Wednesday, July 19, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
17
Commentary...
Struggling to get clean from the war on drugs
By Jim Cornelius
News Editor
Oregon has taken a bold
step in weaning the state
off its addiction to the “war
on drugs.” Under a new bill
recently approved by the
legislature aiming to curb
mass incarceration, first-time
offenders caught with small
amounts of heroin, cocaine,
methamphetamine and other
illegal drugs will face mis-
demeanor rather than felony
charges, meaning less jail
time and expanded options
for treatment.
Encouraging drug abusers
to find help instead of filling
up prisons is a smart play,
given that 40-plus years of
fighting the war on drugs has
not produced even a glimmer
of victory.
Given the horrible blight
that drug abuse brings to so
many lives, it is understand-
able that for some it may
seem like Oregon is retreat-
ing or surrendering. But
reducing drug penalties and
moving toward a medical
model is not surrender, it’s a
shift in tactics that will hope-
fully prove more effective,
far less expensive than incar-
ceration — and more just.
Asked about the bill on
Oregon Public Broadcasting’s
“Think Out Loud,” Deschutes
County District Attorney
John Hummel offered his
take:
“I don’t think coercion is
going to get someone into
treatment. I think somebody
having ready access to qual-
ity treatment when they’re at
the point in their life when
they themselves are ready for
it, that’s … our best hope.
“We need to do better.
What we’re doing now isn’t
working. I support using a
medical model instead of
a criminal justice model
— you know, for low-level
possession cases. I will tell
you this: For people that are
dealing, for commercial drug
dealers, I don’t think we’re
tough enough. We need to
ratchet up the penalties for
commercial drug dealers, but
I fully support using a medi-
cal model instead of a crim-
inal-justice model for people
who are suffering from an
addiction and are merely
possessing.”
Hummel has it right.
But it’s not easy getting
clean after a decades-long
addiction. Drugs and the war
on drugs have been in the
American bloodstream for
a long, long time. The story
has taken some weird and
dark twists and turns. FX
Network is currently airing
a raw and compelling drama
titled “Snowfall,” depicting
the rise of crack cocaine in
Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The sudden explosion of
a cheap drug producing a
brief, intense high tore like a
plague through South-Central
Los Angeles and through cit-
ies across America. Murder
rates skyrocketed and neigh-
borhoods that had had their
problems — but were still
neighborhoods — turned
into blighted war zones full
of extreme violence and
desperation.
And there was a weird
nexus with another American
addition — addiction to for-
eign intervention.
The
Reagan
Administration was support-
ing Contra rebels, fighting
against the leftist Sandinista
regime in Nicaragua. When
Congress passed the Boland
Amendment in 1982-84,
restricting U.S. support for
the Contras, they turned
to other means to fund
the anti-Sandinista effort.
One led to the Iran-Contra
scandal, where the Regan
Administration secretly sold
arms to Iran and funneled
the proceeds to the Contras;
another more shadowy aspect
involved the cocaine trade.
The Contras were smuggling
massive quantities of cocaine
into the U.S. with the appar-
ent connivance of spooks,
who were willing to accept
the flow of white powder as
a necessary means of fund-
ing the Contra movement in
the wake of Congressional
restrictions.
It oversimplifies and over-
sells the case to say that the
CIA was directly involved
or responsible for the crack
epidemic, but there’s ample
evidence that at least one
blind eye was turned. (It
must be noted, too, that the
Sandinistas and their Cuban
backers also had their own
drug connections. The snow
fell everywhere.)
So we had DEA cops
making cases that the CIA
allegedly shut down on the
grounds of national security.
We had street cops dealing
with an explosive epidemic
of crack cocaine-related
violence that was fostered
at least in part by our own
national security apparatus.
It’s abundantly clear that
guilty knowledge of this went
all the way up to the White
House, where George H.W.
Bush (ex-CIA) was running
the Contra show.
It’s not like people didn’t
know about this. Journalist
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Gary Webb exposed it — and
lost his career and eventu-
ally his life over it. Senator
John Kerry held hearings
on it where spooks admitted
under oath that they’d per-
sonally loaded cocaine on
planes headed to the United
States. Guns flew south; dope
flew north. And it all just got
brushed aside. Nobody, ulti-
mately, really cared. Maybe
because just about everybody
was, one way or another,
standing waist deep in the big
muddy.
El mundo narco is seeded
with landmines for anyone
who ventures there in search
of knowledge and under-
standing. You can’t fall into
the trap of romanticizing the
trade — it’s ended or blighted
literally millions of lives and
corrupted states from Mexico
to Afghanistan. Despite
explicit efforts by Mexican
narcos to tie themselves to the
legacies of Pancho Villa and
Emiliano Zapata, they are no
social bandits or revolution-
aries fighting on behalf of the
pueblo. They’re gangster ter-
rorists. It’s no small point that
ISIS ripped off their horror-
show torture porn playbook
from Los Zetas.
And it’s probably a bad
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idea to get so jaded that you
just shrug at the intertwin-
ing of el mundo narco and
the black-book work of the
national security state. But
then what do you expect to
happen when you look to
fight secret wars against dirty
enemies with secret and dirty
money?
It’s an option to just
ignore it, to look away, whis-
tle past the vast graveyard
that lies just over there. But
it’s our tax dollars that fund
the endless — and fruit-
less — war on drugs and the
prison-industrial complex,
and it’s our society’s crav-
ing for dope that creates the
market. As much as we’d like
to pretend otherwise, hard
drugs are present right here in
Sisters, and, as always, they
are associated with crime and
destruction.
And it’s us who turn the
pages on the narco thrillers,
crank up the narcocorridos,
and watch the TV shows that
dramatize it all. We’re all,
one way or another, caught
up in a powerful addic-
tion, living la vida loca in el
mundo narco.
The passage of HB 2355
is a step in the right direction,
a step toward recovery.
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