“What are you two Asians doing in a black neighborhood?” the driver asked.
“We are reporters.” I answered.

The driver, an immigrant from Pakistan, pointed to a row of houses that were either burned down or boarded up and asked: “Do you think this is America?”

I don’t know the answer. Austin, and other neighborhoods on the west and south sides, is obviously part of America. But it is not the America that I pictured.

I began to search for answer to the question, and through this process I learned. a shocking fact – that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the country houses 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. So what happens to “land of the free, home of the brave?”

As I talked to community leaders, a lot of them mentioned the “war on drugs,” and especially how it applies to African-Americans.

It all started in 1971 when then-President Richard Nixon declared that, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.” Since then, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on drug enforcement. According to a story in Quartz, the U.S. now spends more than $40 billion each year on drug prohibition.

In fact, some current and former law enforcement officers have begun to question the effectiveness of the war on drugs.

James Gierach, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney in the 1970s and now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, believes the war on drugs creates the very problem it tried to prevent.

“Al Capone was in favor of the prohibition of liquor. Why? Because it was the foundation of his business. It enabled him to make $2 billion dollars a year in today’s currency…. Drug cartels around the world are in favor of the war on drugs… because when you outlawed something that people want, it makes that commodity the most valuable commodity in the face of the earth. We tell the kids don’t do drugs and we slide a pot of gold next to the choice we tell them not to take,”

David Simon, a former crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun and creator of the TV show “The Wire,” said in the documentary “The House I Lived In” that the war on drugs undermines the law enforcement’s ability of fighting crime.
“There are lots of detectives I admired for their professionalism, for their craft. The drug war created an environment in which none of that was rewarded,” he said. “A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store. Probable cause? Are you kidding?”

According to Simon, the “simplicity” of a drug arrest means a police officer can make more arrests and get paid for the extra hours he worked.

“Compare that guy to the one guy doing police work—solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. If he gets lucky, he makes one arrest for the month… At the end of the month, when they look and when they see officer A, he made 60 arrests. Officer B, he made one arrest. Who do you think they make the sergeant?” Simon said.

Therefore the war on drugs creates an incentive for law enforcement to go into a neighborhood and arrest people while interring with other police works. In the long run, it creates the distrust between police and the community.

In my opinion, drug abuse is a public health issue instead of a criminal justice issue. The tax money should go to prevention and treatment instead of building prisons.

Drugs do not dignify individuals, and there is no argument. But the war on drugs that lasts for more than 40 years do not accomplish any of its original goals.

Now add to that another risk: fueling the “narco wars” in Mexico that have pitted government troops against powerful drug traffickers. At least 22,700 have died in drug-war-related violence in Mexico since 2007, by some estimates. That’s more than eight times the number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001.

“America’s love affair with illegal drugs fuels the major Mexican drug cartels,” former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration Robert C. Bonner said. “[It] allows them to be powerful, corrupt, and to engage in a lot of violence and intimidation in Mexico and elsewhere.” Bonner has also served as a federal judge and Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Marijuana is often viewed as the most innocuous of illicit substances, and it is the most commonly used illegal drug in the United States. But it is hardly innocent. Many Americans think of cocaine and heroine when they think of the drug wars in Mexico, but by some estimates, marijuana is the most significant source of revenue for the cartels.

“Marijuana represents a good portion of the cash flow of the Mexican cartels, and it represents the most key drug on the southwest border by huge amounts,” Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne said. “I don’t think people realize that when they increased the demand for marijuana in the United States, oftentimes they directly benefit drug trafficking and the violent cartels in Mexico.”

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron says that “prohibition pushes the market underground … [resulting in] ancillary negatives,” like the violence and corruption along the border.

Miron points out that not all marijuana in the U.S. is trafficked from Mexico; some is raised domestically. But because of a lack of any product regulation, it is often impossible to know from where – and from whom – a given amount of marijuana comes. Many users inevitably, if unwittingly, help fund the drug wars that haunt the United States’ southern neighbor.

In a July 2010 prepared congressional testimony for a House hearing on international counternarcotics strategy, Adam Isacson, senior policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America reported: “Decreased violence in Colombia has been offset by a sharp rise in drug-related homicides in Mexico. Today, Mexico is the center of gravity for groups involved in illegal drug transshipment, which is by far the most profitable link in the drug trafficking chain.”

The tactics and levels of organization of the Mexican cartels also have changed. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that “Violence reached acute levels [in Mexico] in 2006 and has only worsened since then; decapitations became common and cartels began disseminating videos documenting gruesome deaths – ‘narco messages’ – to threaten rival cartels and government officials. While initially the majority of violence was between cartel members, in the past two years, police officers, journalists, and politicians have become frequent targets of drug killings. In May 2008, for instance, Mexico’s acting federal police chief was killed in a drug hit.”

The reports of death and conflict continue. A pregnant American consulate worker and her husband were killed in broad daylight in March of this year, in the violence-ridden border town of Ciudad Juarez. And on July 22, Mexican officials received a tip that led them to several mass graves in the northern part of the country. At least 50 bodies were buried there.

Drug-related conflict could also be creeping over into the United States. The Maricopa County attorney’s office in Phoenix told the New York Times that it received 241 reports of border-related kidnappings or hostage-takings in 2008, compared with just 48 in 2004.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the enormous toll the drug wars have taken south of the Arizona border.

“The Mexican drug cartels pose a national security threat to Mexico in the same way that, at one time, the Colombian drug cartels threatened the Colombian state,” Bonner said.

That, in turn, poses a problem for Mexico’s northern neighbor.

While Bonner said he does not think drug cartel activities pose a substantial national security threat to the U.S. itself, the Mexican government’s battle with the cartels is still of significant concern to the United States.

“It would be untenable [for the U.S.] to have a state on our border that is controlled by narcotraffickers,” he said.

On this side of the border, in 2008, over 40% of American 12th graders had used marijuana at least once, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Bonner said that while he believes cocaine and methamphetamines are ultimately more profitable for the cartels, “it all adds up.”

When young Americans buy even small amounts of marijuana that is trafficked by the cartels, “they’re contributing to criminal organizations that have engaged in and are engaging in wanton violence in Mexico and elsewhere,” Bonner said.

“They’re aiding and abetting.”

WASHINGTON — Military doctors are prescribing more meds to soldiers to treat depression and anxiety, yet there is an increasing rate of suicides among active duty soldiers and veterans. This includes recent veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Meanwhile pharmaceutical companies – the Big Pharma crowd and an increasing showing from low-cost generic brands – are benefitting from the uptick in business without clear disclosure of just how much each is receiving.

The Military Times and affiliated Army Times Group publications have been doing a series of reports pointing out the liberal distribution of prescription medicine to those in the military and a potential connection to the mental instability that leads to suicide. Although ­a combination of therapy and medication has proven to be of significant help in treating depression, anxiety and trauma, it may be the case that active troops have access to a dangerous variety of drugs without much concurrent therapy. The Times based its report on the government data obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. Use of antidepressants in the general population itself has exploded, yet it has not come with such a spike in suicide and possibly includes more clinical care.

While the Afghanistan/Pakistan and post-Saddam Iraq battles drag on interminably, the continued presence of terrorism, either independent or organized, assures the continuation of ubiquitous U.S. armed forces and support personnel. Troops are subjected to myriad traumas and stress, only to come back stateside with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in many cases and then even the most iconic among them have struggled in attempts to receive care. This may compound the problems created by the loose dealing of prescription drugs to active soldiers, experts say.

The number of annual suicides per 100,000 troops serving has risen from 8 in 2001 to 14 in 2009, according to the Times analysis of Defense Logistics Agency data. What’s more, citing information from the Veterans Affairs Department, The Army Times reported last week that as many as 18 veterans are committing suicide each day.

Bart Billings, a doctor and retired colonel, recently testified ­ before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs that soldiers should not be taking antidepressants at all, let alone at the alarming rate and in such varied combination. “Drug cocktails,” however, have become common in the armed forces despite there being little research to support many of the combinations, according to Billings.

I caught Billings on the phone this weekend while he was at the Annual Combat Stress Conference, which he founded 18 years ago.

Billings is an outspoken critic of the lax oversight of ­what appears to be a huge proliferation of drugs in the field that is not being reported. He said that it’s hard to quantify how much of these kinds of medication are being used in the field , but that there are documented cases of sudden death as a result of so-called medication cocktails.

“It’s easier to figure out how many drugs are coming from Colombia to the U.S. than trying to figure out the number of drugs going to the field,” Billings said, in a reference to cocaine cartels.

Peter Breggin, Ph. D., presented an article to appear soon in a scientific journal in which he draws the clear connection between the use of antidepressants by soldiers put in stressful situations who are taught to use violence and increased incidence of suicide or even homicide.

Following the money

The Pentagon has more than a $6 billion annual budget for prescription drugs. I tried to find out if there is information available about just how much taxpayer money is going to which drug manufacturers, but ran into some road blocks.

The DLA, a part of the DoD, is the place that orders the drugs eventually used by all U.S. armed forces. That agency spent at least $1.1 billion on psychiatric and pain medication between 2001 and 2009, according to the Military Times report. Yet the DLA doesn’t purchase anything directly from the manufacturers such as Ely Lilly, Wyeth, Pfizer and GlaxosmithKline.

Instead, the DLA uses a network of pharmaceutical “prime vendors,” according to DLA spokeswoman Diana Stewart. So they contract with distributors in the pharmaceutical industry to purchase and deliver pharmaceuticals in different geographical regions while the prime vendors purchase direct from the manufacturers.

It’s not yet clear whether those in the DoD have a say in which manufacturers are used or if it would matter whether they are courted by pharmaceutical companies. Yet it is certain that the pharmaceutical industry shells out money for at least the travel of DoD doctors and other medical professionals.

The Center for Public Integrity had previously collaborated with Medill to report on the amount of money drug companies spend on travel for the Defense Department officials. The 2009 report showed that from 1998 to 2007, the medical industry paid more than $10 million for 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel.

Health care bill sunlight

The momentous Obama administration health care bill recently passed by Congress might actually illuminate how much the Department of Defense pays to each manufacturer, as a sunshine act actually will track the relationship between Big Pharma and physicians to see whether there’s any undue influence in who uses which drugs.

Until then, the DLA is working on gathering the information on its prime vendors, and the Army Times publications are working on another reporting package on the subject.