Collateral damage
                   Jul 26th 2001
                   From The Economist print edition

                   The drugs war has many casualties

                   THE most conspicuous victim of the war on drugs has been
                   justice, especially in America, where law enforcement and the legal
                   system have taken the brunt of the harm. But all over the world
                   there are human victims too: the drug users jailed to punish them
                   for the equivalent of binge drinking or smoking two packs a
                   day—except that their habit is illegal. Many emerge from prison
                   more harmed, and more harmful, than when they go in.

                   The attack on drugs has led to an erosion of civil liberties and an
                   encroachment of the state that alarms liberals on America's right
                   as well as the old hippies of the left. At the Cato Institute, a
                   right-wing think-tank in Washington, DC, Timothy Lynch is
                   dismayed by the way the war on drugs seems to be corrupting
                   police forces. Not only does it breed what some might see as
                   excusable dishonesty: “testalying”, or lying on the witness stand
                   in order to put a gang behind bars. It also breeds police officers
                   who, says Mr Lynch, “use the powers of policing to put a rival
                   gang out of action”.

                   The drugs war perverts
                   policing in other ways too.
                   For example, the police
                   can keep property seized
                   from a drugs offender,
                   which may be giving the
                   wrong incentives. Another
                   undesirable effect has
                   been the militarisation of
                   America's police forces.
                   Some 90% of police
                   departments in cities with
                   populations over 50,000,
                   and 70% of departments
                   in smaller cities, now have
                   paramilitary units. These Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT,
                   teams are sometimes equipped with tanks and grenade launchers.
                   In Fresno, California, the SWAT team has two helicopters complete
                   with night-vision goggles; in Boone County, Indiana, an amphibious
                   armoured personnel carrier. Set up initially to deal with
                   emergencies such as hostage crises, such teams increasingly
                   undertake drugs raids. Inevitably, from time to time they raid the
                   wrong premises or shoot the wrong suspects.

                   Civil liberties also suffer because there is usually no complaining
                   witness in a drugs case: both buyer and seller want the
                   transaction to take place. The police, says Mr Lynch, therefore
                   need to rely on informants, wire-taps and undercover tactics that
                   are not normally used in other crimes. The result is “a cancer in
                   our courtrooms”, as he puts it, that proponents of America's drugs
                   war rarely acknowledge as one of the costs of prohibition.

                   To these intrusions should be added many smaller ones. All manner
                   of benefits have become conditional on a clean drugs record.
                   Employers routinely test staff for drugs: in the mid-1990s, 14% of
                   employees said their bosses tested people when they hired, and a
                   further 18% said they subsequently conducted random tests.
                   Access to student loans, driving licences and public housing are all
                   now jeopardised by taking drugs. Since traces of cannabis stay in
                   the urine longer than those of more dangerous drugs, the greatest
                   threat to such privileges comes from the mildest offence.
 

                   Out of sight

                   But by far the worst consequence of the war on drugs is the
                   imprisonment of thousands of young blacks and Hispanics. Of the
                   $35 billion or so that the American authorities spend each year on
                   tackling drugs, at least three-quarters goes not on prevention or
                   treatment but on catching and punishing drug dealers and users.
                   More than one in ten of all arrests—1.5m in 1999—is for drug
                   offences. Some 40% of those drug arrests were for possessing
                   marijuana. Fewer than 20% were for the sale or manufacture of
                   drugs, whether heroin, cocaine or anything else. The arrests also
                   sweep up a distressingly large number of teenagers: 220,000
                   juveniles were picked up for drug offences in 1997, 82% more than
                   in 1993.

                   Many of those arrested
                   receive mandatory
                   minimum sentences of five
                   or ten years for
                   possession of a few grams
                   of drugs, a dire
                   punishment rushed
                   through Congress in 1986
                   amid hysteria about crack
                   cocaine. Eric Sterling, now
                   head of the Criminal
                   Justice Policy Foundation,
                   a campaigning group,
                   worked in Congress on
                   drugs policy at the time.
                   He recalls that Congress set small quantities for no better reason
                   than ignorance, politicking and “a lack of fluency in the metric
                   system”.

                   Because congressmen did not know their grams from their kilos
                   back in 1986, America's prisons are crammed with drug offenders,
                   who now account for roughly one in four of those in custody, and
                   more than half of all federal prisoners. Most of these drug
                   offenders are locked up for non-violent crimes: in only 12% of
                   cases was any weapon involved. Almost all are from the broad
                   bottom end of the drug-dealing pyramid. America's imprisonment
                   rate for drug offences alone now exceeds the rate of imprisonment
                   in most West European countries for crimes of all kinds.

                   Disturbingly, even though drug use is spread fairly evenly across
                   different racial groups, three-quarters of those locked up are
                   non-white (see chart). For example, most users of crack cocaine
                   are white, but 90% of crack defendants in federal courts are black
                   or Hispanic. White people, being generally richer, do their deals
                   behind closed doors, whereas blacks and Hispanics tend to trade
                   on the streets, where they can be caught more easily. A report by
                   The Sentencing Project, a group lobbying for criminal-justice
                   reform, notes that black people account for 13% of monthly drug
                   users; 35% of those arrested for possessing drugs; 55% of those
                   convicted; and 74% of those sentenced to prison.

                   Thanks to the war on drugs,
                   says JoAnne Page, head of
                   the Fortune Society, which
                   campaigns on behalf of
                   ex-prisoners, there are now
                   more young black men in
                   prison than in college. “The
                   consequences are
                   devastating,” she says. “We
                   are taking a whole
                   generation of young black
                   and Latino kids and
                   teaching them a set of
                   survival skills that allow
                   them to live in prison but
                   get them fired from any
                   job.” A recent study by
                   Human Rights Watch reports
                   that 20% of men in prison
                   are victims of forcible sex.
                   “The rage that these people
                   come out with affects their
                   relations with their families,” says Ms Page.

                   If they go to prison without a drugs habit, they may soon acquire
                   one. “I've seen heroin, marijuana, cocaine in prison,” reports Julio
                   Pagan, a former convict who is now a counsellor. “I've seen people
                   injecting drugs.” Those who inject in prison are at extreme risk of
                   contracting HIV, because they are far more likely than users
                   outside to share needles. Dr Alex Wodak, director of an alcohol
                   and drugs unit at St Vincent's Hospital, in Sydney, Australia,
                   calculates that at least half the inmates in Australia's prisons are
                   injecting drug users, half of whom continue injecting in jail, where
                   they might typically share needles with 100 people in a year.

                   This risk is unique neither to Australia nor to the rich world. Dr
                   Wodak cites disturbing evidence that the sharing of needles by
                   injecting drug users in prisons in Thailand has been the origin of
                   that country's terrifying AIDS epidemic. Locking up drug injectors
                   and failing to provide them with clean needles may thus be one of
                   the biggest threats to global public health.

                   These immense costs to society must, of course, be set against
                   the benefits gained from banning drugs. But there is another, more
                   mundane cost that should be taken into account: the loss of
                   potential revenue. One of the main reasons Prohibition eventually
                   came to an end in America was that it yielded no tax revenues.
                   Likewise, prohibition of drugs hands over to criminals and rogue
                   states a vast amount of revenue—say $80 billion-100 billion a
                   year, based on the gap between rich-world import prices and retail
                   prices—that governments could otherwise tax away and spend for
                   the common good.