Why the drug war should learn from the battle against smoking // Washington Post

Right wing federal judges barred the FDA 
from mandating graphic cigarette warnings, 
citing the right to free speech.  From Citizens United
to cigarettes to contraception the First Amendment has become
a reactionary tool. - gwc

Why the drug war should learn from the battle against tobacco
by Danielle Allen

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. In January 1964, the Beatles first broke onto the Billboard chart with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; by June, Ringo Starr had collapsed from tonsillitis and pharyngitis. In January , the surgeon general announced that scientists had found conclusive evidence linking smoking to cancer and thus launched our highly successful 50-year public- health fight against tobacco. In August, the North Vietnamese fired on a U.S. naval ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the public phase of the Vietnam War. Alongside an accelerating deployment of conventional troops would come their widespread use ofmarijuana and heroin.

By 1971, cigarette ads had been banned from radio and television, the surgeon general had called for regulation of tobacco, and cigarette smoking had begun its long decline. T he impact of drug use among troops and returning veterans provoked President Richard M. Nixon to declare a war on drugs.

This was followed, of course, by the 1973 passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York. These set the model for criminalization and increasing penalties for the country as a whole, especially regarding drugs.

In the contrast between what has happened since 1964 with tobacco, on the one hand, and marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other banned substances, on the other, we have an instructive lesson in the comparative effects of choosing a public-health or a criminalization paradigm for dealing with addictive substances.

The approach to tobacco has worked. Between 1964 and 2014, smoking rates declined by half; between 1996 and 2013, the number of eighth-graders who had smoked within the past 30 days fell from 21 percent to 4.5 percent. The progress against smoking has been steady and impressive.

It’s an altogether different tale with banned substances. While levels of illegal drug use have risen and fallen since 1971, current levels are equivalent to those we had in the mid-1970s. According to the Monitoring the Future r eport, daily use of marijuana by 12th- graders was at 6 percent in 1975; in 2014, it was 5.8 percent. The picture with heroin has shown similar stability. In 1975, 1 percent of 12th-graders had used heroin within the year. In 2000 that figure was 1.5 percent. In 2014 it was down to 0.6 percent, but it may be climbing again.

And for every year of the past decade, Americans have spent $100 billion to buy banned substances.....