Critics have long derided America’s “War on Drugs” as a mistaken moniker. Anti-drug policy, they argue, has no defined mission, no coordinated enemy, and no path to victory. In the Clinton administration, drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey attempted to jettison the phrase, in part because of the public’s impression that the government had lost the war. John Walters, Bush’s drug czar, subsequently revived the analogy, and recently Obama’s appointee, Gil Kerlikowske, has again renounced the war parallel.
While the drug czars have vacillated about whether drug policy should count as war, the American understanding of war itself has changed. Since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States understands war to be more akin to drug interdiction. Specifically, it is now an acknowledged fact of war that taking too uncompromising a line can threaten a fragile society.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. commanders struggle to root out enemies from among civilians without disrupting social stability in the process. Domestic drug policy faces the same challenge: mandatory minimum sentences, designed to harshly punish drug dealers, instead undermine the urban communities they were meant to protect (p. 16). Contributing to a prison-overcrowding crisis, this situation demands more careful efforts to distinguish between nonviolent drug users and the truly dangerous (p. 8).
The importance of such distinctions extends abroad to countries where the United States can succeed if it views drug-producing farmers differently from drug-financed terrorists. In both Afghanistan (p. 9) and Columbia (p. 18), the way forward is not eradication of drug crops, which dissuades few and angers many, but creation of alternative markets; so long as opium and coca remain profitable, they will also remain widely grown. In the same way, Mexico’s drug trade is unlikely to disappear while the incentives to sell drugs in the United States remain so lucrative (p. 13).
To alter these circumstances would require a shift toward a more dispassionate legal and economic understanding of drug activity. Domestically, this is already underway. Legal strategies addressing prescription drug abuse, for example, seek not so much to catch users as to make prescriptions harder to forge (p. 11). In Massachusetts, decriminalization of small quantities of marijuana aims to decrease user arrests (p. 12). And the Obama administration’s decision to deemphasize federal drug laws will shift power to the states, with some taking more lenient stances (p. 14).
Of course, these policies represent incremental, rather than seismic, change. Moral concerns over drug use keep arguments for legalization out of the mainstream debate (p. 15), and frenzied media reaction to drug “crises” will continue to prompt harsh congressional action (p. 17). Yet the overall trend suggests that Americans perceive the hard-line approach of the past decades to have harmed the social fabric that drug interdiction is supposed to protect. A sophisticated definition of war, such as that developed through public discourse about Afghanistan and Iraq, can accommodate this pragmatic approach. While “War on Drugs” language is likely to persist, perhaps a simplistic understanding of it will not. ♦