The speed and scope of the leftward lurch of the Biden Administration since inauguration day has been nothing less than breathtaking. From the blizzard of executive orders to the “woke” pedigrees of appointees, we are not merely being steered toward more progressive policies and “settled” dogmas, we’re being driven like cattle toward a utopian feedlot designed by big government to make small citizens. It is truly a Brave New World.
The utopian – or more accurately, dystopian – state prophesied by Aldous Huxley in 1931 envisioned a future America so narcissistic and narcotized by ubiquitous and easy pleasures that its population had become stupefied, malleable and easily coerced because of its love of comfort and servitude. Such willing and incoherent passivity on the part of the masses was achieved through the universal and unbounded use of “soma,” Huxley’s euphoric drug made widely available to, at once, please and pacify, satisfy and subjugate, gratify and enslave.
Huxley’s prophetic dystopia has often been compared to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which warned us against the totalitarian jackboots and oppressive surveillance of “Big Brother.” Nevertheless, as social critic Neil Postman has observed, it is far more likely that we “will dance and dream ourselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting drug-induced pleasure. Seemingly foretelling our current state, we now apparently choose to allow, as a matter of government policy, all forms of psychoactive and neurochemical recreation among a pampered and sheltered population, and then sympathetically provision the deliverance of ever more government services to rescue the citizens from themselves.
The much anticipated release of the Biden Administration’s policy priorities concerning drug trafficking and abuse was announced this month by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). As predicted, it is long on sensitive, therapeutic strategies and short on actually controlling illegal drugs. In fact, the administration’s objectives mention nothing about protecting our communities and our nation from illegal drug manufacturers and traffickers; nothing about enforcing our legitimate state and federal drug laws; and nothing about securing our borders from violent transnational criminal organizations.
Instead, the White House identifies five key policy priorities: 1) Advancing recovery-ready workplaces and expanding the addiction workforce, 2) Confronting racial equity issues related to drug policy, 3) Supporting evidence-based prevention efforts, 4) Enhancing evidence-based harm reduction efforts, and 5) Expanding access to evidence-based treatment. And all of these aspirations, they proclaim, are “rooted in science” designed to “build back better,” as if our current drug crisis could be solved with scientifically deployed economics, racially oriented benevolence and snappy slogans.
What’s old is new again. The recycling of the tired and feckless policies from Obama’s presidency are clearly on display in all areas of the new executive branch, with drug policy being no exception.
Flashing back to 2010, the Obama White House proudly issued its “Principles of Modern Drug Policy” where, full of hope and change, it declared its ten principles designed to reduce drug use and its consequences in “the 21st century.” The strategy began by appealing for “compassionate, and humane drug policies,” and then soared into “protect human rights,” and “support and expand access to medication-assisted therapies,” and listed, among other helpful things, the necessity to “reform criminal justice systems.” All clearly laudable goals. Incomprehensibly, however, one had to scroll all the way down to the final principle to find anything resembling a core function of our nation’s office on Drug Control. Number ten – Number Ten! – listed “protect citizens from drugs.” Yet with Biden’s new iteration, we have apparently “progressed” beyond even this single afterthought of a need to safeguard the country from criminals.
We have become schizophrenic in many of our policies that could potentially necessitate the unkind and distasteful application of legal sanctions. As we “reimagine” drug law enforcement in our country, we now seemingly find repugnant the notion of promoting lawful behavior and, therefore, instead, begin to direct our drug control institutions along the same path of agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is practically no longer allowed to enforce immigration law for fear of offending the poor illegal aliens (er, undocumented migrants); or Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), which, having been hamstrung for years, is relegated to minimizing gun violence over the enforcement of gun laws.
The Biden drug control plan is akin to ceasing the enforcement of our traffic laws—even repealing them entirely—in order to promote “equity,” while simultaneously funding the limitless proliferation of first aid stations, emergency rooms and medical examiners needed to handle the explosion of traffic-related injuries and deaths. All, of course, while being exceedingly careful not to “stigmatize” the irresponsible or reckless drivers themselves.
We can’t control and constrain this modern epidemic by treating only its downstream destructions. Civilization must be defended. This is our society—one worth fighting for. And fight we must. Not simply with compassion and caring, although these are important facets to our panoply of reactions, but also with an aggressive and wide-ranging drug law enforcement response that upholds the rule of law and what is right against a constant onslaught of amoral predators who leave only human suffering and social decay in their never ending pursuit of riches. To not target, arrest and imprison those who prey upon our fellow citizens—sometimes with unimaginable violence and barbarity—would not only be cowardly, it would be grossly immoral.
Maintaining prohibitions against mind-altering and highly-addictive drugs does more than merely reduce availability, it buttresses society’s message that drug use is wrong. And as the eminent sociologist James Q. Wilson once instructed, “Drug use is wrong because it’s immoral. And it’s immoral because enslaves the mind and steals the soul.”
The majority of Americans understand that laws controlling the unrestricted availability of dangerous and addictive drugs are necessary and that the ones we ask to enforce those controls are not the bad guys. They recognize that drugs spawn and intensify violent crime, degrade families and communities, and undermine the rule of law. And they deeply comprehend that our police, freely choosing to bear the public trust and, if necessary, standing ready to give their “last full measure of devotion,” are doing exactly what their democratically elected legislators ask them to do on our behalf in order to maintain safety and order in society.
Twenty-five years after his book was published, Huxley wrote: “In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice, it was a political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The daily soma ration was an insurance agent against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was the people’s religion.” Huxley’s brilliant literary classic was meant to be a caricature, a “perfected” American future where, through an all-caring and supremely compassionate government, everyone was happy, every appetite appeased. But it turned into a nightmare.
To think that we can tackle our nation’s current drug crisis solely through gentle and therapeutic programs while ignoring the existential requirement to reduce drug availability by enforcing the law—to say nothing of the need to re-stigmatize drug use—is at best folly, and at worst, will ultimately usher in a catastrophic, brave new world.
Vaughn Steiger is the pseudonym of a career federal drug law enforcement professional who has served in various domestic and international assignments, as well being influential in the drug policy arena of Washington, DC. He currently lives in the heartland of America.