Jeffrey B. Stamm, a highly-decorated DEA agent for 31 years, served domestic and overseas assignments in South America and Central Asia. He rose from undercover agent to a member of DEA’s Senior Executive Service. In December 2015 he retired from the DEA to take a job as executive director of the Midwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) based in Kansas City, Mo. The following is an excerpt from his new book: On Dope: Drug Enforcement and The First Policeman
INTRODUCTION
Civilizations die from suicide, not murder. –Arnold Toynbee
We are in grave danger of losing the debate against illegal drugs—dope—and, in the process, our very society. Not because of the inherent correctness of the arguments and opinions of those who advocate drug legalization or decriminalization, but due to the near-complete lack of an informed and engaged citizenry pushing back against the demagogues, apologists, and appeasers who peddle, with increasing success, only dangerous myths and false metaphors.
Their reckless and illegitimate accusations that the current drug control paradigm has not only “failed” but that it is patently “racist” and “oppressive” have served to bully and confuse a sleepwalking population too timid and self-absorbed to argue. In our attempt to be tolerant, sensitive and compassionate, we, instead, exhibit a stultifying weakness in the face of a zealous and committed pro-dope cabal intent on changing the landscape and the laws. Allowing them to succeed will produce catastrophic social and cultural consequences that will require generations, or longer, from which to recover.
Against an unceasing and withering torrent of criticisms against our current legal and political drug-control framework, we seem to have succumbed to the deceptions and propaganda of misguided “experts” who tout “new,” “daring” and “brilliantly innovative” policies in the face of our current “failures.” Through what has become something of a forced compulsion to nonjudgmentalism and pervasive compassion, we are increasingly surrendering to the false hopes of both the utopian liberals and fundamentalist libertarians who preach that “drug prohibition does more harm than good” and, further, that drug use “affects no one but the user himself.” Such views are not only utterly wrong, but destructive and fundamentally incompatible with a free and democratic society. Besides, there is no situation that cannot be made even worse through wrong and foolish policies.
It has been said that you don’t have to be a soldier to understand war, but it sure can help.[2] So, too, is this true in the arena of drug enforcement. Professor James Inciardi has argued that, at least every now and then, those who have the most to say about drug affairs ought to leave their “safe, secure and existentially antiseptic confines” and visit the mean and despairing streets to understand the scope and solemnity of the problem.[3] Indeed, anyone who has had the slightest acquaintance with the unprecedented human carnage brought on by the allure of crack cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, new potent strains of marijuana, abused opioids, or any number of other substances in the pharmacopoeia of intoxicants misused for cheap “pleasures” understands the insidious and pernicious decay that dope spawns in the individual and in society.
Most “experts” promoting a “bold” or “compassionate” solution, well-meaning as they might be, either claim some expertise in a wholly unrelated field, or—more likely—possess no expertise whatsoever. They are like Saddam Hussein (before he was introduced to his Maker by the United States Army), who claimed some mantle of martial prowess owing simply to his authoritarian stature. Asked once about the dictator’s supposed military expertise, General Norman Schwarzkopf replied: “As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist—he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that he’s a great military man.”[4] Those who stridently demand an end to the so-called war on drugs exhibit remarkable ignorance. They also reveal an arrogant and casual disregard for both the user and our society in order to pander to a temporary and specious desire by a selfish minority intent on exercising “rights” divorced from corresponding duties. Such ideas are not, in fact, new, but actually represent a timid surrender to human weakness and base desires with no regard for the future and only contempt for the lessons of the past.
Jeffrey Stamm
Throughout our nation’s one-hundred-year struggle to limit the menace of psychoactive drugs, beginning with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, we have continuously sought a social and legal equilibrium between maximizing individual liberty and maintaining the essential requirement of public safety and order. Along the way, we have made mistakes. We have allowed excesses and undue pendulum swings at both ends of the spectrum. We have at times witnessed government missteps, but, far more often, we have experienced tragedy and harm produced by radical self-indulgence and human predation. We constantly strain to find just the right incremental adjustments, just the right balance to maintain both liberty and order. Clearly, our current drug-control paradigm falls far short of complete success. It is, however, like Sir Winston Churchill’s famous observation about democracy: the worst system ever devised by the wit of man—except for all the others![5] Despite the selfish and pedantic complaints from the pro-drug lobby that persist in decrying our current situation, the truth is that, given the state of human nature and the profound allure of pharmacological “pleasure,” all of the activists’ novel alternatives are either politically unfeasible or dangerously irresponsible. The unintended consequences of their simplistic and irrational “solutions” would produce overwhelming social and economic costs, especially to society’s most vulnerable and innocent.
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By Steve Neavling
