50 Years Later, Is America's War On Drugs At A Turning Point?
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Fifty years ago this month, America started a new kind of war.
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RICHARD NIXON: America's public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
SHAPIRO: June 1971, President Richard Nixon ushered in a new national strategy to fight drug addiction in America on a kind of military footing. Over the decades, the U.S. spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this effort.
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SHAPIRO: It locked up millions of mostly Black and brown Americans on drug charges, which meant building a vast new system of jails and prisons. Congress created whole new bureaucracies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, and funded new armies of federal agents and local police. And yet, half a century later, drug use is as high as ever. And overdoses are at record levels, with 90,000 drug deaths last year alone.
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MIKE SCHMIDT: What we've been doing for the last number of decades has completely failed. It's gotten us to this point.
SHAPIRO: DA Mike Schmidt is the prosecutor for Oregon's largest county, Multnomah, which includes the city of Portland. People like him have been on the front lines of the war on drugs for decades. Now that war may finally be at an inflection point, where health care and harm reduction replace prohibition, interdiction and mass incarceration.
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SCHMIDT: Criminalization keeps people in the shadows. It keeps people from seeking out help, from telling their doctors, from telling their family members that they have a problem.
SHAPIRO: CONSIDER THIS - 50 years later, there's still no winner in America's war on drugs. But there are many losers, which is why one state is trying a different strategy.
From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, June 21.
It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. The reporting in this episode comes from a special series of NPR stories marking 50 years of America's war on drugs. A lot has changed over those years. Some of America's most punitive drug policies have been repealed, like long mandatory prison sentences for nonviolent drug users. Voters in many states have legalized marijuana and decriminalized other drugs. But those changes were never the goal of America's drug war. In fact, they may have been partly driven by a backlash to decades of harsh drug laws. During months of interviews for this project, NPR found a growing consensus across the political spectrum - including among some in law enforcement - that the drug war simply hasn't worked. And you can see what that means up close in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville, N.Y., where Aaron Hinton lives.
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AARON HINTON: This is where I was born and raised. Most of my childhood friends who I played on that very playground with when I was, you know, younger - they're out here.
SHAPIRO: Aaron's mom died a few years ago. She overdosed on prescription painkillers. Today, he's an activist and community organizer.
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HINTON: I have known my mom to be a drug user my whole entire life. She chose to run the streets and left me with my great-grandmother.
SHAPIRO: Aaron's neighborhood of Brownsville is mostly Black. It is 600 miles away from the small, mostly white city of Huntington, W.Va.
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COURTNEY HESSLER: It's such a tight-knit community. It has so much love in it and just people helping other people out.
SHAPIRO: Courtney Hessler is a newspaper reporter in Huntington. Her mom also struggles with opioid addiction. As a girl, Courtney spent time in foster care.
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HESSLER: I was just mad all the time and just constantly just going - living my life just from a place of hate. And there was a point where I said, OK, there's something wrong with me. I really need to get help.
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SHAPIRO: Courtney and Aaron both spoke with NPR correspondent Brian Mann, who found striking similarities in their stories and their towns - two places where America's drug war left deep and lasting scars. Here's Brian.
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BRIAN MANN: People in both communities say tough drug war policies that were supposed to make people safer just didn't work and, in some cases, wound up doing more harm than good. One reason I wanted to look at these two places together is because people are asking similar questions about the country's response to addiction, how it went wrong, how it could change.
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MANN: Brownsville is super-busy the afternoon Aaron and I walk along the shops.
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MANN: People are selling clothes and toys and sunglasses from tables on the sidewalk. When heroin and crack cocaine took root here in the 1980s, the government's response was to arrest people, lots of people, and send them to prison, often for decades. Brownsville's incarceration rate was among the highest in the nation.
HINTON: You know, they spending so much money on these prisons and to keep these kids locked up, they don't even spend a fraction of that money on sending them to college (laughter) like - or some kind of school, like some trade schools or something. Like, come on.
MANN: If Aaron sounds angry, it's because he is. A lot of people here are furious.
ALICKA AMPRY-SAMUEL: What the war on drugs did was actually tore families apart.
MANN: Alicka Ampry-Samuel, who represents Brownsville on New York City Council, told me change is happening here finally.
AMPRY-SAMUEL: We're seeing the dismantling of a lot of those policies today.
MANN: New York state's most severe drug war-era laws have been steadily repealed. Ampry-Samuel says that means a lot fewer people from Brownsville going to prison. A bill passed earlier this year legalized marijuana, and it dedicated funding from marijuana tax revenues to help communities like Brownsville. She says there's already more money for drug treatment and health care and even some progress changing how police interact with her community.
AMPRY-SAMUEL: Conversation is not about policing anymore. The conversation is about public safety. And what does public safety mean?
MANN: People I talked to in Brownsville say after decades of the drug war feeling sort of inevitable and unstoppable, this shift feels meaningful.
HESSLER: You can keep going straight.
MANN: After leaving Brownsville, I'm in a car with Courtney Hessler, driving through Huntington. I want to know if things are changing here in West Virginia too. The city spreads along the Ohio River. It's a lot more conservative than Brownsville. There are a lot more pickup trucks. In important ways, the drug war played out differently here in Huntington. The main problem wasn't mass arrests and long prison sentences. Here, federal agencies created to protect people from drugs allowed pharmaceutical companies to flood the community with prescription painkillers.
HESSLER: It was pretty bad. It was - 81 million opioid pills over an eight-year period came into this area.
MANN: People here voiced the same anger and confusion I heard in Brownsville. How did we spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting this drug war and wind up with more addiction, more overdoses than ever? Right now Courtney's covering a big opioid trial for her newspaper where a lot of that history is being dredged up.
HESSLER: I think it's important. You know, there's thousands of children that grew up the way that I did. These people want answers.
MANN: Like in Brownsville, there's a sense here this could be kind of a pivotal moment. If Huntington wins in court, corporations that profited from opioid sales could be forced to pay billions of dollars to help communities fund things like drug treatment and foster care. Even without that money, people say there have been important changes. The federal government finally cut the supply of opioid pills to local pharmacies. Huntington has also pioneered really innovative programs to help people with addiction get treatment and housing.
AMANDA COLEMAN: We're a place where people can come and get out of the weather, get showers, laundry, food, clothing.
MANN: I stop in to visit with Amanda Coleman. She runs a sprawling social service hub called Harmony House. There are projects like this all over Huntington - a shelter for moms and babies affected by opioids, another program to help people using heroin and other drugs avoid contaminated needles. Coleman says more people in Huntington are accepting that drug addiction is an illness, not something that can be defeated in a war.
COLEMAN: It's a part of everyday life here, basically.
MANN: After visiting Huntington and Brownsville, I think there is one more way their stories are intertwined. People in both places say there's progress, but changes feel fragile. For places in America where the drug war landed hard, this recovery won't be fast or easy.
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SHAPIRO: Brian Mann covers addiction for NPR. You can find more of his work for NPR's series on the drug war at the link in our episode notes. So as we mentioned, after 50 years, that war looks very different than it used to. One state where that difference is really striking is Oregon. Last November, voters there passed a measure called Measure 110, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs like heroin or meth. People caught with certain amounts of those drugs now get a civil citation like a traffic ticket, not a criminal charge. The citation comes with a fine - a hundred dollars - but the fine gets waived if you agree to get a health screening through an addiction recovery hotline, an assessment that might lead to counseling or treatment. In theory, it's exactly the kind of humane shift away from America's war on drugs that critics have been calling for. In practice, implementation has been a challenge.
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MIKE MARSHALL: They put the cart before the horse.
SHAPIRO: Mike Marshall is co-founder of the group Oregon Recovers. He says while the new law did include some treatment funding, there are big questions about whether that money can be used strategically to scale up state services like residential and outpatient treatment and recovery or harm-reduction programs.
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MARSHALL: Our big problem is our health care system doesn't want it, is not prepared for it, doesn't have the resources for it and honestly doesn't have the leadership to begin to incorporate that.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Eric Westervelt reports from Portland, Ore., on where the state goes from here.
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MARSHALL: So a key selling point of decriminalization in Oregon is that it will significantly reduce racial and ethnic disparities in convictions and arrests. Here along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in northeast Portland, Julia Mines runs what's called The Miracles Club. It's the state's only place targeting the African American recovering community. And they run up to three recovery meetings every day, all year.
JULIA MINES: At the beginning of this, I wasn't for it. It took me to go to prison to get on the right track.
ERIC WESTERVELT: Mines had gone far off track due to a cocaine addiction. She says she lost jobs, friends, her health and a child to adoption. Mines says she changed her mind on 110 when she realized it might mean a chance to end the criminalization of addiction that continues to ravage people in her community. She's now on one of the measure's implementation working groups.
MINES: I made my voice loud and clear. I'm here representing the African American community and that if we're going to implement this, we need to have resources for the people that are just getting those citations.
WESTERVELT: This month, Miracles was among 48 groups statewide that got a portion of the first wave of new treatment funding. Another key person helping to lead Oregon through this rocky decriminalization transition is 36-year-old Tony Vezina. He's the new chairman of Oregon's Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission, which is tasked with improving treatment services.
TONY VEZINA: Been in and out of jail since I was about 14. You know, my roots are from trailer parks in Pocatello, Idaho, history of crime and trauma and poverty in both sides of my family. You know, and I was a product of all that.
WESTERVELT: Vezina is now nine years sober from what he says was a crippling meth and heroin addiction. He founded and runs the state's first youth-centered recovery program called 4th Dimension in Portland, which hosts daily recovery meetings.
MARCUS: Hello, my name is Marcus. And I am a recovering addict. What's up, guys? My clean date is...
WESTERVELT: The session on Wednesday is called Sounds of Recovery, encourages people to recite an original poem or maybe rap or play an original tune on the group's beat-up acoustic guitar.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) Push these stones till the sweat turns into blood.
WESTERVELT: As Oregon's new drug policy commission chair, 4th Dimension Director Vezina says he's committed to having some tough conversations across a treatment community that remains divided over the way forward.
VEZINA: Now we need to rapidly design a new system strategically. But Oregon doesn't operate strategically around this. We don't have a new intervention system. We don't have a recovery-oriented system of care. We've just decriminalized.
WESTERVELT: So far, the nonprofit that runs Oregon's new 24/7 addiction help line says it's done just 29 health addiction screenings from calls from people cited for possession. But Tara Hurst, director of Oregon's Health Justice Recovery Alliance, isn't worried. It's very early days, and people need to see the big picture, Hurst says, and get to work helping make Oregon what she hopes will become a model for states looking to stop arresting and charging people with a substance use disorder.
TARA HURST: This could make or break the movement on some level if Oregon wasn't able to pull it together. And so I hope other states take notice, and they watch. And we're going to learn a lot.
WESTERVELT: And Multnomah County prosecutor Mike Schmidt says what Oregon was doing, merely tinkering with policy, just wasn't working.
SCHMIDT: Maybe there would have been a better way to glide path this on. But sometimes, you just need to stop the way you're doing it to put some urgency behind fixing the systems that need to come into place.
WESTERVELT: So a bold, voter-mandated experiment is underway in Oregon, one treatment veterans hope they get right because, ultimately, it's an experiment with people's lives.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Eric Westervelt. That story comes from NPR's special series, The War On Drugs: 50 Years Later. And you can find more from that series at the link in our episode notes.
It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.
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