Social Judgments/Social Control. In the concluding chapter to his 1990 book Peaceful Measures, Bruce Alexander discusses why he believes Canada continues to promote the “war on drugs” even though there is ample evidence of its general failure. After spending most of his professional career working in the area of illicit drug policy, Alexander concludes that the war on drugs continues because it serves some deep-seated and mostly unconscious psychological needs of two of its principal participants: drug warriors and drug policy reformers (or “resisters” as he calls them). He writes:

I have become convinced that drug warriors and resisters use the War on Drugs to cope with the same set of emotional problems. The two most important of these problems are: (1) the need to blame someone for the unremitting evil and cruelty in the world, and (2) the painful conflict between opposing needs for societal control and for individual autonomy (Alexander 1990:329).

According to Alexander, blaming serves three major purposes: “First, blaming and attacking the scapegoat provides a feeling of at least doing something about a threatening situation. Second, identifying someone else as the cause of terrifying problems is one way of escaping the blame oneself. Third, blaming functions to organize and mobilize the emotions of a society. Terrifying problems become manageable when the evil derives from a single source” (Alexander 1990:330-331).

There is ample evidence of the tendency of society to severely judge those involved with illicit drugs and use them as scapegoats for major social problems like crime and delinquency. This has been true in the past and continues to be true today. One need look no further than the evening news or the increasingly popular real-life TV crime shows to confirm this fact. Or, for a more personal validation, the next time you are out socially and someone asks you what you do for a living, try telling them you are working to reform Canada’s overly-punitive drug laws. My experiences with how people react to this statement have been eye opening to say the least. There is no doubt in my mind that a majority of North American citizens are highly judgmental and ready to dole out harsh punishments against those that they consider socially deviant, including those involved with illicit drugs.

Assessing the contribution that social judgments and the need to blame make to the continued emphasis on supply reduction in Canadian drug policy is difficult because “most people’s involvement in scapegoating is not active but passive and symbolic,” so we are once again dealing with a fairly unconscious socio-psychological process (Alexander 1990:332-333). In lieu of directly assessing the influence of this potential explanation, however, it is possible to link social judgments indirectly to the observed enforcement bias by considering that scapegoating is likely a contributing factor to tough on crime political posturing discussed previously. Perhaps the tendency to react to illicit drug use and other criminal behaviour with harsher and harsher penalties is partially based on an unconscious desire to find someone to blame for some of our more intractable social problems.²¹ For the purposes of this article, then, this explanation will be assessed as less influential and reinforcing to the tough on crime political posturing explanation.

²¹ The promotion of harsh penalties for criminal behaviour is based on the theory of deterrence which says that if you make the costs of doing a crime are high enough, people will choose not to offend. Criminal justice research has shown, however, that many of the basic assumptions that sit behind the theory of deterrence are not valid. What is perplexing is why tough on crime initiatives continue to gain in popularity when there is significant evidence of their general ineffectiveness at reducing crime in the long term? If tough on crime initiatives do indeed serve a psychological need to blame and punish, as Alexander claims, then their increasing popularity is more understandable.