Natasha Vargas-Cooper has written an article on Bath Salts for Spin.com that I regret to say contains a narrative that is both unfortunate and misleading (despite stating many accurate and relevant facts). Yet there is a light at the end of the tunnel: the comments to her article seem to suggest that people are starting to reject the wisdom of drug prohibition, even in cases where a drug seems dangerous. Before we reach those comments, though, I’d like to take a couple steps back and zoom out for a moment.

The discussion over Bath Salts is really a flash point in America’s drug war. The manufactured hysteria over this drug is nothing new. The same thing has happened numerous times in America’s history with numerous other drugs du jour. It happened with marijuana when Mexican immigrants brought vast quantities of the plant with them across the border in the early 20th century. It happened with cocaine when Southern whites conjured up the frightful (and false) images of “negro cocaine fiends” raping and terrorizing white women in the South. By associating these marginalized groups with criminality inspired by drug use, the powers that be could engage in racist witch hunts against Southern Blacks and Mexican immigrants without resorting to racist overtures (though the two often coincided). They could blame the drug, and then scapegoat the users for society’s ills.

Today, we’ve managed to skip the overt racism, but we retain the racist effects by calling for color-neutral proscriptions on drugs, while forgetting that human beings are not color-blind, including law enforcement officials. This makes it inevitable that harsh drug laws will be disproportionately enforced against communities of color, because the assumption of black criminality has ginned up more probable cause than any other machination of human intuition. These mechanics ensure that drug enforcement will always be visited on communities of color more so than any other socio-economic stratum.

Not a word of this should be construed to suggest that I am accusing Vargas-Cooper of writing an (un)intentionally racist narrative in her article. It is merely to point out that every call for prohibition and punishment has a hidden, unintended consequence baked into it that must be considered; drug prohibitions must be enforced by a criminal justice system that is afflicted by structural racism. These same prohibitions are more responsible for the increased incarceration of Black people in America than any other policy to date. It is not something that can be avoided or readily ignored. And it must be considered in the analysis of any responsible policy discussion that claims to identify a problem associated with drug use, and proceeds to offer a solution.

Unfortunately, history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. And it seems that there is no area of public policy where our country is less likely to learn from the mistakes of the past than our nation’s drug policy. We’ve been making the same mistakes for literally decades. And yet still we see intelligent, thoughtful people falling back on the same recommendations about drug policy (prohibit the drug & punish the user) that got us into this mess in the first place.

The War on Drugs is one of the most destructive policies that modern governments have ever implemented. This criticism is not limited to the proscription of “soft” drugs, like marijuana. Overwhelming evidence suggests that our attempts to ban “hard” drugs have not only failed to reduce either the demand or supply for those drugs, but in many cases, attempts to prohibit those drugs have simply made the harms associated with hard drug use more profound and wide-spread. The law of unintended consequences is nowhere more pronounced than it is in America’s drug war.

After forty years of attempting to rid America of the “scourge” of illegal drug use, we have not only failed miserably, but made things worse. As of 2008, Americans used illegal drugs at a higher rate than any other nation in the world. What’s more, we carry that dubious honor despite the fact that we incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. Meanwhile, south of the border, U.S. money and guns have helped kill nearly 50,000 people. Not only have we failed, but we’ve made the problem exponentially worse through the unintended consequences of aggressive enforcement and harsh penal sanctions. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then America’s drug policy can be justifiably described as insane.

Outlawing drugs whose negative effects scare us does not prevent people from using those drugs. It does not prevent entrepreneurs from manufacturing them, dealers from selling them, or users from purchasing them. It just increases the likelihood that at some point in this chain of underground commerce, someone will end up dead as a result. And we are not speaking here about mindless, unstable and/or unproductive junkies who are useless to society. The 2011 Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy found that:

The majority of people who use drugs do not fit the stereotype of the ‘amoral and pitiful addict’. Of the estimated 250 million drug users worldwide, the United Nations estimates that less than 10 percent can be classified as dependent, or ‘problem drug users’.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s article on Bath Salts failed not because it doesn’t contain accurate facts; it failed because it relies heavily on ONDCP and DEA-approved talking points that paint those facts in a light that favors prohibition. Her article contains plenty of accurate information, but it is presented in the form of a narrative that reads as supportive of renewing a milquestoast ban on Bath Salts, which would necessarily be accompanied by the imposition of criminal sanctions against those who use it. Sanctions which will be enforced disproportionately against communities of color, and will perpetuate both mass incarceration writ large, and the unequal economic positions that define race relations in America. Yet there’s not a word of this to temper the DEA’s hysteria over Bath Salts. Unmentioned too is the economic disruption that enforcement activities will have on small businesses, or the fact that Bath Salts only exist in the first place because safer, time-tested highs are illegal and much more difficult to get.

The article manifests concern over Congress’s failure to renew a mildly effective federal ban on Bath Salts. But the ban would be a mistake. "Prohibit & Punish" is the same drug policy that has failed us again and again and again in the last forty years, and has failed by virtually any measure. The number of books, scholarly articles, opinion pieces, and magazine articles that have been written about the ineffective and/or destructive consequences of drug prohibition are too numerous to count. Suffice to say, calling for a ban on a drug that scares people is not the road less traveled. It is a predictable suggestion with predictable consequences, few if any of them good.

If our experience in the drug war has taught us anything, it’s that not every human problem can be solved by trying to outlaw its cause. Sometimes the best, smartest option is to let people make their own choices, and then set up support networks that minimize the harm associated with those choices. In doing so, we minimize the negative effects associated with aggressive enforcement, while keeping potentially productive citizens in society and out of prison. Legalization is preferable, but decriminalization is the next best thing. And this is not merely academic bluster. “Drug decriminalization … has been a success everywhere it has been implemented.”

Yet despite the growing consensus that the War on Drugs has failed, and the virtually universal success of decriminalization efforts in other jurisdictions, there is still yet a resilient feeling in the minds of many Americans that uniform legalization and/or decriminalization is not an appropriate alternative. This is where the light at the end of the tunnel appears. To wit, I was heartened by some of the comments on Vargas-Cooper’s article, which seem to reject the narrative of her article for many of the same reasons I cited above. The tenor of the comments is perhaps best exemplified by a commenter named Peter Reime, who begins by quoting from Vargas-Cooper’s article:

“In some sense, bath salts are an exercise in decriminalization” - not really, it is more a lesson in un-controlled, unlicensed drug use, just like the people blinding themselves on dodgy moonshine laced with antifreeze or smoking questionable, cheap cigarettes or getting food poison from eating from an unlicensed food vendor. Decriminalization doesn’t reduce the risks for the user, it simply eases the impact on society by reducing the criminal element. Drugs (all of them) need to be legalized and heavily regulated and their sale controlled, just like prescription drugs or alcohol. This would introduce both quality control, so people can be assured they aren’t consuming rat poison with their drug of choice, and distributors should be required to warn of any side effects as well give advice on the effects of mixing substances.

Perhaps there is hope yet that Americans are beginning to realize the nature of this problem, and we are moving, slowly but surely, towards a more enlightened drug policy. I do not expect Across-the-board legalization to occur overnight. But if we can at least return to where we were before Nixon declared the first warning shot in the War on Drugs, it would be a start. And we would all be better off.