Academics have been consistent critics of the drug war — not from the front lines, mind you, but from many miles away, surveying the casualties and second-guessing the battle plans.
From the safety of their classrooms and university offices, scholars dissect drug policy as they would a bloated cadaver, cracking open the chest and taking notes. After completing the autopsy, they wash up and drive home, personally unaffected by the cause of death: Drug prohibition killed this patient and many more.
In fact, scholars who maintain a personal distance from drug warfare arguably achieve greater objectivity in their analysis. Unlike the late Timothy Leary, contemporary academics are not suggesting that America "turn on, tune in and drop out."
Today's scholars — such as Yale law professor Steven Duke and Dartmouth medical professor Michael Gazzaniga — have questioned drug prohibition as a source of social injustice, medical mistreatment and pure economic folly. Nor will you hear the most famous pro-legalization academics, Stanford's Milton Friedman and George Shultz, recounting the joys of narcotics; instead, these two former presidential advisers see the naive goals of prohibition as unobtainable in a free society.
But every once and a while, the drug war hits home and becomes more than just another failed public policy subject to academic critique. Such is the tragic case of Gennady Danilenko, a law professor at Michigan's Wayne State University, described by many as a brilliant scholar.
Danilenko became ill while traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit on Sunday, April 15, forcing officials to divert the flight to Newfoundland. While performing emergency surgery for an apparent heart attack, doctors discovered the source of the professor's demise: the ingestion of 13 cocaine-filled balloons, six of which had burst in Danilenko's stomach.
Wayne State's faculty and students were obviously shocked by Danilenko's death, but so were a few government agents. "It's kind of bizarre that a person with his degrees and his status would be smuggling like this," said a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
We may never know the exact motive behind the professor's ill-fated trafficking scheme, whether he was driven by addiction, debt, greed or some other compelling force.
And, quite frankly, the inexplicable nature of this tragedy — given Danilenko's professional stature and prestige — only reconfirms an important lesson of prohibition: Drug warfare knows no intellectual or socioeconomic boundaries.
Although they bear a disproportionate burden of narcotics enforcement, residents of inner-city ghettos are not the only ones smuggling, selling or using drugs. White-collar businessmen, Ivy League-trained lawyers and doctors, PhD's in the arts and sciences and, yes, even university professors are committing drug crimes.
As a law professor myself, I found Danilenko's death exceptionally disturbing — and yet, this is standard fare for prohibition, with a drug-related tragedy hitting nearly everyone's home on occasion. The religious community, for instance, was shocked by last month's midair slaughter of an American evangelist and her child; the Peruvian air force apparently mistook the missionaries' plane for that of a drug runner.
Sports fans can still remember the day that college basketball star Len Bias died, while lovers of music and entertainment continue to mourn the fatal overdoses of John Belushi, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix and many others.
As a society, America is suffering the torture of a thousand cuts, each one representing the drug-war death of a public icon or hero, a family member or friend, a colleague or student. Individually, they seem insufficient to inspire a broader discussion and debate on prohibition or to spur government reform. But collectively, these drug-war casualties expose a social disease eating away at the American conscience.
Must each profession, each business, and each family experience the loss of a colleague, friend or relative before we rethink the war on drugs? And just how many Danilenkos must die before society considers alternatives to drug warfare?
Erik Luna is associate professor at the University of Utah College of Law who specializes in criminal law and procedure.