Border Reefer Madness -- Now and Then
Tom Barry
Each of us has our favorite example of how absurd, wasteful, or tragic U.S. border security policy is.
Measured by the numbers, the Border Patrol’s war on marijuana is currently my favorite one.
Anyone who follows what the Border Patrol is doing or who lives near the border knows that the Border Patrol is mainly a marijuana-control agency. A highly effective one, when measured by the number of seizures or the number of pounds of marijuana confiscated. Less effective, though, when measured by the growing number of marijuana consumers.
Here are some numbers that are worth remembering in effort to end border security escalation:
On the southwest border in 2011:
93.5 percent of all drug seizures by Border Patrol were marijuana.
99.3 percent of the total weight of drugs seized was marijuana.
Truthout recently published two pieces I wrote about the Border Patrol’s reefer madness. Links are here, and articles pasted below.
Securing the Homeland Against Marijuana
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13094-securing-the-homeland-against-marijuana
Past U.S. Example Could Stem Border Arrests and Violence
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13109-the-past-may-be-the-future-of-marijuana-on-the-border
The first article is an overview of the Border Patrol’s marijuana war, couched in my opinions. The second looks at a bit of the history of marijuana control – and the lack of it – on the border.
Lest you think that only marijuana backpackers or smugglers heading north are the only victims of this reefer madness, you only need to pass through any one of the dozens of Border Patrol checkpoints in the homeland – where the victims of the agents and their dogs are almost all U.S. citizens.
Along the border, the sheriff departments in border counties are making out like border bandits because of the escalated focus on drug control at these checkpoints. Most now have canine teams that can sniff out a joint, a pipe, or even a twig. Instead of heading these drug criminals over to DEA, the Border Patrol has a deal with the local sheriffs, who come to the checkpoints, pick up the offenders and their forbidden goods, hauls them to jail to be fingerprinted, charged, and heavily fined -- $750 a pop in Hudspeth County, for example.
And get this: Under the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative, the border sheriffs are compensated for their prosecution and jail expenses by the Justice Department. In the case of the notorious Hudspeth County in West Texas, the county has been overbilling and double-billing the DOJ, all the while hollering about the socialist Obama administration.
I visited the marijuana-stuffed evidence room in Sierra Blanca.
Deputy Mike Doyle told me, “We don’t care if its medical marijuana from those dopers in California, marijuana brownies – and we have quite a selection here – or just paraphernalia. It’s against our Texas law, and the law of the land.”
Tom
Securing the Homeland Against Marijuana
The US Border Patrol has recently released its new strategic plan, the 2012-2016 Border Patrol Strategic Plan, which the agency says is "risk-based."
What is the greatest risk to the border or cross-border threat to the "homeland"? Measured in numbers, that would be marijuana - the weed that citizens in Colorado and Washington on November 6 voted to legalize for recreational use and which is considered a legal medication in 17 states.
Close observers of anti-drug war and anti-drug prohibition campaigns variously describe the new measures to legalize marijuana use as a "tipping point" in the long struggle to overturn drug prohibition. The Washington Office of Latin America, an American non-governmental organization promoting human rights, observed that legalization and decriminalization are "voter-friendly" issues, obligating politicians to consider the stalled federal legislative campaign against drug wars and drug prohibition in a "new light."
Even as support for drug prohibition has steadily eroded both in the United States and throughout Latin America, on the border, the war against illegal drugs has hardened. Enforcing drug control laws appears to have become the principal focus of the border security buildup. Drug seizures along the US-Mexico border have soared, as the drug wars rage south of the border and as the federal government has channeled billions in new federal dollars for drug law enforcement by Border Patrol, US immigration officers, the FBI and local police.
However, as drug seizures, mostly marijuana, have reached record levels, unauthorized immigration flows have steadily declined - dropping to the lowest numbers in four decades. The Border Patrol states that it is protecting the homeland against "dangerous goods and dangerous people." But its own statistics show that it is largely focused on drug-war operations, especially against cross-border flows of marijuana.
For the Border Patrol, whose mandate is to "secure the border" between the ports-of-entry, this means, for the most part, arresting marijuana backpackers, who cross the border with 50 to 60 pounds of marijuana on their backs and without immigration documents. At highway checkpoints, once almost exclusively focused on immigration enforcement, drug control is currently the primary focus. At the spreading array of borderland traffic checkpoints - ranging from large permanent installations to temporary structures to roving roadblocks - Border Patrol agents still ask the citizenship of drivers.
But canine teams now do most of the work, sniffing out personal stashes and paraphernalia, as well as larger hauls of illegal drugs headed to major urban markets. The most effective Border Patrol checkpoints are not the ones stopping northbound traffic from Mexico, but rather the checkpoints on the east-west highways that catch thousands of unsuspecting citizen drivers. Many may have medical marijuana cards or just a joint or two of marijuana. But marijuana remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance - along with heroin and methamphetamines, under federal law. Thus, German shepherds have become the main instruments of border security as now practiced by the Border Patrol.
Measured by numbers, the outstanding result of increased border security operations over the past decade – doubling of the Border Patrol force, drone surveillance, and the virtual and real border fences – is the unprecedented amount of marijuana seized and marijuana carriers apprehended.
With the exception of two years (2008 and 2010), every year since 2001, when the current border security buildup began, the Border Patrol has reported record-breaking marijuana seizures. Before the US government declared that it would "secure the border" with new border security strategies and spending, the Border Patrol in fiscal year 2001 (ending on September 30, 2001) seized roughly 1.1 million pounds of marijuana. Last year the Border Patrol reported hauling in more than 2.5 million pounds of cannabis – an increase of more than 125% since the post-9/11 commitment to border security.
When measured by the number of drug seizures of cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, marijuana, and ecstasy, the Border Patrol reported 16,355 seizures along the southwestern border in fiscal year 2011 – 15,252 being marijuana seizures. Overall, marijuana accounts for more than 93 percent of drug seizures along the US-Mexico border. Along many stretches of the southwestern border, particularly rural areas, agents patrolling the border only rarely, if ever, encounter anything but marijuana. Illegal drugs other than marijuana are most often discovered near urban areas or while stopping traffic already well within the country, since the higher-priced and more easily concealed drugs aren't crossed in areas patrolled by the Border Patrol but through the legal ports-of-entry.
Measured in pounds, marijuana is indisputably the drug-war heavy. Last year, the Border Patrol seized a record quantity of marijuana – 2,518,211 pounds. That compares with 2 pounds of ecstasy, 385 pounds of heroin, 8,763 pounds of cocaine, and 1,838 pounds of meth.
The Border Patrol insists that dramatic declines in unauthorized immigration flows are directly related to its risk-based border security operations. More border security deters prospective unauthorized immigration, says the Border Patrol. But for reasons they don't explain, this deterrence strategy hasn't effectively deterred illegal drug flows. While the Border Patrol is capturing substantially more marijuana and other illegal drugs produced in Mexico, still more is flowing into the country to meet expanding markets, especially for marijuana. Increasingly, Americans are consuming marijuana – judged illegal and harmful by the federal government – legally, medically, and without penalty within the homeland.
The 2012-2016 Border Patrol Strategy, the new plan to secure the border, commits the agency to increased risk assessments and intelligence gathering. Yet most of the Border Patrol's threat assessments and intelligence operations have little or nothing to do with either public safety or homeland security. Instead, they are largely focused on the purported threat of marijuana.
The Border Patrol claims to be protecting "America's frontline" against threats to border and homeland security. Yet the numbers tell a different story. For the Border Patrol, border security and homeland security are mostly measured in marijuana statistics. Instead of truly formulating a new strategy for border control, the Border Patrol continues to wage an unsuccessful war against marijuana that has been tragic in human consequences, both in the homeland and in drug-war ravaged Mexico.
The Border Patrol insists that the billions of dollars the agency spends each year protects the homeland against "dangerous goods." As acceptance for marijuana and other illegal drugs grows in the United States, as made clear in the recent elections, the Border Patrol is on the wrong side a new political and ethical line in America. Border Patrol agents find themselves vainly attempting to secure the border against a relatively harmless good that a large number of Americans want.
What's marijuana have to do with national security, homeland security, or border security? That's a pressing strategic question for the Border Patrol, and also for the second Obama administration. [end]
Past Could Be Future in Border Marijuana Control
– Or Lack of It
The federal government's nearly 100-year-old move toward cracking down on marijuana consumption with regulation, enforcement, and prohibition has resulted in a boom in marijuana smuggling, drug-war violence and mass criminalization and incarceration in the US. Perhaps it's time to change direction?
Could the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its border protection agencies end their fixation on marijuana control? No one knows what lies ahead, but DHS and the US Border Patrol may want to look to past border control practices of its legacy agencies as a guide to extricate themselves from their current billion-dollar-plus commitment to the marijuana drug war on the border.
Today, for DHS and the Border Patrol, marijuana is the moral and legal equivalent of transnational organized crime. Moreover, marijuana is regarded as a security threat to the homeland. Over the past five years, as the flow of illegal immigrants has diminished to historic lows, the Border Patrol is mostly on the lookout for marijuana.
Also see: Securing the Homeland Against Marijuana
The Border Patrol's border security buildup, including more agents, drones, and fences, has resulted in record quantities of seized marijuana and tens of thousands of Mexicans, Central Americans and US citizens arrested for violation of federal drug control statutes. Marijuana is a "Schedule 1" controlled substance, the same as heroin, under federal law.
In press releases and Congressional statements, the Border Patrol routinely points to record-breaking quantities of weed seized and presumably destroyed. Last year, the Border Patrol boasted that its commitment to border security on the southwestern border yielded 2.53 million pounds of marijuana. These seizures, declared the Border Patrol, are a direct strike against what it formerly called the drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico, which in the past couple of years have been relabeled as transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).
Marijuana seizures, along with the apprehensions of those illegally crossing the weed across the border (usually in bundles tied to their backs), are successes in the border campaign to "disrupt and dismantle" the TCOs. In other agency releases, the Border Patrol prefers different alliterations.
The agency's Arizona-based Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats (ACTT) aims to "deny, degrade, disrupt, and ultimately dismantle criminal organizations and their ability to operate; engage communities to reduce their tolerance of illegal activity." Alternatively, the Border Patrol sometimes deploys other "d" words, saying its drug war operations aim to "detect and deter" TCO activities.
The Border Patrol doesn't say how many members of the TCO leadership have fallen to the agency. But it does regularly issue press releases lauding drug war seizures and arrests.
What's so striking about these figures is that these drug war victories only rarely involve illegal drugs other than marijuana.
Measured by the weight, the Border Patrol in 2011 seized 2,529,211 pounds of heroin, marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, and ecstasy along the southwestern border.
The marijuana seizures weighed 2,518,211 pounds - comprising 99.3 percent of the total. Measured by the number of seizures of these illegal drugs, marijuana constituted 93.5 percent of the total of Border Patrol drug seizures between the ports of entry along the US-Mexico boundary.
Since the early 1990s, the US government has been stepping up its efforts to control drug flows across its borders. Until 1914 - when the US Congress passed the Harrison Act, the first in a mounting number of federal anti-drug laws - there was little effort to control narcotics (such as heroin and opium), stimulants (such as cocaine), or psychoactive plants (such a marijuana). In the 1890s, you could even order a syringe and a small stash of cocaine through the Sears & Roebuck catalog - for $1.50 plus handling.
As addiction rates increased, calls for a crackdown against heroin, cocaine, and opium mounted after the turn of the century. As the support for drug prohibition expanded, marijuana was largely ignored. Cannabis could be grown almost anywhere, but most of the weed crossed into the United States from Mexico. Marijuana, or "marihuana," is a portmanteau word, joining the Spanish names María and Juana. Thus, the English nicknames Mary Jane and Mary Warner.
The drug prohibition era began through the implementation of tax and certification regimes - not with a zero tolerance mandate. Initially, it was widely accepted in Congress and among law enforcement agencies that there were legitimate medical uses for opiates and even stimulants.
The Harrison Act of 1914 aimed to end the recreational market for heroin, opium and cocaine, but was not intended to stop physicians from prescribing narcotics. The Harrison Act was self-described as "An Act To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes."
Although the objective of the Harrison Act was to regulate the domestic market, the legislation ushered the Customs Agency Service - later Customs Service, currently divided into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) - into drug control in a major way for the first time, both because the agency was empowered to enforce the act at the border and also because this first foray in drug prohibition legislation led to a boom in cross-border drug smuggling.
Marijuana was not on the radar of drug prohibition proponents at the time the Harrison Act became the law of the land. By the 1930s, however, drug prohibition advocates had succeeded in instituting marijuana bans in many states. The anti-marijuana movement was in large part a backlash against demographic, racial, and cultural changes. The violence and disruption of the Mexican Revolution caused many Mexicans to flee north, and some of these immigrants introduced the recreational use of marijuana to US society.
Assertions that marijuana use led to crazed violence by Mexicans and African Americans were common in the Congressional hearings on drug control in the 1930s. Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger introduced in the Congressional record a letter to the editor of a newspaper in Alamosa, Colorado, that stated: "I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions."
What the antimarijuana campaign called the "marijuana menace" was the subject of the 1936 propaganda film Reefer Madness, which affirmed common beliefs among older and white Americans that marijuana was driving the youth of America crazy and into alien cultures, like the jazz of African-American and other vanguard musicians.
But the US government didn't see marijuana as the threat to public health, safety, and national security that it currently does. At the time, community healers and the medical sector were still exploring the medicinal and therapeutic uses of marijuana, and US businesses were legally selling hemp fiber, oil and seeds.
In its Narcotics Manual of 1927, the US Customs Agency Service stated: "Neither is there any federal law specifically regulating the importation of Marihuana, but by regulation under the Food and Drugs Act, Collectors of Customs are directed to refuse delivery of all consignments of Marihuana, unless the importer shall first execute a penal bond conditioned that the drug referred to will not be sold or otherwise disposed of for any purpose other than in the preparation of a medicine."
The federal government gradually began cracking down harder on marijuana distribution, both in the domestic market and on the border. The US Border Patrol was created in 1924, but it was not until the late 1930s that the agency was given a clear mandate about marijuana enforcement.
Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which brought cannabis into the drug control structure established by the Harrison Act for heroin, opium and cocaine. A high tax was levied on marijuana distribution by this 1937 drug act, the main proponent of which was Anslinger, the antidrug crusader who was commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Under the provisions of the Marijuana Tax Act, the federal government made marijuana control its business for the first time - through regulation of the importation, cultivation, possession and marketing of the cannabis plant.
Although it was not explicitly prohibited, the antinarcotics legislation put marijuana for the first time in the same regulatory framework used to crack down on heroin, opium and cocaine - whose principal victims were the poor and people of color, not predominantly middle- and upper-class consumers.
It remained legal to import marijuana into the country, and the US Customs Agency Service did collect taxes and affix a certifying stamp on burlap bags of marijuana that met its requirements for legal use and sale. But the end result was that marijuana fell subject to an increasingly restrictive regulatory climate that by 1970 had evolved into complete drug prohibition.
President Richard Nixon became the first drug warrior in the White House. Under his leadership, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, under which marijuana was classified as a Schedule 1 controlled substance. That means, according to the federal government, the substance has a high potential for abuse, has no currently accepted use in medical treatment in the United States and can't be used safely - even under medical supervision. Other Schedule I substances include peyote, DMT, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), and heroin.
At the time that Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, the US Customs Service Agency was not preoccupied with securing the border against cross-border flows of marijuana, as the Department of Homeland Security is today. The agency's narcotics manual noted: "Marihuana may be cultivated or grown wild in almost any locality. Inasmuch as this drug is so readily obtained in the United States, it is not believed to be the subject of much organized smuggling from other countries."
But the federal government's steady move away from noninterference toward regulation, enforcement and prohibition has resulted in a boom in marijuana smuggling, horrific drug-war violence in producer and transition countries, and mass criminalization and incarceration in the United States.
Today, the Customs and Border Protection agency, especially the Border Patrol, has made marijuana enforcement the chief operative focus of its border security mission.
One can only speculate at what point the federal government will begin reversing its border control practices, perhaps by once again taxing and stamping marijuana imports. Or even - with the advance of a medical marijuana and marijuana legalization - end the agency's misguided and ineffective commitment to marijuana enforcement entirely?
Recalling the scenario described in the narcotics manual of the mid-1930s, we may see the future of marijuana.
It just may be possible that some day, sooner than we think, we could see a time when marijuana is again grown throughout the United States outside of a drug prohibition regime, thereby displacing Mexican and other foreign suppliers, ending the need for so much "border security" spending and undercutting the foreign drug warriors – both the legal and illegal ones.