Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century. Steve Chapman
Sunday, November 5, 2000
Here’s our quiz for today: Was it Al Gore or George W. Bush who said, “On my first day in office, I will pardon everyone who has been convicted of a non-violent federal drug offense. I will empty the federal prisons of the marijuana smokers and make room for the truly violent criminals who are terrorizing our citizens”?
No, it wasn’t Gore or Bush. It was another presidential candidate — Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party. Browne, who favors free markets, limited government, and deep tax cuts, has virtually nothing in common with Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, who thinks the only thing better than big government is giant government. But the two do converge on the drug issue.
Nader has come out in favor of legalizing marijuana and drastically changing policy on other drugs: “Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. We do not send nicotine users to jail in this country. More than 500,000 people are in our jails who are non-violent drug users.”
It takes outsiders like these to state the obvious. The American war on drugs has been going on for more than two decades, and not only is victory nowhere in sight, but no one really expects it will ever be won. It has been called our domestic Vietnam — long, costly and unsuccessful. The difference is that in Vietnam, we eventually acknowledged the futility of our efforts.
The two major party nominees ought to be able to see through the myths of drug prohibition. Gore has acknowledged smoking cannabis in his younger days, and Bush has been careful not to deny ever using illicit substances.
But instead of drawing the logical conclusion from their experience — that drug offenders who are not arrested and incarcerated generally go on to lead responsible, productive lives — they insist on enforcing laws that, due to good luck, were never applied to them. All we can expect of a Bush or Gore administration is to identify what’s failed in the past and do twice as much of it.
This is a tried and true approach. Since 1980, notes Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation in New York, federal spending on anti-drug efforts has risen from $1 billion to $18 billion, and state spending has followed the same upward trajectory. The number of people in state prisons for drug offenses has climbed more than tenfold. Nearly 60 percent of all inmates in federal prison are there on drug charges.
To a large extent, law enforcement in America is just busting crackheads and pot peddlers. Last year, the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses exceeded 700,000, the highest in American history — and 88 percent of the arrests were for simple possession, not trafficking.
We now arrest more people for marijuana offenses than for all violent crimes combined. We incarcerate more people for drug crimes than the countries of the European Union incarcerate for all crimes.
The people most likely to get caught in the dragnet are not people resembling the young George W. Bush and Al Gore. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws says that blacks and whites use pot at roughly the same rate. But blacks are more than twice as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as whites.
What have we gotten for all this, except lots of jobs for correctional officers? Not much. The White House itself admits that illegal drugs are cheaper now than they were in 1980. Amid the barrage of anti-drug messages, illicit drug use among high school students and young adults has risen, not fallen. Meanwhile, treatment programs of proven effectiveness go begging for money.
Despite the rigidity of their leaders, the American people seem open to a different approach. Measures to legalize the medical use of marijuana horrify White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, but they have been approved by voters in seven states and the District of Columbia.
Californians are about to vote on a ballot initiative that requires probation and treatment, not jail, for those convicted of drug possession — a change that would spare at least 25,000 people a year from going to prison and save California taxpayers $1.5 billion over the next five years. The measure is leading in the polls. Arizonans approved a similar measure in 1996. Alaskans may go even further: They’ll vote Tuesday on whether to legalize marijuana outright.
On this issue, change will have to come from the bottom, because it’s not coming from the top. The drug war has been a costly, destructive failure for 20 years. With a President Gore or Bush, you can make that 24.
Bush and Gore are neck-and-neck in hypocrisy
Sunday, December 3, 2000
To become president of the United States, says the Constitution, a person has to be at least 35 years old and a “natural born citizen.” Conniving, dissembling, opportunistic snakes are not disqualified, which is a good thing for George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Not that either side is incapable of honesty. Both Democrats and Republicans accuse their opponents of trying to steal the election, and both are right. Each side is striving to prevent the other from winning through unfair and unscrupulous means, so that it can win through unfair and unscrupulous means.
The warring parties bring to mind the 17th-Century Puritans, who allegedly came to America in search of religious freedom. Actually, they wanted religious freedom only for themselves, not for anyone else. Gore and Bush each want to exploit the various types of electoral unfairness to his own advantage, not wipe it out.
What partisans portray as a battle over principle looks more like the Super Bowl of hypocrisy. Bush has argued against hand recounts, and particularly against including “dimpled” chads. Yet he signed a law in Texas authorizing those very practices. Letting human beings inspect disputed ballots one by one is dangerously subjective in Florida, but indispensable to honest elections in the Lone Star State.
Gore claims that all he wants is a fair count of all the votes cast in Florida. But he hasn’t stopped a local Democrat from suing to exclude absentee ballots in Seminole County — which conveniently would deprive Bush of several thousand votes. The vice president’s passion for inclusiveness is also absent when it comes to absentee ballots from military personnel stationed abroad: Hundreds of them have been rejected because they lack postmarks. It’s Bush’s attorneys, not Gore’s, who went to court insisting that those votes be included.
Republicans say state law gives counties just seven days to report their vote totals, and that the limit must be enforced even if some counties need more time for recounts. The extension ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, they say, amounts to a flagrant rewriting of the law. At the same time, Bush and Co. think it would be horribly unjust for election boards to actually abide by that law requiring postmarks — because it means some military votes (which tend to go Republican) won’t be counted.
Should we enforce the law as written, or should we make adjustments to get a better measure of the will of the people? Bush and Gore have a clear, coherent answer: Enforce the law when it will help me, and don’t when it won’t.
Democrats were pleased when Secretary of State Katherine Harris was told she couldn’t enforce the seven-day rule but had to abide by the Nov. 26 deadline established by the Florida Supreme Court. But when Palm Beach County election officials took Thanksgiving off and then wanted yet another extension, Democrats thought Harris should disregard the timetable established by the court and grant extra time entirely on her own.
Republicans have taken pride in the near-riot by Bush supporters — “newly assertive Republicans,” in the admiring words of conservative writer Peggy Noonan — at the Miami-Dade County Board offices, which helped induce the board to abandon a recount that would have helped Gore. If a raucous protest led by Jesse Jackson had intimidated election officials in a GOP stronghold, do you think Noonan would be praising the demonstrators’ assertiveness?
Democrats are fond of resolving disputes by turning to the federal government, which they trust more than state and local bodies. But it’s Gore taking the position that the U.S. Supreme Court should stay out of this squabble because it’s the rightful province of the state of Florida. Bush, whose party