| Number 211 | June 27, 2003 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, It’s been five months since the last “Stroll Through the News With Nygaard,” so we’re overdue. Long-time readers may recall my stated intention of presenting the Stroll every couple of months. Why do I even say these things? Nygaard Notes is far more improvisational than that. I don’t even know what’s going to happen next week, let alone in two months! As if to illustrate, this week’s issue was actually intended to be a Stroll, but didn’t really turn out that way. A Stroll is typically a collection of many very short pieces that together make up an illuminating and (I hope) entertaining collage. I started out to do that this week, but the pieces got longer, so I only had room for three of them. They’re pretty illuminating, though. Entertaining, too. So, maybe, instead of a Stroll, it’s a Hike. Or a Trek. Whatever. Last week I talked about the “Key Fact” and its importance in “decoding” the news. There are many decoding skills beyond the Key Fact skill, of course, and I use several of them this week. It’s not important to know the names of these skills, but regular readers of Nygaard Notes have told me that they end up acquiring some of the skills just by reading the results. I hope that is true for you. Off we go. Nygaard |
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The local paper here, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) ran an article on June 21 with the headline “Marijuana Use Tied to More than Half of Men in Hennepin County Jail.” (Hennepin County is the state’s most populous and urban county, wherein is found Minneapolis.) To read this article is to descend into the netherworld of the War Against Drugs, which has been going on for some 30 years now, since being declared by President Richard Nixon. This is a realm where fantasy and imagination play a far larger role than facts and thinking. This would only be interesting trivia if it were not for the fact that this particular war has resulted in untold suffering and, significantly, has completely failed to reduce the incidence of drug use. The Star Trib article reported on a report from the U.S. Justice Department about an ongoing program called the “Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program.” While the headline reported that “marijuana use” was “tied” to more than half of the men in Hennepin County jails, that’s a little misleading. As the story says, these men “tested positive” for marijuana. Anyone with any experience knows that people can “test positive” for marijuana use for up to a month after using it. Which immediately raises a question: What is the connection between marijuana use and crime? Here’s what the Star Trib said: “The report's findings didn't come as a surprise to many Twin Cities law enforcement officials, who say they've been concerned for some time about marijuana's possible link to crime.” Then the Star Trib quoted some local police officers showing their ignorance, or self-deception: “‘Obviously [the men's] lifestyle of using marijuana had an effect on their being arrested,’ said Lt. Dan Grout, commander of the Minneapolis Police Department's narcotics unit. ‘You can't ignore that. It's a real problem here.’” In fact, according to the advocacy group the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA),
(I recommended this group ‘way back in Nygaard Notes Number 51 “How Not to Fight Drug Addiction.”) Here’s more from the cops, this time from one Nick O’Hara, an inspector for the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, which includes St. Paul: “Unfortunately, O'Hara said, many experts believe marijuana leads to other kinds of drug use. ‘It's a gateway drug, no question about it,’ he said.” No question? Let’s hear from DPA again:
Toward the end of the article, we cut to the chase, with a quotation from Skip Van Patten, the assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Agency's Minneapolis office. After remarking that “Although many people believe marijuana isn't a hard-core drug,” the Star Trib quotes Skip saying, “It is an illegal drug and we should be concerned about any drug usage in Minneapolis.” The obvious question: Why should we be concerned about “any drug usage” in Minneapolis? What I would say, as a former drug abuse counselor and the child of two alcoholic parents, is that we should be concerned about drug abuse, not use. Failing to make the distinction between the simple use of mind-altering chemicals (legal or illegal) and the abuse of them is a serious error, one with tragic consequences for millions of people caught up in the War on Drugs. Take a look at the website of the Drug Policy Alliance at http://www.dpf.org. |
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Evidence of the irrationality and illogic of the War on Drugs is easy to find, as it’s in the papers so frequently. A recent example appeared in the NY Times of May 17th. The report had to do with the widespread practice of testing high school students for drug use. If you don’t have kids in school (and you’re not in school yourself) you may not be aware that the Supreme Court has “twice empowered schools to test for drugs, first among student athletes in 1995, then for those in other extracurricular activities last year.” The Times did a pretty good job in this article. First of all, the headline was accurate and succinct: “Study Finds No Sign That Testing Deters Students’ Drug Use,” it read, and it gave the facts very plainly:
As far as the irrationality and illogic, the article quotes two of the Supreme Court’s testing advocates, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Scalia, writing for the Court in the 1995 case, described the “efficacy of this means for addressing the problem” of student drug use as “self-evident.” (Ed. Note: Not “true,” just self-evident.) The reason that the Court gave at the time as to why these drug tests do not violate the Fourth Amendments safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures is “because children have limited expectations of privacy, the tests are not overly intrusive, and because they are likely to deter substance abuse,” the Times reported. It was a decision by Veronia High School in Oregon to screen its athletes that led to the 1995 ruling by the Supremes. The principal at that school at the time was one Randall Aultman, who commented on the case to the Times. As the Times reported it, “Drug use was so rampant among [Aultman’s] students that he says ‘we had to do something drastic,” without even knowing whether it was legal, much less effective.” This argument falls into the category of the “Do something – ANYthing!” response to a problem. If this sort of thinking strikes you as seriously flawed, even idiotic, consider that the same sort of reasoning was used seven years later by His Honor Clarence Thomas, writing in the 2002 drug testing case. He stated then that “the need to prevent and deter the substantial harm of childhood drug use provides the necessary immediacy for a school testing policy.” This is the same sort of thinking as that which could drive a nation respond to a terrorist attack by attacking a country that had nothing to do with the attack. If you can imagine such lunacy. Note that both Scalia and Thomas refer to “drug use,” and not “drug abuse,” begging the question of whether the use of “drugs” is, in and of itself, harmful. That’s never even discussed, although it’s highly debatable. While I have personally known quite a number of people who have been seriously harmed, even killed, by drug abuse and addiction, I have known far more people who have “used” drugs, including as teenagers, and have been none the worse for it. And that’s not just a personal anecdote, unless you believe that all 87 million United Statesians who have used “illegal” drugs are all in need of treatment. |
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On page 13 of the New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) of April 14th, right in the middle of the U.S. campaign to occupy Iraq, appeared an article with the intriguing headline, “Europe Seems to Hear Echoes of Empires Past.” It was labeled “News Analysis,” which seems to be the popular label for an editorial that appears on the news pages. Or something. Anyway, I say “intriguing” because it is rare to see the word “empire” in a headline in the Times. In fact, it only has happened in the news pages an average of 3.86 times per year since 1996, according to a search of Times headlines for the period. It’s even more rare to see a reference to the U.S. empire—almost unheard of, actually—since empires are seen as historical relics that we have left behind. Almost all recent references in the Times have to do with the British empire, the Indonesian empire, the ancient Roman empire, or such commercial “empires” as the Hearst newspaper empire, or even the Versace fashion empire. So it was with great interest that I read this Times article. Typically, it began by referring to “an earlier period in global history—the era of imperialism.” Beyond that, the point of the article seemed to be to ridicule the numerous European voices that dare to speak the “E-word” in regard to the United States.
What a damning indictment of the U.S. media that is! If such a thought does seem “strange, almost paranoid, to many Americans,” it is not because it hasn’t been plainly stated by the Bush administration in public documents. On page 29 of “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” for example, which was released by the Bush Administration last September, we find the following statement:
The 2002 document, in turn, was based in large part on a 1993 document prepared by Dick Cheney, then the Secretary of “Defense.” Entitled “Defense Strategy for the 1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy,” this version was even more blunt than the recent one. “We must not stand back and allow a new global threat to emerge or leave a vacuum in a region critical to our interests,” it said on page 8. Later on we read that “It is not in our interest or those of the other democracies to return to earlier periods in which multiple military powers balanced one against another...” Still later Cheney says, “the strategy aims to raise a...barrier to the rise of any serious global challenge” to U.S. power. “Beyond challenge.” “Dissuade...military competition.” “No multiple military powers.” Sounds like a plan for “unchallenged global dominance” to me. Or maybe I’m just being strange. Almost paranoid. |