I have been interested in the White House cocaine imbroglio, mostly because it marks the closing of an interesting historical loop. To be sure, this probably isn’t the first time a bag of yayo has ended up in the West Wing, and it’s doubtful it will be the last, but in the age of suspicious white powders it is certainly the most public.
In 1971 Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs. As a veteran of that war, with the scars to prove it, I can say with utter certainty that we have lost it. It wasn’t a failure, not really, because the first time an infant crawls out of filth, underfed and crying, and hands you a bag of his mother’s meth you know to a moral certainty that drug trafficking isn’t a victimless crime. What you know instinctively is that you are battling a bottomless evil with profound generational effects. That seems like a fight worth having, even if most of the country appears to have given up.
Americans have largely thrown up their hands, are legalizing possession everywhere, and now react in predictable horror to the open-air drug markets in major cities, and the wave of drug-related mental illness and addiction cases wandering the streets like zombies. The decriminalization experiment is doomed to failure, in the same way locking up addicts and street-level clowns was doomed to failure. To fight the war on drugs effectively you must follow the money. Arresting Tweety Bird with an ounce might get you one rung up the ladder, but in the end it does nothing to arrest the flow of money--which is when you start getting somewhere.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Craig Rullman on Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.