Fake War on Drugs

compiled by Editorial Staff

A REAL War on Drugs? - Just how serious is the government about dealing with illegal drug use and sales?

So far, perhaps because the black market for drugs generates $64 billion annually, the effort to curtail drug supply has been a dismal failure. The efforts to reduce demand have fared no better than our efforts to reduce supply. More drug education of the sort existing cannot be expected to reverse these trends. Indeed, study after study shows that current drug education programs have no effect on drug use. Why? They lack credibility. Most programs focus on marijuana, which the programs overly demonize, hoping to frighten young people away from experimentation. Half of American teenagers try marijuana anyway, and once they learn the dire warnings are not true, they begin to mistrust everything about drugs that adults tell them. And why shouldn't they? Why should they listen at all if they can't believe what the government tells them?

Politicians cannot run a REAL war on drugs. It seems simple to me that the idea of the "supply and demand" concept must be considered in drug eradication. Kill the DEMAND and shorten up the SUPPLY and the problem would be simply solved. All commercial entrepreneurs know that. In order to competently deal with the eradication of drugs the first step would be to eliminate the demand for it. Without a demand the supply would be useless. Just as those whose job it is to convince the public of a need for a product and they sell us goods everyday, the same people can UNSELL the public.

Wouldn't it be more effective to hire the best marketers on Madison Avenue to run a marketing campaign, countrywide that would be directed at non-drug use? Wouldn't the cost of running a campaign like that be more cost effective than incarcerating thousands upon thousands of people who are only returning back to the Communities doing the same thing and returning to jail in the end result?

In the hands of PROFESSIONAL “Marketers” a anti-drug campaign would entail billboards across the country making statements about drug use. Anti-drug advertisements would appear nationwide on television, radio, newspapers and the Internet launching an unprecedented media campaign aimed at reducing drug abuse among young people. That kind of anti-drug effort with it’s anti-drug campaign would outpace those by American Express, Nike and Sprint if the government really cared about the issue.

Every TV channel would be having commercials about it. Advertisements would appear simultaneously on all four major television networks marking the first time that substantial federal funds will be used to buy anti-drug spots that will be targeted at specific audiences. Federal funding will allow targeted ads to be shown -- for example, advertising aimed at young children can be guaranteed to appear on cartoon shows. Specific media campaigns can be developed for regional drug problems, such as the heavy use of crack cocaine in the urban areas.

In the mail would be circulars about anti-drug use. Radio programs would be talking about it every hour. Rewards would be offered to turn in drug dealers for rehabilitation. In every school there would be regular campaigns and educational seminars on the subject that would be relevant and honest. You couldn't open a newspaper without seeing the anti-drug campaign on FULL PAGE ADS. Mailers would be going out every week reminding folk of the bad effects upon the Community of illegal drug use upon the Community. Patrols would be set up in every drug infested Community. And again, rewards would be paid for "turn in a dealer" for rehab. That is a war!

The problem is simple: attacking supply without addressing demand guarantees that drug markets and drug sales will NOT cease; they'll simply move to another spot momentarily untargeted by police raids. Then they'll move again. This phenomenon accelerates the epidemic, casting a wider net than would otherwise be cast, reeling in child addicts who would otherwise stand a much better chance staying drug-free. It's important, again, to be very clear on this point: America’s law-enforcement efforts actually help peddle drugs. Society has become a pusher. It's hard to draw any other conclusion.

The government’s first priority ought to be gaining the trust of young people. They ought to offer a scientifically grounded education that allows youth and adults alike to learn all they can about drugs, alcohol and any other substance(s) they ingest. Young people will ultimately make their own decisions about drug use. When they do, they ought to have information from sources they trust to insure their safety.

Is it possible for the African American community to do this kind of massive advertising to promote an anti-drug message among themselves? Should it be the Black Communities responsibility? Since African Americans pay their share of tax dollars, shouldn’t something effective be expected in return for the ‘war on drugs’?

The reactions of White Americans to the Black drug problem has been of fear that their children might start using drugs, and that somebody else's children who already use drugs might steal from them, consequently the pressure of penalties for drug use have grown stiffer with every passing year. Three-strikes-you're-out laws have spread from state to state. Judges increasingly operate under "mandatory minimum" rules that force them to send drug users away for years. As a result the fastest-growing sector of our economy is prison building. Some 1.6 million people are now in jail in the United States. Prison-building is expensive: California, which leads the way in all things, now spends more on prisons than on universities, despite the fact that twenty-five years ago it spent about ten times as much on universities as on prisons.

America’s drug czars bravely claim that they're making more arrests, rounding up more petty dealers, intercepting more shipments of drugs. Hooray for them. Meanwhile, the number of addicts rises; the fortunes based on drug dealing continue to grow; and the economies of nations from Mexico to Colombia to Burma are distorted and corrupted by drugs headed for customers in the United States.

Politicians talk tough about drugs, as the population watches as more money is sucked away by prison building, but they can't explain to African Americans that there is not really any plot to lock up all their men.

It's been a fake war, like the inconclusive ones this nation waged in Korea and Vietnam. For the average citizen, being locked up for a drug offense might be a serious deterrent. To the population that buys, sells, uses, steals, and relies on hard drugs for their livelihood, a jail term is a nuisance. A cost of doing business. Free room and board! It’s all a farce.

Right now we are embarked on a course, which will incarcerate millions of people who, in the view of many of the prison wardens in this country, don't need to be in prison. We are turning loose violent felons so we can incarcerate more drug users. With these laws, we have the opportunity to imprison literally millions of people. America must decide how many millions of people they are going to put in prison to make this policy work.

The "three strikes" laws and mandatory minimums are only aimed at inner city low-level dealers. At the very least, they get dealers and users off the street, reducing the proportion of their lives in which they can prey on everyone else. But manifestly they are not enough. If they were, the problem would be solved already.

Drugs are an unacceptable threat to our Communities. They are destroying the life of our communities. They are directly or indirectly responsible for at least half the nation's total crime. Through history they have debauched populations. They make human existence less than fully human.

America is supposed to be at “drug-war”, and must ACT as if it is. Trafficking in drugs easily falls under federal jurisdiction. Nearly all the raw product crosses America’s national borders, and then state lines, so the federal government could take charge. The U.S. military should be dispatched with border-interdiction as a principal responsibility. And the federal criminal code should be constructed as if we are a nation at war. Like the Chinese during the first year of their rehabilitation program, the government should do everything possible to reform its addicts. Remember, “war is hell”.

The reality is that we're never going to declare all-out, Shanghai-style war on drugs. Whether or not that approach might ever work doesn't matter; it is not going to be tried. And since it's not, we should abandon the reckless current policy that gives us 90 percent of the social damage of a draconian approach with none of the anti-drug effect.

Fortunately America does have an alternative. A group called Drug Strategies released a poll of city police chiefs from across the nation. Overwhelmingly, the chiefs felt that the drug problem was serious, and that it was getting worse. But overwhelmingly they said that stricter sentences were not the answer. You could lock more people up for longer terms, the great majority of police chiefs said, and you would not make a dent in the supply of or DEMAND for drugs.

It should be noted that three-fourths of federal anti-drug money goes to police, prisons, border patrol and interdiction efforts in countries like Colombia. Only ONE-FORTH goes to prevention and treatment. Thirty years after “war” was declared, there are no fewer drug addicts but more people in prison for drug crimes than ever before.

Bernard C. Parks, Chief of Police, Los Angeles Police Department cites: “It's a failed policy to call anything a war when you're addressing issues in the community - when you declare war on your own community. There are many sides to address - the supply-and-demand side, prevention, intervention, rehabilitation, and enforcement.

John Timoney, Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia cites: “…The ones who are particularly affected by drugs are the minority communities. We get a lot of pressure to clean up neighborhoods where there are four or five drug dealers on the block. But then we also hear another cry: You're incarcerating a whole generation, giving up on too many people. Some members of the minority community may see an effort toward drug legalization as whites trying to continue genocide through drugs in the black community. The important thing is that you need to make sure the minority community is involved in this discussion.

Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator, Utah (Republican) cites: “We have to get some treatment for them. We haven't concentrated, as we should on first-time offenders. They can get drugs in jails, but there's no real education in the jails, and no treatment. …. Keep in mind, treatment alone won't do it, Enforcement alone won't do it. Education alone won't do it.

We have to reduce both the demand for and the supply of drugs. The movie Traffic drives home the point that law enforcement alone won't solve the problem.”

Henry A. Waxman, U.S. Representative, California (Democrat) cites: “We've always put the emphasis on the supply side when we ought to put the emphasis on the demand side. We ought to be making treatment available to anyone who wants it, to get a handle on addiction. That's clear. If you look at the voters in California, they were pretty clear [on Proposition 36]. They'd rather have people go to treatment than to a jail cell. How much longer can we keep warehousing people? It's not doing any good, and you can argue it's doing considerable harm.

The hardest thing for most people to do is holding themselves responsible and show strength of will and character. In order for addicts to change, there must be some reward that forces them to do what they need to do, a lever to hold them to accountability.

What would make a difference, they said, was a radically expanded program of treating people who were already addicted, and preventing addiction among those who had not yet fallen off the cliff. Remember, these were not hand wringing social workers talking, but people who pack guns and wear badges. In their view, an addict sent off to prison was still an addict who would go back to old ways upon getting out. Therefore, they recommended that the country shift money from prisons and law enforcement to new beds in treatment centers, with the aim of getting people past their addictions.

Most sane people recommend that the mandatory minimums for drug offenses be repealed, that the three-strike laws apply only to truly violent criminals, that treatment rather than imprisonment become the first line of defense and attack against the nation's drug problem. If twenty years of “war on drugs” have taught America anything, it is that a flawed strategy can never succeed, no matter how many resources are thrown behind it. Let America change the strategy and attack the problem at its root.
Tragically, as in past years, funding to reduce drug demand constitutes barely a third of the proposed federal narcotics budget while treatment budgets in many U.S. cities continue to drop. Drug offenders sentenced to treatment by judges languish in prison for months for lack of a bed, and about 1,200 people are on the city's waiting list for methadone maintenance. Meanwhile, across the United States treatment programs can accommodate only about 50% of hard-core users.

Drug laws--not drugs themselves--have been a very effective tool for keeping the African American community down.

FACT: One in three young Black men in the country is under criminal justice control. One in 15 Black males is incarcerated. Nearly 700,000 Black males (683.200) are behind bars, compared with 674, -400 white males.

This number has added to a growing prison population that ranks as the highest incarceration level in the Western World. Indeed, when it comes to putting African Americans in jail for drugs, the Bush camp is making the Nixon Administration look like a group of dope smoking liberals by comparison.

“Troubling as these numbers are, they tell only a part of the story of crime and prison in the lives of African-Americans. It is regrettably the case that American prisons, historically, have often confined poor people for whom simply being an African-American was either their only crime, or the real reason that their crimes were punished with incarceration rather than a lesser sanction. We see vestigial manifestations of racist uses of prisons in today's massive and continuing war on drugs” writes Robert Johnson Professor of Justice, Law and Society at The American University in Washington, D.C.

It's a known fact mostly people of color and poor people use crack, a cheaper drug that emerged in the 1980s. More whites use the more expensive powdered cocaine. Crack is the only drug that sets a mandatory prison term for possession, which contributes to the growing numbers of Blacks in jail even though we're a small percentage of the population.

It is not working: according to a recently released federal drug survey, drug use among teenagers has doubled just since 1992. And it is a source of racial tension: because crack-cocaine is mainly used by African-Americans, and because penalties for the use and sale of crack are generally much tougher than those for the use and sale of other drugs, there is a disproportionate number of blacks in jail. Anachronistic laws about marijuana possession are still in effect in many states and are unfairly tough when compared to laws dealing with other types of crimes.

Additionally, from the introduction of the highly addictive crack cocaine has caused widespread devastation in inner city communities. Under a tough 1986 crack law, vast numbers of Black males are serving long prison sentences, yet crack sales and crack addiction have not decreased. Despite the failure of the so-called “War on Drugs” to reduce drug use or crime in inner city neighborhoods, protests that the crack law targets blacks for prosecution and long prison sentences, and evidence that the CIA was involved in introducing crack cocaine into inner city neighborhoods, the government has refused to change its tactics and take measures to actually help the black community recover from the crack epidemic.

PRISON ECONOMY FOR AMERICA

The whole business of the prison industrial complex is providing an economic base for White America. Most of the employment gained from the “war on drugs” are favored to Whites i.e. the social workers, probation officers, prison guards, judges, court personnel, transportation departments, builders, engineers, rural town economy’s, prison supply companies, independent bidders (commissary items, pencils, pens and paper, sheets, towels, toilet paper, etc.), and many other HIDDEN costs of maintaining an INDUSTRY (not even including the benefit of FREE State labor on many products).

Making matters worse, it appears as if corporate America is getting in on the profiteering of the drug business, which only escalates the problem. American Express Cards has even entered the booming industry of building prisons. “Corporate America as a whole are profiting off the misfortunes of Blacks and people who are poor. The urban cities have become harvesting fields for a new crop, and when the crop in rural America are bad, farmers are able to tend the crop of Black men and women that have harvested from the streets of urban American.

Therefore, with this much money involved in sustaining the lives of so many White Americans it is no wonder that the so-called “war on drugs” is actually nothing but a ‘magic trick’, an illusion to pacify groups of people who cry out for something to be done about the drug problem that unduly and disproportionately affects the African American Communities.

ANTI PRISON CAMPAIGN TOO

But instead of treating drug use as a public health issue, America continues to criminalize it with endless street raids, which send hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders to prison. And incarceration is yet another way our policies actually promote drug use. Almost half of all inmates at DC's Lorton prison are nonviolent drug offenders, many of them sentenced under draconian federal laws requiring a mandatory minimum five years in jail for possessing as little as five grams of crack - the weight of two pennies.

Any offender who is not chronically deviant and prone to long-term drug use before incarceration has his chances ratcheted up significantly during five years exposure to the violence and dysfunction of prison culture.

It's time to end what amounts to state sponsorship of drug use in our cities. What is needed is to increase and improve treatment and drug education programs as possible first steps toward gradual decriminalization, but that is a whole another issue.

Salim Muwakkil writes:
“What's even sadder is that this growth of what many critics refer to as the "prison industrial complex" is being fueled largely by an absurd war on drugs. It has failed in its professed goal to wipe out drug abuse, as the availability of drugs has increased and the price decreased.

But this disastrous war also has nourished a ruthless underground economy, triggering the growth of both international drug cartels and domestic gang warfare, and endangered Americans' civil liberties. It also has had a vastly disproportionate effect on the African-American community. …

This is a national outrage. It is beyond explanation how Americans can continue to support the insane logic of a failed "war" that also exacerbates this nation's enduring racial divide.

The corroding effects of this war combined with the law-and-order posturing of opportunistic politicians has led us to this ignoble point where our nation leads the world in incarcerating its own citizens.

For African-Americans these misguided policies have enduring ramifications.
The jailing of so many young men (and increasingly young women) at the primary age of family formation stunts the vitality of the black community and contributes to family dissolution, single-parent households, increased incidence of HIV/AIDS, reduced job prospects and political participation (due to state-based disenfranchisement laws) and other debilitating effects.

We can do better. We must do better.”

Why should African people support drug policy reform?
1. Because the drug problem is tearing up the black community and we need to find a better approach - whatever it may be.
2. Because the drug laws were based on racism from their inception, so there is no reason to expect them to be balanced and productive laws today.
3. Because every major study of drug policy said that this policy only caused more harm than good, particularly for poor communities.
4. Because it is the morally right thing to do.
5. Because we want to rebuild Black men and make them productive citizens, not destroy them.

Does this support legalization?

Not at all. We are asking you to recognize the simple proposition that prison has become a bigger threat to black men than the drugs themselves. Black men can, and do, recover from drug problems and go on to live productive lives. They have a much harder time recovering from a long stretch in prison. We need to discourage drug use but we do not need to destroy their lives in order to save them.

I fully admit that there are a good number of Black men out there who are dangerous and should be locked up for the good of society. But we have now reached the point where about half of all the young Black men in America will have spent at least one stretch in prison before they are thirty. I find it hard to believe that we have to lock up half of all the young black men in America for the good of society. Whenever the numbers get that large, we must stop and ask ourselves if this is really the best course of action.

" Get up, stand up!! Stand up for your rights.
Get up, stand up!! Don't give up the fight !!"

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