward armed conflict by a nation at war with forces that it has created and nurtured.

>From California and Texas come the stories of two teenage boys, used by police with less regard for their lives than for the cops' next bust. In California, Chad McDonald was released into his mother's custody by the juvenile court on condition of his ongoing cooperation with the Brea police department. His mother claims that the Brea police assured her of Chad's safety. She also claims that even after helping to bring about arrests in several cases, the police continued to insist on Chad's services as a narc.

In the end, however, word of Chad's cooperation apparently got out on the street, and upon entering a known drug den on March 1 with his fifteen year-old girlfriend, the two were kidnapped, held and tortured for two days before the girl was raped, shot and left for dead in a forest outside of Los Angeles by area drug dealers. Chad was strangled to death, his body dumped unceremoniously in an alley. Details of the boy's involvement in undercover operations were not revealed until the girl recovered sufficiently to begin telling her story. Until then, the police had been silent. Although the Brea police have refused comment on the case, they do acknowledge that minors are in fact used as informants. In Texas, an undercover agent building his case drove 16 year-old recovering heroin addict Jonathan Kollner to the home of a dealer, not once, but six times. Each time the officer waited as the boy used the heroin. Prior to becoming ensnared in the operation, Jonathan had tested clean for twelve months.

It is an unholy war, this War on Drugs. It has led a nation -- not just any nation but the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world" -- to routinely commit acts which should be, by anyone's standard, abhorrent. We have police, across the country, who are so deeply enmeshed in unwinnable and never-ending day-to-day combat on the streets of our cities that they apparently think nothing of risking the life of a seventeen year-old boy, or re-addicting a sixteen year-old boy, sending both of them back into a world and an atmosphere that each had already proven was beyond their ability to resist, in service to their next small-time bust. How many busts have there been? How many more will there be? Has any of it, will any of it make the drugs disappear? Will it take the money out of the market? Will it put an end to the limitless supply of kids and criminals who are lured every day to take the place of the last one to be carted off? Is any of this worth the fact that we have become a society so poisoned by the effects of our own policies that the lives of our children are worth less than the next worthless arrest report?

It would be nice to think that we have hit bottom, but the fact is that most likely, we have not. There are plenty of freedoms yet to be surrendered and plenty of kids left to be sacrificed to our tragic folly. In our country's last futile and ill-conceived war it was said that sometimes you have to burn a village to the ground in order to save it. In the current futile and ill-conceived war, it is becoming apparent that we have taken this approach to our entire society.

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