Lies the government told you

by Andrew P. Napolitano

  They were correct; correct, after terrifying the public; correct, after wasting millions in tax dollars; correct, after causing over one hundred million dollars in losses to the perfectly safe and utterly innocent tomato industry;26 correct, after exercising power that the Constitution does not grant to the federal government. That’s your government at work.

  If you have a failing organization that already wastes tons of money, what is the best solution? Unsurprisingly, the federal government thinks that expanding it so more of our money can be wasted is the answer. The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2009 that the Obama administration is planning to toughen safety standards to try to prevent contamination of foods and ensure food industry compliance with federal standards. Generally, “tougher” means more expensive. So, the likely outcome is that government will get bigger, taxes will go up, and our food will be just as unsafe this year as it was last year.

  Lie #11

  “We Are Winning the War

  on Drugs”

  The “war on drugs” is a deceptive name for what has really become a war on the American people through the government’s assault on human freedom, the prison system, and all taxpayers. Despite nearly four decades of battling against the use and selling of drugs, the government’s so-called “war on drugs,” both at home and abroad, has largely been a failure. The tide of drugs imported into this country has not slowed, despite astronomical spending by the government and the imprisonment of record numbers of Americans, often for the possession of insignificant amounts of recreational drugs. Legislators, police, and prosecutors have encouraged judges to lock up more and more Americans, causing prisons to be bursting at the seams and ruining countless lives, a great many of them among racial minorities.

  This government lie is hardly new; in fact, the “war on drugs” is in effect a reincarnation of prohibition. The sale of all alcoholic beverages was outlawed in 1920, with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Closing the legal market on something that consumers desire simply opened a black market, and in the 1920s, there was a great deal of corruption and violence caused by the government’s ban. It actually created the lawlessness that characterized the era. Consequently, gangs and organized crime flourished. By 1921, the murder rate in America jumped.1 After seemingly recognizing the harm that Prohibition had caused, the United States enacted the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 to allow people to drink as they pleased.2 After Prohibition was repealed, the homicide rate began to fall.3 This is not a coincidence.

  After the alcohol ban was repealed, much of the organized crime that was facilitated by Prohibition simply switched businesses and entered into the illegal drug market. Today (several decades after the “war on drugs” commenced), the black market for drugs is thriving. The parallels between today’s prohibition and yesterday’s prohibition are glaringly obvious and point to the government’s severe case of amnesia and its Victorian attitude about our bodies; except that this time, the stakes are higher. In our twenty-first-century global economy, the violence is not confined to the U.S.; it is worldwide. Ironically, in its metaphoric war on the use of drugs, the government has facilitated actual wars, actual violence, and actual death. It’s about time that the government put its weapons (and our cash) down and began to use some common sense.

  The War on Taxpayers

  Ethan Nadelmann has written extensively about the futile war on drugs. He is a former Princeton University professor and is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that promotes alternatives to the drug war. In one 2003 speech he stated:

  We’re a wealthy nation. If we want to lock up millions of our fellow citizens, we can afford to do that. . . . On the other hand, our economy is not what it once was. In the 1990s, incarcerating millions of people was something we could afford—10, 20, 30 billion dollars: a drop in the bucket of the national economy. But now . . . we can no longer afford this failed war on drugs.4

  If America could not afford a war on drugs in 2003 when Nadelmann wrote this, we certainly can’t afford a war on drugs now with our ailing economy paired with ever-increasing government expenditures. Yet, is the question really “Can we afford it?” Wouldn’t “Why should we pay for it?” be a more appropriate question?

  American taxpayers are once again forced to foot the bill. And a mammoth bill it is, as the United States spends at least $40 billion a year on costs directly related to the drug war, and then several billion more in indirect costs.5 The costs—of spraying Colombian crops, of hiring numerous DEA and other government employees, of locking up more people on drug charges than all of Western Europe locks up on all charges combined6—are astronomical. And these are only the direct costs. What about the welfare dependence that comes from creating a class of people who have drug-related crimes on their records and often cannot obtain employment?

  The drug war is indeed perpetuating a harrowing cycle for people with drug use or drug sales in their past. For example, let’s say you were charged with sales and then were forced to spend some time in jail. Once you served your time and were released from prison, you decide to apply for some jobs. When you fill out employment applications, you are asked whether you have had a criminal record. If you check the “yes” box, chances are that you won’t be the employer’s first choice. If you check the “no” box, you are lying and could get into further trouble if the employer does a background check or finds out that you lied. There are no great options here.

  Then, because you cannot find a legitimate job, it is difficult to make a living. This makes turning to the sale of drugs an easy and almost sensible option, even if that is not the choice you wanted to make. The point is that when the government locks ordinary people away for committing nonviolent, nonvictim, harmless drug crimes, it sets people up for repeat offenses.

  It also makes welfare a very plausible option. Either way, taxpayer money goes to the huge cost of filling prisons or the huge cost of supporting people and their families when the breadwinner is imprisoned or unemployable. And the cycle generally does not end with one person. Children who grow up in houses where their parents are drug dealers, in housing projects, and on welfare generally are not primed to have the brightest futures. They grow up around these things, and this lifestyle becomes normalized and passed on. Whole generations of families grow up around this, and it is unhealthy, dangerous, and expensive. This cycle is detrimental, and the government’s holier-than-thou values have been unable to stop it.

  Why We Fight

  Yet, the drug war keeps going, and going, and going. Regardless of who is in power, Republican, Democrat, liberal, or conservative, the war on drugs has been happening for four decades. Why? Is the government so arrogant and stubborn that it can’t look at the statistical information and see that these policies simply do not work? Do politicians just like squandering our money? These questions are still open, but it seems likely that the government knows these policies do not work. It must. Yet, politicians lie to us and wax poetic about eliminating the use of drugs because it sounds like a good thing to say from a stump. Well, it’s about time they come back down to earth.

  Politicians like to speak about the war on drugs because combating drugs sounds moral. The people from good families, with good morals, and good character that we want to represent us in the government feel the need to propagate this squeaky-clean image. Advocating for a drug-free society generally helps this image and is something the public wants to hear. Politicians are afraid to veer away from it. The mainstream public is afraid to disagree. Basically, we all waste $40 billion a year to keep up a useless, ineffective appearance.

  Who’s fooled by this charade? Anyone who picks up a news paper, tabloid, watches TV, or goes on the Internet could tell you that politicians are far from angels. They have affairs, they steal money, they gamble, they drink to excess. Many have even used drugs that they themselves have voted to make illegal. And the truth is, many ordinary American people have used drugs as well; for this is the r
eason that the drug war is such a large enterprise.

  At its heart, the war on drugs is about false morality and personal freedom. People do risky things every day. Sure, some people are more averse to risk than others and would never climb a mountain or go bungee jumping. Yet, some people love doing these death-defying stunts, and their quality of life would be damaged without doing them. Drugs are not much different. Once you take the government’s sense of morality out of the equation, and simply look at drugs as dangerous and addictive substances, drugs are really not much different than other risks. So, instead of spouting on and on about the morality of this issue, couldn’t politicians take on the cause of freedom?

  This gets back to the heart of what this book argues: The government lies to us when it tells us the drug war is for our own good or when it tells us that the war on drugs is working. The government lies to us by covering up what the drug war is actually about— image, power, and usurping the rights of Americans.

  Anthony Gregory, senior researcher at the Independent Institute, a free-market think tank in Oakland, California, eloquently wrote:

  The ideology of the war on drugs is the ideology of totalitarianism, of communism, of fascism and of slavery. In practice, it has made an utter mockery of the rule of law and the often-spouted idea that America is the freest country on earth. The United States has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world, second only to Rwanda, thanks largely to the drug war, all while its federal government imposes its drug policies on other countries by methods ranging from mere diplomatic bullying to spraying foreign crops with lethal poison, from bribing foreign heads of state to bankrolling and whitewashing acts of mass murder conducted by despots in the name of fighting drugs.7

  Reported incidents reveal a gross abuse of police power during drug raids. In Philadelphia, a group of narcotics squad members entered Jose Duran’s tobacco shop with guns drawn and then smashed some of the store’s surveillance cameras with a metal rod before arresting the owners for selling tiny, empty ziplock bags which the officers claimed were drug paraphernalia. After breaking the remaining surveillance cameras, the police stole money from the cash register and handfuls of Zippo lighters.

  Similar stories about abuse of police power were reported by seven other small shops in the Philadelphia area. All of these jackbooted raids were apparently led by narcotics officer Jeffrey Cujdik.8 At least three people who formerly acted as informants for Cujdik claimed that the officer would give them cartons of cigarettes that he stole from the stores he raided. In one raided store, officers opened up the refrigerators to drink and take the juice and energy drinks kept inside.

  No matter who performs actions like this, they are against the law. But, people’s rights are often trampled, with the war on drugs used as a justification. These Philadelphia raids are just a few examples of the government-engineered assaults on our rights through the war on drugs. Several federal civil rights lawsuits were filed against Cujdik and his brother Richard, who is also an officer, other drug squad members, and the City of Philadelphia.9 As of this writing, the outcomes of the cases have yet to be determined.

  The government uses the drug war to justify taking away our rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and bars search warrants on anything but those based upon “probable cause” of criminal activity and issued by judges. Since the war on drugs began almost four decades ago, most searches and seizures reaching the United States Supreme Court have been approved. According to Yale Law School Professor Steven Duke, the Court has held that a search based on an invalid warrant does not require any remedy so long as the police acted in “good faith.”

  So people can be stopped in their cars or in airports, trains, or buses, and then submitted to questioning or held to be sniffed by dogs. Police may search an open field without warrant or cause, even if trespassing on it would otherwise be a criminal offense. Police may use helicopters to look into our homes and backyards, private property they could not lawfully or constitutionally enter without a search warrant. They can search our garbage cans without giving a reason. And if they have “reasonable suspicion,” the police may search our bodies.10

  The erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights caused by the war on drugs has not been confined to cases involving drugs, either. Duke explains:

  The pressure to uphold police activities in drug cases generates new “principles” that thereafter apply to everyone, whether or not drugs are involved. If the police are authorized to search for drugs on suspicion, they can also search for evidence of tax evasion, gambling, mail fraud, pornography, bribery and any other offense. The putative object of a police search does not limit what can be confiscated. If police conduct is a lawful search, they can take and use any evidence they see, however unrelated it may be to what got them into the home—or the body—in the first place.11

  So, even people who have never touched a drug in their lives are subject to the loss of Fourth Amendment rights brought about by the war on drugs, because a supine judiciary, cowed by the need to appear antidrugs, has lowered the bar for what police conduct is lawful and constitutional.

  There are many examples of “wrong door” raids where the police bust into the homes of individuals only to find that they entered the wrong house and found no drugs. For example, New York City police accidentally entered into the wrong house during a predawn raid. They handcuffed Mini Matos, a deaf, asthmatic Coney Island woman, while her children cried. Ms. Matos begged the police to permit her to use her asthma pump, but she was ignored until the officers realized they had entered the wrong apartment.12

  In 2003, the NYPD mistakenly raided the home of a fifty-seven-year-old woman. The violent manner in which they entered the apartment literally scared her to death and she died of a heart attack on the scene.13 And it is far from surprising that one of these raids could scare someone to death. These types of raids are “typically carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last twenty-five years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams.”14

  One very tragic story involved state law-enforcement agents who raided the home of Cheye Calvo (the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland) after the agents had tracked a package containing marijuana that was left on the front porch of Calvo’s house. Calvo brought the package into his house, and the drug agents “burst into the house without warning, shot and killed Calvo’s two dogs, and bound Calvo and his mother-in-law.”15 Sadly, this was all a mistake made by the agents. Neither Calvo nor anyone in his home had anything to do with the drugs.

  In November 2006, a ninety-two-year-old woman was shot and killed in her Atlanta home when three officers raided it on a drug bust. Katherine Johnston, the elderly woman who was killed, did not have any drugs. The police had the wrong house. The officers had obtained a search warrant after an undercover officer had allegedly purchased drugs at Johnston’s home earlier on the day in question. The warrant was also a “no knock” warrant, meaning that they could come into the home without asking the occupant to let them in.

  The officers announced themselves as police, and broke down the front door. Out of fear, Johnston used a gun her niece bought her for protection and shot at the officers, wounding them. In retaliation, they shot back and murdered her. Johnston had lived in her home on 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta for seventeen years. Johnston’s distraught niece, Sarah Dozier, was “mad as hell,” and stated that the police had “shot her down like a dog.”16 By the end of 2008, all three officers had pled guilty to various felonies in connection with the massacre. They began serving substantial prison sentences in early 2009.

  Drug Money Supports Terror

  The Office of National Drug Control Policy has begun running ads that say, “Drug money supports terror.” The ads ask, “Where do ter
rorists get their money? . . . If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.” This is another lie. Here is a kernel of truth the government fails to comprehend: It is not the demand for drugs that is responsible for nurturing and harboring terrorists, it is the prohibition of the drugs that wreaks the most global havoc. Drugs are profitable because there is a ban on them. And items found on the black market generally are not cheap.17 So while the government goes and blames terrorism on people who buy drugs, it is the government itself that is actually perpetuating terrorism through its nonsensical drug policies. Apart from that, plenty of your tax money was used to fund these fruitless ads.

  In fact, the war on drugs is responsible for a great deal of violence around the world. Recently there have been many brutal killings and much horrific violence related to drug cartels in Mexico, who have been warring with Mexican and U.S. officials. All of this was in the name of the drug war. Drug lords are engaging in a violent competition to export illegal drugs into the U.S. and reap the great rewards of the black market. As a result of these gang “drug wars” caused by the government “war on drugs,” many innocent people have lost their lives.

  Since January 2007, there have been an estimated 9,903 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico, more than the U.S. fatalities thus far in the Iraq War.18 Many children have also been exposed to the brutal war. In Tijuana, schoolchildren have seen bodies hung from overpasses and stuffed into refrigerators.19 Furthermore, twelve corpses, with their tongues cut out, were dumped into a vacant lot across from an elementary school.20 The stories are downright tragic.