Discrimination is the Basis of the War on Drugs, Doctors, and Patients

Taken from David Musto’s book The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control 1973, 1987, 1999

David Musto
January 8, 1936 – October 8, 2010

Masters in History of Science and Medicine. MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine. Residency in psychiatry at Yale.

“It is important for us to know the history of drug abuse in America if we are to make wise decisions now and in the future.”

By 1900 there was a comparatively large addict population, 250,000, and an increasing fear of addiction.  The addicts were identified with foreign groups and internal minorities who were already actively feared, and the objects of massive social and legal restraints. Two groups associated with certain drugs were the Chinese and the Negroes.

p. 43: Wright: “One of the most unfortunate phases of the habit of smoking opium in this country was the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabiting with Chinese men.”

“The menace of cocaine was more serious.” He emphasized it is “encouragement” among the Negro population in the South.

P 47: Charles B. Towns, operator of a drug and alcohol hospital in NY, defended the Foster bill.  “Anyone could get addicted to morphine by taking ¼ grain daily for 3 weeks, no matter what his character.
“There is no drug in the Pharmacopoeia today that would produce the pleasurable sensations you would get from cannabis.”

p. 65 By 1914 prominent newspapers, physicians, pharmacists, and congressmen believed opiates and cocaine predisposed addicts toward insanity and crime. They were widely seen as substances associated with foreigners or alien subgroups. Cocaine raised the specter of the wild Negro, opium the devious Chinese, morphine the tramps in the slums; it was feared that use of all these drugs was spreading into the “higher classes.”

p. 241 By WW1 the American addict was identified as a social menace and equated with the IWWs, Bolsheviks, anarchists, and other feared subgroups like the cocaine-using blacks and the opium-smoking Chinese.

p. 254 The history of drug laws in America shows that the degree to which a drug has been outlawed has no direct relation to its inherent danger.

p. 255 Comprehensive Drug Abuse and Control Act (1970) Public Law 91-513

Combined earlier laws into one
Created 5 schedules:

1. Drugs that are not permitted to be used in medical practice: heroin, LSD
2. Most dangerous prescribable drugs: morphine, cocaine

p. 261 President Carter: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this clearer than in the laws against possession of MJ in private for personal use.” He called for decriminalization.

p. 266 Cocaine, “Crack” and Aids

Crack appeared in 1985.

1. Smokable form, cheap, does not require needle injection.
2. Bypasses the danger of flammable liquids such as ether in preparation like other smokable forms of cocaine “freebase”.
3. Allows a large amount of cocaine to enter directly into the bloodstream from the lungs, and reaches the brain quickly. (Nose vessels constricted, slowing absorption)
4. 274: 1986: the Anti-Drug Abuse Act introduced a scale of mandatory minimum sentences for offenses involving cocaine. Nearly 90% of the offenders convicted for crack cocaine were Black while the majority of users were white.

Rather than write a letter and share, I’m going to share the information that I use to write my letter.  So below you will find single sentences, paragraphs, ideas, etc.  Then you take the sentences you want to use, put them together in a brief, single page email to send to the legislators.

For general population, the list of representatives can be found HERE. The group of all minority physicians can be found HERE.  There are now 132 minority legislators, and we should be able to teach them enough to create change and get the Controlled Substance Act repealed.  Then to get their contact information, you can go to their individual websites.

For supporters of doctorsofcourage, you will find the spreadsheets with all of the contact links on the membership site. Then you just have to click the link and paste the message.  I’m able to send to around 200 in 1 hour. Be careful, though, with twitter.  Keep under 100 at a time, and wait a couple of hours or they will block you for 8 hours.

Information to use in your letters:

In 1994, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman revealed that the “War on Drugs” had begun as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize Blacks and the anti-war left.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman said.

Mass incarceration, the gradual progeny of a number of congressional bills, made it so much easier. Most notably, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Act eliminated parole in the federal system. Then the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, including the infamous 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine sentences. Its expansion in 1988 added an overly broad definition of conspiracy to the mix. These laws flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses.

The prevailing narrative at the time was “tough on crime.” It was the same narrative that brought about the crack–powder cocaine disparity, supported the transfer of youth to adult courts, and popularized the myth of the Black man as a “superpredator.”

This led to the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentences, unnecessarily lengthy prison terms, even life, that snatched parents from children and loved ones, destabilizing families and communities. Such punishments should offend our society’s standard of decency.

Supreme Court rulings in the past basically stated that yes, systemic racism exists, but because that is the norm, it is therefore constitutional.

Since the late 1980s, a combination of federal law enforcement policies, prosecutorial practices, and legislation resulted in Black people being disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

There must be an end to the racist policies the War on Drugs brought us. We must not be content with piecemeal reform and baby-step progress. Indeed, rather than steps, it is time for leaps and bounds. You must accept the fact that the War on Drugs was designed to be used against minorities.

The plain fact is that the drug war hysteria has become an engine for the restoration of Jim Crow justice in this country,

It is important to talk about the federal DEA training program because many public officials who can no longer deny the fact of racial profiling would like us to believe it is the work of rogue cops. No, we are not talking about rogue cops. We are talking about rogue policy. We are talking about rogue leadership. We are talking about a national policy which is training police all over this country to use traffic violations as an excuse to stop and search people with dark skin. They’re not interested in that when they stop you for those violations. The traffic stops are used as a pretext to look into the car and, one way or another, to obtain your consent to search for drugs,

Nor is this just about highways. In body searches by immigration officials at customs checkpoints ranging from hand frisks to cavity searches and strip searches, 96 percent were fruitless: nothing illegal was found. And the selection was not based on evidence. Two-thirds of the people selected for those body searches were black and Latino. That is policy.

On the streets of our cities, people are stopped for so-called Terry frisks. So-called because their legality is based on a Supreme Court case names Terry v. Ohio, in which the Court ruled that it was constitutional for the police, without a warrant and without the normal evidentiary threshold of probable cause, to stop and frisk people they believe may be packing a gun. They’re supposed to have at least reasonable suspicion that the person they stopped and frisked has a gun. But the reasonable suspicion often turns out to be that you’re black, you’re Latino, and you’re young. Or that you’re walking in a neighborhood you shouldn’t be in, which is to say, not the ghetto. This feeds into the persistent prejudice in peoples’ minds, created by government disinformation for decades that, in fact, most blacks and most Latinos do carry drugs and are drug dealers.

Criminal prohibition of drugs, which is a relatively recent experiment in this country’s history, dating back to the early 20th Century, is profoundly wrong in principle.

On the most basic level, the government ought to have no legitimate power to intrude into anyone’s personal life for things that they do, things that they eat, things that they drink, that may harm themselves. It also is not warranted to threaten me with jail in order to force me into low-cholesterol treatment. And, above all, it is not warranted to arrest and imprison somebody else who eats red meat and ice cream moderately and without danger, because I do so abusively and excessively.

Even with respect to alcohol and tobacco, that principle is plain to most Americans. There are 15 million alcoholics in this country whose lives are in disarray, and which disarray affects the lives of people close to them. But that does not lead to government authority to put those people in jail for their own good. And it especially does not lead to putting people in jail who have a glass of red wine at night because somebody else is drinking a quart of vodka every morning.

Tobacco. Compulsive use of tobacco is infinitely more dangerous than even the compulsive use, much less the moderate use, of a drug like marijuana. But not even the most fierce opponents of tobacco has yet suggested putting people in jail for using it. Nor does anyone suggest using prison as a club to force tobacco users into treatment, and certainly nobody suggests arresting moderate users of tobacco or alcohol for possession of these drugs because somebody else is abusing them.

If anybody tried to suggest such measures in this country, they would be laughed at even within this Congress, this White House, this Department of Justice. So why are we doing precisely that with drugs?

In 1859, John Stewart Mill offered this advice to free societies: He said “one very simple principle to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do so or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others to do so would be wise or even right. There are good reasons for remonstrating with him or reasoning with him, in persuading him or entreating him, but not for compelling him. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

We must look at real-world consequences of the drug war. To place that kind of power in the police of any state invites the sort of racial subjugation that drug prohibition has become. Racial profiling on our highways is not, by itself, the issue. Racial profiling is, in fact, part of a larger system of racial subjugation and separation. And that larger system is called drug prohibition.

Drug prohibition has been with us for 100+ years. The early 1900’s was a period in which warped phrases like the yellow peril became popular, in which opium dens, like crackhouses today, were used to whip up an anti-Asian, anti-Chinese sentiment.

It was a period when cocaine-crazed Negroes were said to be threatening the sexual safety of white women. This was the atmosphere in which drug prohibition was initially passed. Once drug prohibition was established, things got steadily worse. Between 1914, when the Harrison Act was passed, and 1970, 55 federal laws and hundreds of state laws were passed making the possession and the sale, the buying and the selling of drugs for personal use a crime.

Over all those years prohibition had demonstrably not worked. It did not make drugs less available. It did not interdict drugs sufficiently to suppress supply. It did not make drugs safer. It did not make drug use safer, and it did not decrease the number of people using drugs. Quite the opposite.  Just like during prohibition, when moonshine thrived and people died drinking wood alcohol, drugs have become more potent, more deadly, and more available through the black market.

President Biden, in his state of the union address, mentioned stopping illicit drugs entering the country. But that is impossible. And unnecessary once we understand the futility and wrongfulness of our drug prohibition era.

In other words, the system designed to reduce drug availability and to interfere with the marketing of drugs demonstrably had not accomplished either purpose. Despite that, in New York, in 1973, Governor Nelson Rockefeller decided that the failure of these tough laws was that they weren’t tough enough. And he introduced what came to be known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which created draconian mandatory minimum sentences, and helped legitimize the notion of mandatory minimums that plague us today and are responsible for the escalation of incarceration in this country. Mandatory minimums were brought to us, courtesy of the drug war.

The idea was that now we’re really going to get tough. Now if you were caught with even a particle of a forbidden substance, you were going to go away for 15 or 20 years, and no judge could use discretion to vary that sentence.

There were other wonderful effects of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Because these harsh laws only applied to adults, and not juveniles, they managed to accelerate the use of young people into the fine art of trafficking drugs.

As of January 2023, the incarceration rate of the United States is the sixth highest in the world, at 505 per 100,000 people. While the United States represents about 4.2 percent of the world’s population,^[3] it houses around 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Pervasive racial targeting provides another peculiarly U.S. stamp to the drug war. We are incarcerating black men at a rate approximately four times the rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under apartheid. Prisons are used for slave labor in private industry. The number of black men in prison today is more than the number of men enslaved in 1820. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For black men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system.

The caustic effect of punitive drug policies has slowly eroded the cornerstone of U.S. democracy. It is no surprise that the court cases that have most destroyed the Bill of Rights, methodically abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and property rights, have centered on fear of drugs.

The war on drugs has similarly decimated the Fourth Amendment, a measure intended to limit the power of law enforcement to search and arrest. Unlike other crimes, drug offenses do not typically have complaining witnesses, people who come forward to request police assistance. The parties are mostly consenting participants who likely wish to hide their drug activity. In order to unearth drug crimes, the police resort to wiretapping, surveillance, peering through private windows, flying over houses, undercover operations, bribery of informants, entrapment by offering to buy or sell drugs, and countless other shady or corrupting police practices. Businesses, schools and government agencies have increasingly required intrusive drug tests. For example, until the ACLU brought suit to stop it, Michigan forced all welfare recipients to submit to urine drug tests regardless of suspicion.8 Schools across the nation have sought to drug-test students, threatening to create a broad doctrine of treating students as second class citizens under the Constitution.9

Property rights, once sacred in the United States, have also been sacrificed to the war on drugs under the strange fiction that property could be “”guilty.”” All assets suspected of “”participating”” in a crime can be seized and sold, with the profits flowing to law enforcement budgets. The burden of proof for demonstrating the property’s innocence falls upon the rightful owner. Often without even accusing any individual person of a crime, the police confiscate the homes of innocent people rumored to have some relative who uses drugs; they seize the money of unsuspecting bystanders whose only crime is to carry an unusual amount of cash (“”only drug dealers do that””); and they have gunned down property owners standing in the way of the quest for attractive assets. Beyond the deeply arbitrary process, asset forfeiture poses a deeper threat. A significant part of drug enforcement efforts has shifted from prosecuting drug crime to seizing property.

Of all the constitutional depredations of the war on drugs, one stands out for its continuing damage to democracy: the disenfranchisement of former felons. The United States is the only democracy in the world to deprive its citizens of the right to vote after they have completed their sentences. Coupled with the unprecedented rate of incarceration, disenfranchisement laws fundamentally restructure political power and entrench the politicians who support and benefit from drug war policies. In the states with the most widespread and lasting loss of voting rights, harsh drug laws find particularly solid political support.

The right to vote did not exist for slaves. As of 2020, an estimated 5.17 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction.

The war on drugs subjects the United States to much of the same harm, with much of the same economic and ideological underpinnings, as slavery itself. Much of society sits idly by, accepting the rhetoric that later will seem so unbelievably corrupt. We will one day understand that the war on drugs was a war on people and communities.

And there are many more racial dimensions of the drug war. Blacks do not use drugs more than white people; whites and blacks use drugs at almost exactly the same rates. In fact, the most common drug user is a 25ish year old white female. And since there are five times as many whites as blacks in the United States, it follows that the overwhelming majority of drug users are white. Nevertheless, African-Americans are admitted to state prisons at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than whites, a disparity driven largely by the grossly racial targeting of drug laws.

In yet another instance of the drug wars’ methodical reproduction of the constitutive elements of slavery, disproportionate numbers of black women have lost or stand to lose their children. Some parents, both men and women, have lost custody of their children for being on legitimate pain medicine.

The undercutting of free labor, so central to slavery, plays a similarly powerful role in driving the expansion of drug war prisons. Inmates are paid a pittance, as little as 5 cents an hour. Much ordinary labor is increasingly being transferred to prisons, many of them privatized prisons- or should we say plantations?

Here lies the new Civil Rights Movement. As in a nightmare it revisits the same issue civil rights activists faced in the 1960s when fighting Jim Crow, the same issues abolitionists faced in the nineteenth century. It is the original sin of the United States that the “”Founding Fathers”” sanctioned slavery and enshrined racism in the Constitution in the form of the three-fifths compromise. And with each generation Americans become uncomfortable with this legacy of racism. We chronically disavow the sin, distancing ourselves from the old, discredited form of racism. We denounce it. We say we have finally healed ourselves. But yet, as with the figure of original sin, it rises back up to the surface, and today takes form as the war on drugs. We must recognize it and call it by its true name. It is the U.S. apartheid, the new Jim Crow.

Benefits of repealing the Controlled Substance Act:

1. Reduce the expense of incarceration of citizens and the poverty of their families on the taxpayer.
2. Reduce the taxpayer expense of chasing the rabbit of drug addiction treatment.
3. Reduce the taxpayer expense of defunct agencies.
4. End the border problem, as people would not have to leave their country to escape the cartels, and they could raise and sell the natural herbal products for sale to the legal industry.

Facts to know and pass on

1. Drugs are not the cause of addiction. Addiction is caused by toxicity in the body through lifestyle.
2. Addiction can be cured with non-pharmaceutical treatment and lifestyle changes.

For more information, visit www.doctorsofcourage.org/videos/ and watch The REAL Cause of Drug Abuse.

General introductory email:

We, Doctors and Patients of Courage, represent the 100 million Americans who have legitimate pain or the doctors who are trying to treat them. We are looking for legislators—of which you could be one—who will put the country’s interest over his/her own. As a newly-elected representative, we would like to help you understand a major problem the government has caused. We are asking you to help fix the ignorance of the government and the standard jumping into a quagmire of ineffective solutions that they are so good at creating. The problem, as we see it, is one of money. More money is being spent than is being recovered, but the organizations recovering the money spread the lies and throw the blame on others, to justify their own existence.

We are throwing money away because of a government-created, fake “crisis” with the only intent of making money for special interest law enforcement groups and agencies. Read Ronald Libby’s masterpiece “The Criminalization of Medicine” and learn the history of what you have walked into. Learn the truth on www.doctorsofcourage.org. The government is

actually creating addiction by the increased anxiety of legitimate patients who need legitimate medicines to maintain a quality of life. We can give you the information on how government ignorance and mishandling of the facts is actually creating the problem you are attempting to control, and won’t with your current methods. The centuries-old percentage of addiction has always been 1%. It was 1% when the fake government agencies decided to criminalize the legitimate use of opioids in the 1990’s. It is now climbing (slightly, to 1.3%) due to government-created anxiety (the #1 acidifier of the body) in legitimate patients now being tortured with lack of treatment.

Please become a supporter of stopping this never-ending waste of taxpayer’s money. Learn what WILL work. Stop destroying the lives of 33% of the citizens over the 1% that you aren’t helping anyway. Learn how you can help be learning the REAL cause of Addiction and Drug Abuse, which can be seen on a video on https://www.doctorsofcourage.org/videos/.

Linda Cheek, MD, the president of Doctors of Courage, is happy to speak to any group that would like to get together to work on what will really solve the problem. Her website is www.lindacheekmd.com

Respectfully,

Name
www.doctorsofcourage.org

FB post:

The country needs a legislator—maybe you—who puts the country’s interest over his/her own. We are throwing money away because of a government-created, fake “crisis” with the only intent of making money for special interest law enforcement groups and agencies. Read Ronald Libby’s masterpiece “The Criminalization of Medicine” and learn the history of what you have walked into. Learn the truth on www.doctorsofcourage.org. The government is actually creating addiction by the increased anxiety of legitimate patients who need legitimate medicines to maintain a quality of life. We can give you the information on how government ignorance and mishandling of the facts is actually creating the problem you are attempting to control, and won’t with your current methods. The centuries-old percentage of addiction has always been 1%. It was 1% when the fake government agencies decided to criminalize the legitimate use of opioids in the 1990’s. It is now climbing (slightly, to 1.3%) due to government-created anxiety (the #1 acidifier of the body) in legitimate patients now being tortured with lack of treatment.

Please become a supporter of stopping this never-ending waste of taxpayer’s money. Learn what WILL work. Stop destroying the lives of 33% of the citizens over the 1% that you aren’t helping anyway. Learn how you can help be learning the REAL cause of Addiction and Drug Abuse, which can be seen on a video on https://www.doctorsofcourage.org/videos/. Linda Cheek, MD, the president of Doctors of Courage, can speak to any group to work on what will really solve the problem. Her website is: www.lindacheekmd.com

Tweet:

Needed: decrease the deficit and stop attacks on citizens by rogue agencies supporting themselves with US tax dollars. For the truth about the fake, government-created “opioid crisis”, go to www.doctorsofcourage.org. Stop
throwing money down a bottomless pit.

To be written