13 Aug 1999--This week, when the Garda seized
100,000 ecstasy tablets in Dublin, the haul was widely reported to have a "street value" of 1.2
million pounds. That phrase "street value" has become so familiar a part of drugs crime
reporting that we take it for granted. And yet it is, if you think about it, a rather obvious
distortion
Valuing a wholesale load of drugs by the price it might
fetch if and when it reaches the point of sale is like valuing a herd of rustled cattle by calculating
what the meat might sell for as prime steak in a fancy restaurant
By quoting such figures, rather than the actual cost to the
dealers of the drugs, the success of the operation is dramatised
This game suits the Garda and the media and probably does
little harm. It's worthy of attention only as evidence of the forgotten but pervasive legacy of
events which culminated 25 years ago this summer and which continues to be recognised by a
single word - Watergate
The long-term consequences of Watergate are agreed to be
profound. It massively enhanced the power of the press. It greatly diminished the prestige of
public office, creating, far beyond the US, a scepticism about the integrity of great leaders. All
of this has been commented on as nauseam, most recently during the Lewinsky affair
And yet the most profound effect of Watergate may well be
something which is seldom if ever mentioned in the history of those strange events - the
distortion of public policy on drugs
Who now remembers that the Watergate conspirators (G.
Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Egil Krogh and others) were among the fathers
of the "drugs war"? Their invention and manipulation of understanding the drugs problem was at
the heart of Nixon's attempt to build a private security apparatus to extend his power beyond its
democratic limits
The drugs war started out as a matter of cynical politics.
Nixon won office in 1968 largely on the back of a "law and order" campaign. He promised to
crack down on street crime and to make the US safe
Once in office, he quickly discovered that the president had no
real control over law enforcement and that he would have to run for re-election in 1972 in the
face of ample evidence that crime was continuing to rise and that all his tough talk had led
nowhere. The solution was to build up a panic about drugs and to invent a war on heroin in
which the president could be the hero
The men who would become notorious through Watergate
were brought in to create this war. They started by manufacturing an emergency, hyping up an
"epidemic" which had in fact reached its peak before Nixon took office and was actually
declining. In 1971, Nixon's administration claimed that heroin use was responsible for $18
billion of property crime a year. In fact, the total of all property crime in the US in 1971 was
$1.3 billion
Likewise, the total number of heroin addicts was wildly
exaggerated. Data for 1969 showed that there were 68,000 addicts in the US. These same data,
however, were statistically "reinterpreted" to increase the figure first to 315,000 and then to
559,000. By reworking precisely the same set of figures, Nixon's people produced a "tenfold"
increase in the number of junkies in two years. This increase was accepted by the media and
Congress
Then, in the real master stroke, the same figures were
reworked again to show that there were 150,000 addicts. This massive "decrease" was then cited
as the great success of the war on drugs. The term "street value" was given currency as a way of
glorifying these apparent successes
Nixon's drug war delivered large doses of farce. A doped-out
Elvis Presley was inducted as an honorary member of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs. A heroin "sniffer" device - conspicuously concealed in a Volkswagen camper van with a
snorkel sticking out of the roof - was dispatched to Marseilles in the belief that it could locate
the labs where morphine was turned into heroin. The intricate map of heroin labs it produced
turned out to be a map of Marseilles restaurants: the "sniffer" was unable to distinguish the
fumes emitted by heroin from those emitted by salad dressing
In spite of these and other fiascos, however, the drugs war
took hold in the public imagination. Instead of being understood as a health and social problem,
drug addiction was defined as a law-and-order problem. Movies and TV serials spread the image
of the drugs war around the world and shaped the way most countries responded to the problem
of drug abuse
There was, though, a hidden agenda. Nixon wanted all along
to have his own private security agency, beyond the control of the FBI, the CIA or any other
official government body, which could investigate leaks, tap phones and gather intelligence on
his internal and external opponents
G. Gordon Liddy came up with the brilliant idea that the best
way to do this was to establish the agency under the cloak of the war on drugs. Who, after all,
would complain if a little illegality was indulged in the cause of protecting the families of US
from the plague of heroin?
Nixon ordered John Ehrlichman and Egil Krogh to establish
this unit which was to be called the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
The Watergate conspirators who came to be known as "the
plumbers" - Liddy and Krogh, who had been leading figures in the administration's drugs war,
Howard Hunt, who was brought in from the CIA, and others - were assembled, a preliminary
version of this putative anti-narcotics agency. Krogh, the official co-ordinator of Nixon's war on
drugs, was also, in his unofficial capacity, the head of "the plumbers" who organised the
Watergate break-in
Liddy, the most colourful and notorious of "the plumbers",
was Krogh's assistant. Hunt was a consultant on the drug problem to the president's Domestic
Council. Essentially, Nixon's covert criminals and his drug warriors were one and same. As
Edward Jay Epstein put it in his remarkable 1977 investigation, Agency of Fear, "the new opiate
war provided the perfect cover for this seizure of power"
The weird thing is that long after these people were found out
and sent to jail, the rhetoric and imagery which they had pioneered in the manipulation of the
drugs issue retained its power
By a supreme irony, these criminals shaped a key aspect of
law enforcement worldwide. The notion that drug addiction needed to be fought as a war
between the state and the traffickers, rather than a social disease, took a hold which has yet to be
relinquished
It was a Watergate legacy so insidious that few people
remember its origins. Only now, after decades of waste and failure, is it becoming possible to
think of drug abuse in terms other than those which were invented by Nixon's crooks
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1999 The Irish Times |
