That concludes my review of the book



Drug War: How We Got Into This Mess and the Special Interests That Keep Us Here

By Suzanne Wills

suzy@

How We Got Into This Mess

The Drug Policy Forum of Texas was started by Dr. G. Alan Robison in 1995 when he retired Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at UT Health Science Center in Houston. Dr. Robison was disturbed that drug laws have no basis in science. Drug laws are based on money and politics. The best way to begin to understand them is by reading these books, Drug Crazy, by Mike Gray, How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out and/or Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed by Judge James Gray, A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

In 1900 the US was awash in drugs. Cocaine was in Coca Cola and lots of other soft drinks. Over the counter medicines routinely contained morphine and cocaine. The Bayer Company introduced its brand of morphine, heroin, in 1898 and sold it over the counter for a year. In 1906 Congress passed the only law that has ever reduced drug consumption. It was not a prohibition law. It was the Pure Food and Drug Act. It required manufacturers to list the ingredients of their products on the label. When people realized that many of their favorite medicines contained narcotics, they simply stopped taking them. Of course, not everyone stopped taking all drugs. About 2 to 3 people per 1000 were addicted, usually to laudanum which was a mixture of alcohol and morphine.

This was treated as a family problem and a medical problem until Dr. Hamilton Wright decided to wipe out opium use worldwide. Other countries ignored his crusade, but in this country he had the support of the temperance movement and the financial support of his wife, Elizabeth Washburn Wright, who was a powerful senator’s daughter,. In the winter of 1914 he was able to get the Harrison Narcotics Act passed in the U. S. Congress despite the fact that he had no support from law enforcement and was opposed by the medical community. The act made it illegal for physicians to prescribe narcotics to addicts. Suddenly addicts who had been patients were criminals. The New York Medical Journal wrote “The results of this legislation will appear only gradually and will not always be recognized as such. These will be the failure of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes…, and the influx into hospitals for the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives.” The Harrison Narcotics Act called for $150,000 in total funding. Today we spend that much every two minutes on drug law enforcement. And our rate of addiction is about the same.

Hamilton Wright was a severe alcoholic and had to leave government service for that reason. His work was carried on for half a century by Elizabeth Washburn Wright and by Harry Anslinger. The most notable thing that Anslinger did was to champion the campaign to outlaw Cannabis in the 1930s. At that time Cannabis was widely used in medicine and it grew everywhere. It was literally a weed. It was largely ignored by everyone except Mexican migrant workers who had come to this country to try to find work during the depression. Anslinger ran a very shrewd campaign. He received strong support from Hearst newspapers. Anslinger also used the radio, which was a new medium and got the additional respect that new mediums get. And he gave Cannabis a new name, marijuana. He called marijuana as “as hellish as heroin” and referred to “marihuana-crazed madmen.” He said “some beet-field peon takes a few puffs of this stuff, (and) thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.”

In 1937 the word marijuana was substituted for the word cannabis for the first time in U.S. law. A hearing was held on “The Taxation of Marijuana Act.” Only one medical expert was called to speak, Dr. William C. Woodward. He testified that none of the claims being made about Cannabis indica were true. The congressmen were New Deal Democrats. Dr. Woodward was a Republican. They had already been scrapping about Social Security. As usual, party lines held. Author Mike Gray writes, “In a vote they didn’t bother to record, on a matter of little interest, a handful of congressmen forwarded a bill that would one day help fill the nation’s prisons to the roof beams.” In 2001 there were 723,627 arrests for nonviolent marijuana offenses in this country, 88.6% for possession only, more than the combined total for all violent crimes. Every year enforcing marijuana laws costs an estimated $10-15 billion in direct costs alone.

Contrast the history of marijuana, which has never killed anyone, with the history of the most addictive, most deadly drug we know, tobacco. During the WWII, approximately the same time that marijuana was made illegal, about 65% of American adults smoked tobacco. Since then anti-smoking activists have reduced that number to about 21% using entirely non-violent, non-coercive methods. Fewer high school students smoke tobacco than smoke marijuana by a slight margin. This is in spite of the fact that tobacco is not only legal, but subsidized. It is one of the ironies of the drug war that while we spend millions of dollars to spray coca and other crops in Colombia with herbicide our trade agreements require Colombia to accept not only our tobacco, but also our tobacco advertising.

Back to the history lesson. Richard Nixon was swept into office in 1968 on law-and-order, anti-drug sentiment. Young people in the US and western Europe were protesting the war in Vietnam and smoking marijuana. The United Kingdom, Canada, The Netherlands and the US each created scientific commissions to study marijuana and what should be done about it. Nixon appointed his friend and Republican drug war hawk war, Ray Shafer, to head ours. It was widely expected that his report would reflect his views. It did not. The Shafer Commission found the same things that all the other scientific commissions found. Marijuana use does not cause crime. There is no basis for the gateway theory. Personal use of marijuana should no longer be a crime.

The Shafer Commission made another comment that did not grab headlines, but was just as insightful.

“Perhaps the major consequence of [well-meaning efforts to do something about drug use] …

has been the creation of a vested interest in the perpetuation of the problem among those dispensing and receiving funds.” The amount of money spent in 1972 that so disturbed the Commission was a small fraction of the amount that special interests spend today. 

Only the Netherlands took the advice of its scientific commission. The Dutch began selling marijuana for personal use in their famous “coffee shops.” Thirty years have passed and the results are in. The Dutch, including Dutch teenagers, now use marijuana at about half the rate that Americans do. According to a 1994 survey taken in Amsterdam the average age of first use of marijuana among the Dutch is 20, among Americans it’s 16. The rate of heroin addiction in the Netherlands is about 1/3 of the rate here. Here is the most important result. In the mid-1970s the average age of a heroin addict in the US and the Netherlands was about the same, about 26 years old. Today the average age of a heroin addict in the US is 19. 87% of American heroin users are under age 26. The average age of a heroin addict in the Netherlands has risen to 40. The Dutch wanted to keep from their kids away from drug dealers and they did. Using the opposite approach, the U. S. created the highest rate of illicit drug use in the world.

Instead of following the recommendations of the Shafer Commission, the Nixon administration created the Drug Enforcement Agency. This was a vast new organization with the power to call for wiretaps and no-knock warrants. Today it has more than 10,000 agents in the United States and 58 foreign countries.

Even that didn’t quite get the job done. In 1984, the Omnibus Crime Bill gave prosecutors the right of forfeiture. They could now confiscate cash, cars, boats, homes, bank accounts, stock portfolios, anything, based on an accusation that it was used in a crime. Law enforcement agencies throughout the country promptly factored forfeiture into their budgets. Billions of dollars worth of property has been seized. Fewer than 20% of the owners of that property have ever been charged with a federal crime.

In 1972, the year before the Nixon administration created the DEA, the federal budget for enforcing the drug laws was roughly $101 million. Gen. McCaffrey says, quite proudly, that under his term as drug czar the federal budget for drug law enforcement increased from $17.8B to $19.2B. By comparison, the average monthly Social Security check in 1972 was $177. Today it’s about $800 per month. If Social Security benefits had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, today’s check would be around $35,000 a month. The minimum wage in 1972 was $1.60. Today it’s $5.15. If the minimum wage had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, the wage today would be $316.80/hour. The cost of the drug war exceeds $40 billion per year when state and local costs are added to federal costs. That’s half the budget for law enforcement, half the budget for courts and half the budget for prisons every year.

The only place that prohibition makes drugs unavailable is in a medical setting. In 1996, California voted to allow patients to use marijuana as a medicine. That same year Arizona voted to allow physicians to prescribe any drug they saw fit regardless of federal law. Since then 8 more states and DC have voted to allow use of marijuana as a medicine. Maryland law requires the court to consider use of marijuana for medical purposes to be a mitigating factor in marijuana-related state prosecution.

Since the first laws were passed the federal government has been trying to block any legal distribution of marijuana in a medical setting, except for its own medical marijuana program, the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program run since 1978 by the Food and Drug Administration, which has 5 patients. The federal government won a class action suit by hundreds of patients who sued for the right to join the program. California physicians had to go to the Supreme Court to avoid losing their right to prescribe drugs if they discussed cannabis with their patients. The 9th Circuit Court has ruled that the DEA must cease interfering with distribution of medical cannabis that does not involve interstate commerce. The case (Ashcroft vs. Raich) will be heard by the Supreme Court in the winter, 2004 session. About 1% of marijuana users in California are medical users, yet in 2002 half of all federal marijuana cases filed in the U.S. district court in San Francisco were against medical patients.

The controversy over medical use of cannabis is really a controversy over whether this very easy to grow herb should be allowed to compete with pharmaceutical products for pennies on the dollar. According to a survey conducted by the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in 2004, nearly two-thirds of people using marijuana for medical reasons decreased or stopped taking other medications.

One of the most tragic consequences of the drug war is the denial of treatment to those in chronic pain. Survey after survey has found that physicians routinely under prescribe pain medication because they fear they will be disciplined by medical licensing boards or the DEA. Dr. Russell Portnoy of the Pain Center at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, has said, “The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval.” Dr. Ronald Myers, a Baptist minister who operates clinics for poor people in the Mississippi Delta is president of the American Pain Institute. He says, "The war on drugs has turned into a war on doctors and pain patients. Such is the climate of fear across the medical community that for every doctor who has his license yanked by the DEA, there are a hundred doctors scared to prescribe proper pain medication for fear of going to prison. The DEA is creating a situation where legitimate pain patients now have to go to the streets to get their medication.”

Even more horrifying is our failure to stem the worldwide AIDS epidemic. More people died of AIDS during 2003 than in any previous year. More people became infected with HIV during 2003 than in any previous year. 8,000 per day die of AIDS related illness. Providing sterile syringes to addicts and patients is among the most effective and least expensive ways to curb the epidemic yet it receives no federal funding and is illegal in most states. The United States, influenced mostly by Sen. Jesse Helms, has used its influence in the United Nations to prevent countries that receive UN aid from distributing sterile syringes for disease prevention.

In the last 30 years the United States has created the largest prison system in the history of the world. More than 2 million people are imprisoned, up from 400,000 in 1970. We imprison a larger percentage of our citizens than any country, more than 700 per 100,000 population. About 500,000 U.S. prisoners are non-violent drug offenders. That is more than the European Union imprisons for all offenses and they have 100 million more people. Children of inmates are at high risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and crime. They are the people in our society most likely to eventually be imprisoned themselves. Since 1986, Texas has increased general-fund spending on higher education by 47 percent, while increasing spending on corrections by 346 percent.

Other countries have begun to take a different approach to drug policy. In January 1994, the Swiss instituted a program of giving injectable doses of heroin to addicts at certified medical centers. After three years, crime among the addicts had dropped by 60%, half of the unemployed had found jobs, nobody was homeless and the general health of the group had improved dramatically. There are now 24 participating clinics, up from 6. There have been no drug related deaths among these addicts. A referendum has been held on whether or not to continue the program. It was approved with more than a 70% majority. Swiss property insurance companies are among the most ardent supporters of the program because their claims in the areas around the clinics have decreased significantly. The head of the Swiss police has called this the best crime fighting program he has ever seen. During 2000 the clinics distributed 55lbs of heroin. It cost $128,000. On the illegal market that heroin would have brought traffickers, and possibly terrorists, $3.7 million.

Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxemburg and Ukraine have decriminalized all drug use. Russia has decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of drugs. Belgium and the United Kingdom have decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of cannabis. The effort to decriminalize cannabis in the UK was lead by the British police. Canada and The Netherlands have begun distributing cannabis through their public health programs.

King County Washington Bar Association together with the county medical association did a drug policy project in 2001.

"Any examination of criminal sanctions related to drugs should consider whether current drug policy is serving essential public policy objectives. Among the most important of those objectives are:

1. Enhanced public order and reduced crime

2. Improved public health

3. Protection of children

4. Efficient use of scarce public resources.

This report finds that the War on Drugs has not only failed to fulfill any of these objectives, but also has exacerbated the very problems it was designed to address."

The DPFT is an education organization and has no legislative agenda. I think it is fair to say that most members would agree with the King County Bar Association’s conclusion.

Drug prohibition, in the popular vernacular, is regulation carried to such extreme that the black market becomes the primary supplier. At that point there is no regulation. Drug policy reform is the effort to return regulation to the market place. I would regulate sales of the relatively less dangerous drugs the way we sell alcohol today. Examples would be marijuana, MDMA, the psychedelics. I would regulate sales of the relatively more dangerous drugs using a permit system. Examples would be tobacco, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, etc. Permits need not and should not be onerous, but they would help us with the problem of underage purchases, they would give us an opportunity to offer education to the buyer, they could be used to limit drug purchases to personal use amounts and they could be suspended or revoked if a person committed a crime associated with the drug, like DWI. I would limit advertising for non-medical drugs to in store advertising and direct mail to permit holders.

Special interests

Crime bills and drug laws are passed the same way all other laws are passed, with the heavy influence of special interest lobbyists and their money. The special interests involved in drug policy are formidable. They include all federal agencies, the defense industry, the prison industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco and liquor industries, the advertising industry, the media, the drug treatment industry, the drug testing industry, the home security industry, the timber industry and, of course, the international illicit drug cartels.

The federal bureaucracy: MDMA and INcredible research

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has a vested interest in maintaining and expanding prohibition. Its influence on drug laws can be illustrated by looking at the research it has funded on MDMA.

MDMA (for meth-ylenedioxymethamphetamine) was discovered and patented in 1913 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck. The patent doesn't mention uses.

It was largely unnoticed until a renowned biochemist, Alexander Shulgin, took an interest. In 1977 he gave some to an old friend, Leo Zeff, who was about to retire from his career in psychotherapy. Zeff was so taken with the drug that he began traveling the country introducing MDMA to other therapists. MDMA developed a quiet but loyal following. Besides being euphoric and calm, patients were able to confront fears and anxieties. It broke down all the barriers between people and was ideal for marriage counseling.

By the 1980s ordinary people had discovered MDMA especially in Dallas, Texas. It was called Ecstasy and was widely distributed by Michael Clegg who made it in a lab in California. When I used Ecstasy, it was sold in bars on Cedar Springs in Dallas for about $15/tab. It was everything it was touted to be and more.

No social problems developed because of MDMA use, but an uncontrolled drug is an anathema in the land of the free. The federal government, lead by Senator Lloyd Bentsen, was able to make MDMA illegal in1985 siting Dr. George Ricaurte’s work showing that MDMA damaged the brains of monkeys. Dr. Ricaurte and his wife, Dr. Una McCann, quickly became the darlings of NIDA. Over the years Dr. Ricaurte’s lab at Johns Hopkins Medical School has been given at least $10 million in federal grants, more than any other researcher of club drugs. Dr. McCann works directly for NIDA and collaborates on his studies.

People in general are very trusting of medical research studies. They want to believe that this is the best information medical science has but, research studies are only as honest as their funding sources. NIDA boasts that it "supports over 85 percent of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction."

Other researchers have been very critical of Ricaurte’s and McCann’s work. They have accused Dr. Ricaurte of “playing games with his data” to make the drugs look bad (Dr. Julie Holland) and "running a cottage industry showing that everything under the sun is neurotoxic." (Dr. Richard J. Wurtman) The British publication, New Scientist, has called his work on MDMA “irretreviably flawed.”

After MDMA was made illegal, and therefore lucrative, it went from being a little known drug used mostly in one city to the second most popular illicit drug in the world. In every country where young people had money they used Ecstasy, mostly visibly while they danced to techno music at raves. In the fall of 2002 a Congressional committee was debating the RAVE Act. The RAVE Act essentially applies crack house statutes to any large gathering.

In September, 2002 George Ricaurte’s most notorious study was published in the journal, Science. Ricaurte claimed that a single dose of MDMA could cause brain damage resembling Parkinson’s disease. In spite of that outrageous claim, drug policy reformers were able to prevent the RAVE Act from leaving committee using a concerted effort of phone calls, letters and emails. It was later passed without debate when Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) attached it to the very popular and totally unrelated AMBER Alert bill.

After a year of harsh criticism Dr. Ricaurte withdrew his study saying he had injected his monkeys and baboons with massive doses of methamphetamine. Not with MDMA. He later withdrew other studies saying that methamphetamine had been mislabeled as MDMA. The drug company that furnished his chemicals denies that any bottles were mislabeled.

MDMA is certainly not the only substance on earth that can be used without risk. Because of political agendas in medical research, we do not know what the risks are. Allergic reactions, over heating and dehydration are well known short term risks. Small, privately funded studies have shown no lasting damage. Large scale, honest, unbiased work has yet to be done.

Defense Industry

In 2000 the US Congress overwhelmingly passed a $1.3 billion bill, Plan Colombia, ostensibly to stop Colombian heroin and cocaine from reaching the US market. An amendment to divert $400 million to drug treatment was soundly defeated in spite of the fact that a recent Rand Corporation study had just found that dollar for dollar, drug treatment is 10 times more effective in stopping drug use than is interdiction. Plan Colombia provided $1.1 billion to buy helicopters and $200 million to spray crops with glyphosate (RoundUp Ultra). There had been no public outcry demanding that Congress involve us in Colombia’s 38 year old civil war. Support for Plan Colombia came from lobbyists working for the Colombian government, Bell Helicopter, Sikorsky Helicopter and Occidental Petroleum. The only real discussion that took place in Congress was over whose helicopters to buy, Bell’s or Sikorsky’s. In the end Congress voted to buy some of each and keep both sets of lobbyists happy.

During 2000, 128,000 acres were fumigated in Columbia. The Colombian government halted the eradication program

for about a year over our strong objection. According to them 12% of the acreage that we sprayed was coca,

88% was food crops. According to a resolution presented to the American Medical Assoc. at its 2004 convention

the spraying is causing “widespread illnesses, destroying pastures, destroying food crops, poisoning livestock,

displacing thousands of small farmers, and killing birds, mammals, aquatic life, and natural plants.”

$104 million was approved for the Colombian military in the 2002 budget and provisions requiring that our funds be limited to counter-narcotics activities were lifted. $98 million was specifically allocated for training and equipping a brigade of the Colombia military to guard Occidental Petroleum’s Caño-Limon pipeline from rebel attacks which occur daily. This amounts to a subsidy of about $3 per barrel for oil carried by the pipeline.

In August, 2004, drug czar John Walters said, "Thus far, we have not seen a change of availability [of cocaine] in the United States." He then recommended that the United States continue Plan Colombia.

Jan Egeland, a United Nations humanitarian coordinator, describes Colombia as "The biggest humanitarian problem, human rights problem, the biggest conflict in the Western hemisphere.”

Pharmaceutical industry

The pharmaceutical industry is a huge player in the drug war. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is the Johnson & Johnson fortune, provides the bulk of the funding for the Partnership for a Drug Free America, $15 million in 1999. The immediate past chairman of the Partnership for a Drug Free America is James E. Burke, the retired chairman of Johnson & Johnson. Of eleven donors of $30,000 to $1,000,000 in 2002 six were major pharmaceutical corporations.

Modern pharmaceutical corporations are the most profitable corporations in the US. This is not just because they make a needed product. The pharmaceutical industry spends more money lobbying Congress than any other industry, $91.4 million in 2002. It spends more money lobbying Congress than it spends on product research. It employs more lobbyists than there are members of Congress. In debate on the Senate floor, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said, "PhRMA, (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) this lobby, has a death grip on Congress."

The CEOs of pharmaceutical corporations are among the most highly paid corporate executives in the world. Much of their compensation is in the form of stock and stock options. The value of Eli Lilly & Co. shares fell more than $35 billion in one day when a court ruled that a generic version could compete with its Prozac antidepressant in a year. GlaxoSmithKline obtained nine new patents on Paxil, another antidepressant, and filed five lawsuits to delay generic competition. The company estimated that every day it avoided competition it earned $4.4 million. Abbott Labs pays Zenith Goldline Pharmaceuticals $2 million a month not to sell a generic version of Hytrin, a blood pressure medication. It pays Geneva Pharmaceuticals $4.5 million a month not to compete with Hytrin.

George McMahon, one of the five people who receives Cannabis from the federal government, took 17 different prescription drugs before he began receiving Cannabis. He now uses only Cannabis to treat his Nail Patella Syndrome. According to a survey conducted by the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in 2004, nearly two-thirds of people using marijuana for medical reasons decreased or stopped taking other medications.

Cannabis was removed from the pharmacopoeia in 1941 over the objections of the American Medical Association. At the time it was listed in medical literature as useful for over 100 medical conditions. It effectively treats problems as divergent as multiple sclerosis, migraine headaches, nausea, glaucoma, Crohn's Disease, spasticity and Nail Patella Syndrome. Research at the Medical College of Virginia has shown that it is effective against certain types of cancer. It would compete with literally hundreds of pharmaceutical products for pennies on the dollar. Cannabis is not only non-patentable; people could grow their own in flowerpots. The Partnership for a Drug Free America doesn’t campaign against alcohol or Prozac or Paxil or Viagra or any of the drugs that bombard us during the 6:00 news. It campaigns against marijuana and other non-patentable drugs.

Medical marijuana critics like to say that its supporters’ real objective is to make personal adult use of marijuana legal. This is certainly true in some cases. It is also true that the pharmaceutical industry spends millions of dollars every year to keep marijuana illegal so that it cannot compete as a medicine.

The advertising industry and the media

A bizarre, Orwellian relationship exists between the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (the Drug Czar’s office), the Partnership for a Drug Free America, the advertising industry and the media.

On November 14, 1996, nine days after California and Arizona passed their medical marijuana initiatives drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey, convened a meeting at his federal government offices. Attendees included officials from the Drug Enforcement Adm., Dept. of Justice, White House Office of Drug Control Policy, the Depts. of Treasury, Education, Health and Human Services, the White House, eight senior executives from private pro-drug war groups including Partnership for a Drug Free America. The purpose of the meeting was to devise a way to spend money to stop the other 48 states from following California and Arizona. This required finesse because as a federal agency the drug czar’s office is legally prohibited from interfering with the legislative processes of the states. As an organization that accepts tax deductible money, the Partnership for a Drug Free America is legally prohibited from involving itself in legislative or political causes.

Eleven months after the meeting a plan was announced. The drug czar’s office would buy $775 million in advertising over the next 5 years from major TV networks, magazines, newspapers and Internet providers. For each ad purchased the medium would be required to donate an additional ad. However, it could be freed of this obligation and could sell that lucrative TV time or ad space if it ran satisfactory “on strategy” messages in its editorials or articles or in the content of its programs.

As the media campaign unfolded, ONDCP provided a total of $22 million in financial incentives to the TV networks for government-vetted anti-drug scripts. The same financial-credit-for-content paradigm was in place at some of the nation's most prominent nonfiction magazines. This scheme continued until the Federal Communications Commission ruled in November 2002 in response to a lawsuit filed by NORML that ONDCP must identify itself as an advertising sponsor.

ONDCP then switched to the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a series of anti-drug ads produced mostly by the Partnership for a Drug Free America. Over the past 6 years, Congress has provided $1.08 billion to the media campaign, making ONDCP one of the country’s largest advertisers and the ads the single largest public service initiative in the history of advertising.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has issued two reports declaring that the media campaign doesn't keep kids from drugs; that in fact, it even promotes drug use by girls and younger teens. The Office of Management and Budget found "no evidence" that the ads "have a direct effect on youth drug-related behavior.”

Not to be deterred, the drug czar's office has earmarked an additional $1.02 billion to continue funding the ads through FY 2009. The office does propose to save the cost of third party bi-annual reviews of the effectiveness of the campaign by dropping them altogether.

Prison industry

In his chilling book Going Up the River, Joseph Hallinan says “Having failed to make prisons effective, we have learned to make them profitable."

The United States operates the largest prison system in the world. We have 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. Over 2 million people are imprisoned. Another 2 million people are employed catching law violators and keeping them behind bars. In 2001 we spent $57 billion on jails and prisons. Consider that all of this money winds up in someone’s pocket. That is strong incentive to maintain and expand the prison system. The prison industry does more than a billion a year in business. It has its own trade shows, conventions, websites, catalogues and direct marketing campaigns. The firms involved include some of the nation’s largest architectural and constructions firms. Investment banks handle prison bond issues and investments in private prisons. Other companies that do business with prisons include plumbing supply contractors, food-service companies, telephone companies, health care companies and companies that sell everything from bullet resistant cameras to padded cells.

Prisons are perceived as an economic boon to small towns. Working as a corrections officer is one of the few ways that under-educated people can earn a middle class living there. The prison is the 3rd largest employer in Pecos, TX. Campaigning to sell bonds for prison expansion, County Judge Jimmy B. Galindo described it as “an unpolished jewel of the community.” Federal money for Medicaid, foster care, adoption assistance and social services block grants is based on the census. Inmates count as residents of the county where they are incarcerated, not where their homes are. Conversely, this federal money is lost to the inmates’ home communities which are disproportionately concentrated areas of large cities.

Constructing and operating prisons is not the only way to profit from them. In 1995 US Technologies, Inc., a PC board assembler, closed its plant in Austin and fired its 150 employees. It reopened 45 days later as Lockhart Technologies, Inc. in a facility it leased for $1 per year in the prison at Lockhart, TX. Lockhart Technologies pays minimum wage to its inmate workers, but Wackenhut, the private prison operator, takes 80% of the workers’ pay.

Other companies that use prison labor are Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret and Boeing. Federal wage and safety standards do not apply to prison labor. In California, inmates who work for the Prison Industrial Authority earn wages between 30 and 95 cents per hour before required deductions for restitution and fines.

More than half the states utilize private prisons. More than 100,000 Americans are held in prisons for profit. The guards and prison officials are often shareholders with incentive to hold down costs and oppose early release. Corrections Corporation of America is the largest private prison operator in the country. It built 3 prisons in California on spec. Its chairman bragged that 38 of 46 crime bills passed the CA legislature due to its lobbying. These included three strikes. The California Correctional Peace Officers Assoc., the prison guards union, was the state’s largest donor to legislative races in 1988 and donated $100,000 to support passage of three strikes. The union puts a third of its annual membership dues into political action committees.

William Sessions, former director of the FBI, worked as a “special advisor” to the Bobby Ross Group, a private prison operator based in Austin. At the same time his son, Pete Sessions who then represented the 5th District of Texas, introduced and worked hard for legislation that would have increased the mandatory minimum sentence for possession of 100 grams of methamphetamine to life without possibility of parole.

Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by 2,091%. Its budget has jumped from $220 million in 1986 to $4.6 billion in 2002.  The federal AMBER Alert bill includes unrelated provisions that limit judicial discretion in sentencing even further and allow the Justice Department to monitor the rates at which individual judges impose sentences that fall below federal sentencing guidelines.

The argument for building more and more prisons goes like this. If crime is going up, we need to build more prisons. If crime is going down, it’s because we built more prisons and building even more will lower crime even more. This argument ignores several things.

Once released, prisoners are often sicker, angrier and more alienated from their communities. They are undereducated, unskilled and emotionally ill equipped to deal with life in the free world. Even the lowest-paying jobs prove difficult to obtain with a prison record. Federal laws impose a lifetime ban on student loans or grants, food stamps and welfare for people convicted of even a single drug felony.

The single most accurate predictor of who winds up in prison is who has a parent who did time in prison. Over 2.5 million children in this country now have a parent in prison.

More imprisonment does not equal more safety. Other countries have much higher degree of public safety than we do and imprison a much smaller percentage of their population. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration on earth, about 700 per 100,000. Russia is next with about 685. The UK imprisons about 125 per 100,000. Canada about 115. Germany and Italy about 85. Holland about 73. Finland, about 60.

The United States has about 500,000 non-violent drug offenders behind bars. That is more people than are imprisoned in the European Union for all offenses and they have 100 million more people. In August, 2003 Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy told the American Bar Association, "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.” After a nearly yearlong review, the American Bar Association Justice Kennedy Commission has concluded in June, 2004 that America's criminal justice systems rely too heavily on incarceration and recommended a series of reforms including repealing mandatory minimum sentencing.

It is incumbent upon us to know who our 2,000,000 prisoners are.

Prison statistics-

2001 $167 billion spent on police, prison and courts ($57B on jails and prison; $72B on police; $38B on courts)

13.7 million arrests (about $12,000 per arrest)

1,931,000 inmates in jails and state and federal prisons

12/31/02 2,019,234 prisoners

6,500,000 under criminal justice control

Overwhelmingly poor

70% functionally illiterate-i.e. function at the two lowest literacy levels

60% of federal prisoners are non-violent drug offenders, 37% are first offenders, 1 in 6 is incarcerated for a marijuana offense,

21% of state prisoners are non-violent drug offenders

Overall less than 50% have been convicted of a violent crime

20% are seriously mentally ill

1 in 75 males are imprisoned

Fastest growing segment of prison population-women, 85.1% for non-violent offenses, 80% for drug offenses

When overcrowding occurs violent offenders are often released because mandatory minimum sentencing applies to drug offenders.

80% of all arrests are for drug possession. 44% are for marijuana possession.

42% of federal prisoners are black. 12.3% of population is black. 13% of regular drug users are black.

38% of those arrested for drugs are black. 74% of those sentenced for drugs are black.

In US blacks are incarcerated at 6 times the rate of whites.

Studies show that blacks are treated more harshly than whites at every stage of the legal process from police stops to parole.

In Texas

Largest prison system in the free world.

Built 120 prisons between 1980 and 2000.

Has 137 prisons in operation.

2003 – about 165,000 prisoners (about 700/100K pop., 5 times the rate of MN) (TX had 107/100K in 1970)

740,000 under criminal justice control

47% non-violent

About 18% non-violent drug offenders

30% are mentally ill

41% are black

More blacks are imprisoned than are enrolled in colleges and universities.

Blacks are imprisoned at 7 times the rate of whites.

Sources:

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The Netherlands website, 2001

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DRCNet, #192, 6/29/01and #193, 7/6/01

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news service, 06 July 04, “World AIDS crisis deepens and spreads”

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The defense industry-

The Dallas Morning News

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Noam Chomsky, Z Magazine

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PDFA,

, 27 Jul 2000, Fighting “Cheech & Chong” Medicine

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The advertising industry and the media-

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, 31 Mar 2000, The Drug War Gravy Train; 08 August, 2001, American School Kids

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29 April 2004

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Federal Bureau of Prisons, 24 July 2004

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