Jose H. Valladares, MD
Since the 19th century when Americans first discovered new wonder drugs like morphine, heroin, and cocaine, our society has confronted the problem of drug abuse and addiction.
When the 20th century began, the United States--grappling with its first drug epidemic--gradually instituted effective restrictions: at home through domestic law enforcement and overseas by spearheading a world movement to limit opium and coca crops. By World War II, American drug use had become so rare, it was seen as a marginal social problem. The first epidemic was forgotten.
During the 1960s, drugs like marijuana, amphetamines, and psychedelics came on the scene, and a new generation embraced drugs. With the drug culture exploding, our government developed new laws and agencies to address the problem. In 1973, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was created to enforce federal drug laws. In the 1970s, cocaine reappeared. Then, a decade later, crack appeared, spreading addiction and violence at epidemic levels.
Today, the DEA’s biggest challenge is the dramatic change in organized crime. While American criminals once controlled drug trafficking on U.S. soil, today sophisticated and powerful criminal groups headquartered in foreign countries control the drug trade in the United States.
Once the extremely debilitating power of addicting drugs was recognized, many American cities and states--starting with San Francisco in 1875--began passing anti-drug laws. In 1906, the Pure Food & Drug Act forced the patent medicine industry to list on the label the presence of certain dangerous drugs such as alcohol, opiates, cocaine, and cannabis.
By the 1960s, the great majority of Americans had forgotten the lessons of the first drug epidemic. Moreover, the new Bohemians, Beat literary types, were sending a very different and powerful cultural message: drugs and altered states were part of being hip, social rebels. By encouraging a whole generation to see drug use as "normal," these cultural icons consigned millions to re-learn the painful consequences of rampant drug use--even as the drug menu was expanding to include amphetamines and psychedelics. When many of the 76 million baby boomers embraced not just drugs, but also dealing and trafficking, the drug culture exploded.
Drug use in America reached its peak in 1979, when one in ten Americans used drugs on a regular basis. During the 1970s, cocaine reappeared, touted as the "champagne of drugs" because it was expensive, high-status, and said to have no serious consequences. The price dropped steadily, and by the mid-1980s, six million Americans used it regularly. Cocaine was gradually rediscovered to be highly addictive and dangerous.
Today, drug gangs from Mexico dominate many aspects of the American drug trade. In the late 1980's, the cocaine mafias turned to long-established drug traffickers along the 2,000-mile Southwest border to help smuggle cocaine across to America. For decades, small-time Mexico-based mafias had trafficked in marijuana and black tar heroin. In the 1980's, thanks to Colombia-based traffickers, they expanded into cocaine and became far more powerful. Paid at first in cash, by the late 1980's, the Mexico-based gangs were being paid in cocaine. And so, they began to carve out their own distribution systems. In the mid-1990s, traffickers from Mexico further expanded into methamphetamine, a market they quickly came to dominate. Starting on the West Coast, they have been rapidly expanding, saturating region after region with this highly addictive drug. Like other traffickers who preceded them, the traffickers from Mexico depend on high levels of violence and corruption.
Interesting Facts
· In 1973 President Nixon creates the DEA.
· Jimmy Carter campaigned for president on a platform that included decriminalization of marijuana.
· Pablo Escobar was quoted in Forbes magazine in 1989 as being the 7th richest man in the world. In March 1982 Escobar was elected to the Colombian Congress; he gained support by building low-income housing, doling out money in Medellin slums and campaigning with Catholic Priests. Escobar was killed by Medellin Police in 1982.
· General Manuel Noriega allowed cocaine to be shipped through Panama. He was accused of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. He surrendered to the DEA and is now serving 40 years in a federal prison here in Miami.
· In the mid 1980s, the Mexican border becomes the major port of entry for cocaine headed towards the US. Crack, a cheap, addictive and potent form of cocaine is developed in becomes popular in NYC.
· In 1992 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari issues regulations for DEA officers in this country. The rules limits the number of agents in Mexico, deny them diplomatic immunity, prohibit them from carrying weapons and designate certain cities in which they can live.
· In 1993 President Clinton signed NAFTA which increases the amount of trade and traffic across the US-Mexican border making it even more difficult for US customs to track drug movement.
· In 1997, after receiving personal threats from the drug traffickers, the justices on the Colombian Supreme Court rule by a vote to annul the extradition treaty with the US.
· In 2004, the State Dept and the DEA announce its involvement with the US embassy Kabul Counternarcotics Implementation Plan –designed to reduce heroin production in Afghanistan, the world’s leading opium producer.
· Authorities announce the discovery of the longest cross border tunnel in US history: a ½ mile tunnel linking a warehouse in Tijuana (where 2 tons of marijuana was found) to warehouse in the US where 200 lbs of marijuana were found.
Why have we lost the war on drugs in the USA? What is actually happening?
The death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war.
In the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin.
The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
"Methamphetamine is one of the most addictive and neurotoxic drugs of abuse," said Brookhaven chemist Joanna Fowler, lead author on the study. "It produces large increases in dopamine, a brain chemical associated with feelings of pleasure and reward — both by increasing dopamine's release from nerve cells and by blocking its reuptake."
Cocaine stimulates dopamine to be released in the brain, which feels great. The body naturally breaks down cocaine in a matter of minutes, and the natural recycle process for dopamine gather all the dopamine released, and puts it back in storage for next time.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that influences body movement and is also believed to be involved in motivation, reward, reinforcement and addictive behaviors
Dopamine has a variety of influences on brain function, including playing a role in regulating attention, cognition, movement, pleasure, and hormonal processes. Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit disorder, and schizophrenia all involve abnormalities in the dopamine system.
Meth also stimulates dopamine to be released in the brain. However, is has 2 other properties which make it infinitely MORE addictive than cocaine.
1) It takes the body HOURS to break down, rather than a few minutes. So it continues causing high dopamine activity for hours.
2) during these HOURS of activity, meth also BLOCKS the recycle process, meaning the dopamine can not be "caught" and put back in storage. Because of this, the brain has no choice but to use it's 2nd line of defense against over stimulation -- dopamine destruction.
So for several HOURS the brain goes about destroying dopamine. This means that when the user stops using, there is LESS dopamine left over than before they used. Each time they use, there is less and less dopamine left.
This lack of dopamine causes the brain to NEED meth just to feel normal again.
The body can make more dopamine from protein that is eaten, but not at a rate that can keep up with a meth user's destruction of dopamine. This is why it takes MONTHS (or YEARS) of clean time to begin to feel anything resembling normal again.
You can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again.
Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment.
The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas.
Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product.
The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine.
Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs - marijuana, LSD - that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border - even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.
The drug's precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world.
The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications.
Ephedra, from the plant Ephedra sinica,[1] has been used as an herbal remedy in traditional Chinese medicine for 5,000 years for the treatment of asthma and hay fever, as well as for the common cold.[2] Known in Chinese as ma huang (traditional Chinese: 麻黃; simplified Chinese: 麻黄; pinyin: má huáng), ephedra is a stimulant which constricts blood vessels and increases blood pressure and heart rate.
The alkaloids ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are the active constituents of the plant. Pseudoephedrine is used in over-the-counter decongestants. Derivatives of ephedrine are used to treat low blood pressure, but alternatives with reduced cardiovascular risk have replaced it for treating asthma. Ephedrine is also considered a performance-enhancing drug and is prohibited in most competitive sports.
A new law was created that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.
Amphetamine and Methamphetamine factoids
· During World War II, amphetamines were widely used to keep the fighting men going. During the Viet Nam war, American soldiers used more amphetamines than the rest of the world did during WWII.
· In Japan, intravenous methamphetamine abuse reached epidemic proportions immediately after World War II, when supplies stored for military use became available to the public
· In the United States in the 1950s, legally manufactured tablets of both dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine) and methamphetamine (Methedrine) became readily available and were used non medically by college students, truck drivers, and athletes.
· As use of amphetamines spread, so did their abuse. Amphetamines became a cure-all for such things as weight control to treating mild depression.
· Popular Personalities who were speed users include:
John F. Kennedy (shot amphetamine occasionally)
Adolph Hitler (took daily injections and tablets)
Ted Haggard (enjoyed meth and gay sex)
Charlie Parker (benzedrine in his coffee)
Lenny Bruce
Judy Garland
Johnny Cash
Elvis Presley
Medical Use Today
Today these drugs are generally used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They are also useful in the treatment of narcolepsy.
In the past, doctors recommended amphetamines to control weight problems, because they decreased the appetite and increased a persons energy.
While this may work, it may also cause the user to become addicted to the drug. Because of this, amphetamine use for weight loss is strongly discouraged by doctors, in all but some very severe cases.
Restricting the supply of drugs at the source - those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs - remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists.
Harsh sentencing laws that had put millions of young Americans in prison, disbelieved the "sweeping scientific claims" made about the dangers of medical marijuana and wanted to expand "meaningful drug-treatment opportunities in urban areas." DiIulio and his contemporaries were troubled, too, by the racial imbalances of the War on Drugs: Blacks, who comprised only fourteen percent of drug users, made up seventy-four percent of those in prison for drug possession.
The War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade.
The price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers.
In 1933 when Americans were once again free to manufacture, buy and sell alcoholic beverages, people did not say that alcohol had been “legalized”; they said that Prohibition, an invasive, disastrous attempt to get between people and their intoxicants, had been repealed.
The problems associated with Prohibition included violence, organized crime, official corruption, the erosion of civil liberties, disrespect for the law and injuries and deaths caused by tainted black-market booze. They decided that these unintended side effects far outweighed whatever harm prohibition prevented by discouraging drinking.
Decriminalization amounts to treating users leniently while continuing to arrest, prosecute and imprison producers and sellers but still leaves a black market with all of its attendant problems in place.
If drug use is the evil that government is trying to prevent, why go easy on those who commit the offense and instead throw the book at those who merely assist them? The inconsistency in the treatment of sellers vs. buyers, which is widely practiced and supported by drug warriors is a clue to the fact that government is trying to prohibit something it has no business prohibiting.
The starting point for understanding anything about the USA, is to digest the fact that just this one country, the United States of America, has twenty-five percent of ALL of the prisoners in the entire world.
As of year-end 2006, a record 7.2 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole. Of the total, 2.2 million were incarcerated. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million, despite having over four times the population of the US.[7][8]
