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Drug Warriors and Their Prey
From Police Power to Police State
Richard Lawrence Miller
Praeger Publishers 1996, ISBN 0-275-95042-5
A Review by Peter Webster
There is a certain difficulty in writing a review of Richard Lawrence
Miller's Drug Warriors and Their Prey, but not because
it is a difficult book in any usual sense. On the contrary, it
is disarmingly easy to understand the author's every implication.
Yet the theme of Mr. Miller's essay, a point by point comparison
of the reality of Drug Prohibition in the United States today
with exactly analogous situations leading up to Hitler's Third
Reich and the attempted destruction of the Jewish people, is certain
to repulse the very readers who need most to understand that,
indeed, it can happen again. Thus the book, and any honest
review of it, might achieve little more than preaching to the
converted: those who can readily accept its main thesis must already
be active in resisting not just the "worst excesses"
of the War on Drugs, but the entire and historically-proven futility
of the very concept of Prohibition as a means to advantageous
ends.
Not that Hitler and the Reich's atrocities are too distasteful
for public examination and discourse, far from it! Americans,
and to a lesser degree, Europeans, continue to watch with relish
and fascination each new television episode depicting Hitler and
his cohorts, continue to make best-sellers of both fiction and
non-fiction tomes about the Reich, and we see many educators and
intellectuals insisting that the morbid details of Hitlerism be
widely taught in the schools so that we may "never again"
fall into the trap which ensnared the post World-War-One German
nation. Equally atrocious episodes as the Nazi reign (at least
with respect to relative population size), which have more recently
occurred in Vietnam and Cambodia, or in East Timor, Rwanda, Yugoslavia,
to mention but a few, are given short shrift by producers of documentaries
and consumers of such "entertainment," and ignored in
classrooms as potential "never again" object lessons.
Even more glaringly, America continues to largely ignore the implications
of an even more successful genocide which American Policy, assisted
by American Congresses and Politicians of the highest stature,
committed over a period far longer than the Reich's brief existence:
the eradication of Native American populations. A recent book
which rightly dared to call that eradication a holocaust, was
indignantly denounced by many "intellectuals."
Hitler and his image have clearly become a modern scapegoat through
which we attempt to psychologically expunge collective guilt for
our own atrocities, past and present, as well as for those other
atrocities which we do nothing, or very little, to prevent or
stop. There is plenty of evil-reeking film footage of Hitler's
life and times which when watched, with their pompous and cymbal-crashing
military tunes, and their images of "the bad guys" far
surpassing anything that Hollywood can invent, become the perfect
medium for our unfortunate proclivity to hate. And to do so collectively
in a way which seems correct and proper. The evil image of Hitler
and his deeds provides catharsis for the sins we care not to recognize,
dare not recognize, and allows a continuation of a status quo
which is fertile ground for allowing hate to produce once again
the very situation from which inevitably rise the most glaringly
evil aspects of our modern world.
If we can see from these observations why many a reader will close
his mind to Mr. Miller's thesis, or perhaps merely look at the
dust jacket and replace Drug Warriors on its bookstore
shelf, it is nevertheless quite necessary and effective to compare
the American-led War on Drugs with events in 1930's Germany. As
Mr. Miller readily shows, it is not with the after-the-fact evil
image of "The Great Dictator" that current parallels
correspond, but rather with the actions of individual and ordinary
Germans, their daily life, the ease with which they fell into
that horrible trap, and the actions of police, mayors, governors
and administrators, the deeds and "researches" of doctors
and scientists, the judgments of the courts, the facile way in
which the Jewish people were ensnared in "The Chain of Destruction
: Identification, Ostracism, Confiscation, Concentration, and
Annihilation." Before 1939, when it became painfully obvious
to every person on earth what the Führer was up to, it was
equally as difficult as now to see the inevitable course of events
which follows from the first principles of fascism. Many in the
United States and England praised Hitler's National Socialism
for having brought Germany out of the Great Depression, Presidents
and Prime Ministers believed his Treaties and Promises, even subscribed
to his overall political vision, until it was far too late for
anything but total conflict.
If the very accurate and chilling comparisons of developments
in 1930's Germany to the modern War on Drugs disgusts some readers
to the point where they are blinded to the reality exposed in
Drug Warriors, that in itself is a telling parallel to
that decade before the beginning of WWII. Euphemisms and pacification
would today certainly go no further in helping to reverse ill-conceived
Drug Prohibition than they did in reversing the Reich's rise to
power. Books and articles by those who predicted the inevitable
course that post WWI fascism would take were, as will be Mr. Miller's
book today, viewed as unnecessarily alarmist, the product of an
over-vivid imagination or even fanaticism. But in the telling
of such truth, as in the recommendation of possible means of avoidance
of great disaster, there really is no alternative but the kind
of stark simplicity of theme which Drug Warriors epitomizes.
For the few persons on the brink of waking up to the reality of
the Drug War, the book will certainly provide better catalysis
than other current, and less honest if more complacent tracts.
For those masses eternally convinced that "it can't happen
here," there is, history would teach, little that can convince.
The chapters in Drug Warriors are named for the stages
of "The Chain of Destruction" mentioned above, which,
as Mr. Miller points out, derives from Raul Hilberg's monumental
study of the destruction process as applied to the holocaust.
From the very first page of chapter 1, "Identification,"
we see in vivid detail how the modern drug-user is fulfilling
the same function as did the Jew during National Socialism. He
is the perfect scapegoat, the perfect distraction, the ideal "other"
and alien, the perfect tool "for maintaining the social turmoil
needed by authoritarians" in their rise to power. Miller
quotes Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz:
It was the Jews who helped hold Hitler's system together-on the
practical as well as the ideological level. The Jew allowed Hitler
to ignore the long list of economic and social promises he had
made to the SA, the lower party apparatus, and the lower middle
classes. By steering the attention of these groups away from their
more genuine grievances and toward the Jew, Hitler succeeded in
blunting the edge of their revolutionary wrath, leaving him freer
to pursue his own nonideological goals of power in cooperation
with groups whose influence he had once promised to weaken or
even destroy. An ideological retreat on the Jewish issue in these
circumstances was impossible.... The continued search for a solution
to the Jewish problem allowed Hitler to maintain ideological contact
with elements of his movement for whom National Socialism had
done very little.
Just as it was difficult for people in the US or England of the
1930's to get worked up about a "few incidents" of the
breaking of windows of Jewish shops, or the "excesses"
of burning the contents of a library or two, it is today difficult
perhaps to get worked up over some of the documented "excesses"
of the Drug War, hundreds of which are described and referenced
in Drug Warriors. "A few" such incidents can
always be blamed on individual human error and frailty, as when
an over-zealous cop assassinates a purported marijuana dealer.
But what of the evidence so well presented in Drug Warriors
of actual drug warrior "death squads" instituted by
US government agencies to "assassinate narcotics leaders?"
What are we to make of the statement of former Los Angeles Police
Chief Daryl Gates (also the founder and designer of the DARE program,
"Drug Abuse Resistance Education"): In 1990 he advised
the U.S. Senate about the "'casual user' and what you do
with the whole group. The casual user ought to be taken out and
shot, because he or she has no reason for using drugs." Gates
later emphasized that he was not being facetious and declared
marijuana users to be guilty of treason. Such sentiment in the
US today is not unusual. William Bennett, the former "Drug
Czar" and therefore top drug police officer declared that
ethically no trial is required before killing citizens suspected
of drug dealing. The next day Bennett said of drug dealers, "You
deserve to die." (These passages quoted or paraphrased from
Drug Warriors, where they are referenced.) Comparisons
to the Gestapo are unavoidable.
Miller goes to great lengths to make it painfully obvious that
we are not dealing with a few minor incidents provoked by the
occasional renegade, but as in 1930's Germany, a vast and vicious
machine is being oiled and tested, a horribly familiar pattern
is again materializing, and normal law-abiding citizens are today
just as unaware of what lies just around the corner as they were
formerly. More critically, just as leaders and intellectuals of
the 1930's were equally as duped and pacified into non-action,
even to supporting the rise of the Nazi machine, a significant
movement of leaders and intellectuals resisting the American lead
in the War on Drugs, a coalition of nations, for example, which
might quickly put an end to the rising power of Drug War Fascism,
is nowhere on the horizon, it would seem. Such a project would
need to be a widely visible, intentional and public denunciation
of American policy accompanied by a radical shift in Prohibition
policy itself within those nations.
As much as it may itself seem a fanaticism to compare Drug Warriorism
with Nazism, I have tried to show here why that is far more an
artifact of our psychological makeup than a misinterpretation
or gross exaggeration of the factual evidence at hand. On every
page of Drug Warriors the facts are profuse. We ignore
them, and their proper interpretation, at great peril:
I believe authoritarians are manufacturing and manipulating public
fears about drug use in order to create a police state where a
much broader agenda of social control can be implemented, using
government power to determine what movies we may watch, determine
who we may love and how we may love them, determine whether we
may or must pray to a deity. I believe the war on drug users masks
a war on democracy.
After all, what is the vision of a Drug-Free America? Millions
in prison or slave labor, and only enthusiastic supporters of
government policy allowed to hold jobs, attend school, have children,
drive cars, own property. This is the combined vision of utopia
held forth by Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, William
Bennett, Daryl Gates, and thousands of other drug warriors. News
media and "public interest" advertising tell us this
is the America for which all good citizens yearn.
—Richard Lawrence Miller
I shall end my own intellectually risky yet morally necessary
task of agreeing wholeheartedly with Miller's analysis and prognosis
by quoting the same passage with which Drug Warriors begins,
Everywhere in the world I dread that same self-deception which
holds that "it can't happen here." It can happen anywhere.
It becomes unlikely only where the mass of the population is aware
of the threat, where there is accordingly no relapse into lethargy,
where the character of "totalitarianism" is known and
recognized from its very inception and in each of its aspects-as
a Proteus which is constantly putting on new masks, which glides
out of your grasp like an eel, which does the opposite of what
it claims, which perverts the meaning of its words, which speaks,
not to impart information, but to hypnotize, divert attention,
insinuate, intimidate, dupe, which exploits and produces every
type of fear, which promises security while destroying it completely.
—Karl Jaspers
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