End the War on Drugs Hell No, I Won't Go By Ellen Willis-Art by JonMarc Edwards Design by Kim Klein A t last the government has achieved something it hasn’t managed since the height of ’50s antiCommunist hysteria—enlisted public sentiment in a popular war. The president’s invocation of an America united in a holy war against drugs is no piece of empty rhetoric; the bounds of mainstream debate on this issue are implicit in the response of the Democratic so-called opposition, which attacked Bush’s program as not tough or expensive enough. (As Senator B iden—fresh from his defense of the flag; the guy is really on a roll—put it, “What we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam.” ) To be sure, there is controversy over the drug warriors’ methods. Civil libertarians object to drug testing and dubious police practices; many commentators express doubts about the wisdom of going after millions of casual drug users; and some hardy souls still argue that drugs should be decriminalized and redefined as a medical and social problem. But where are the voices questioning the basic assumptions of the drug war: that drugs are our most urgent national problem; that a drug-free society is a valid social goal; that drug use is by definition abuse? If there’s a war on, are drugs the real enemy? Or is mobilizing the nation’s energies on behalf of a war against drugs far more dangerous than the drugs themselves? By now some of you are wondering if I’ve been away—perhaps on an extended LSD trip—and missed the havoc crack has wrought in inner-city neighborhoods. One of the drug warriors’ more effective weapons is the argument that any crank who won’t sign on to the antidrug crusade must be indifferent to, if not actively in favor of, the decimation of black and Latino communities by rampant addiction, AIDS, crack babies, the recruitment of kids into the drug trade, and control of the streets by violent gangsters. To many people, especially people of color, making war on drugs means not taking it anymore, defending their lives and their children against social rot. It’s a seductive idea: focusing one’s rage on a vivifi, immediate’ symptom of a complex social crisis makes an awful situation seem more manageable. Yet in reality the drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drugwar machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. While they’re happy to use the desperate conditions of the poor as a club to intimidate potential opposition, the drug warriors have another agenda altogether. Forget those ob20 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1989-90
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