Friendly Fire |
Page 1,
2,
3,
4,
5
The political and rhetorical climate surrounding drug enforcement reinforces and perpetuates our systemic reliance upon coercion. Drug enforcement results in the seizure of billions of dollars worth of property - cash, cars, real estate, etc. - that goes directly to law enforcement agencies. Police officers get paid overtime to process drug arrests and to testify at court hearings. For candidates for election and re-election, no issue is more attractive than fighting drugs and crime; tough talk on drugs will always trump treatment or a call for accountability and effectiveness. Taking a tough anti-drug position is politically unassailable. Since 1984, almost every federal election cycle has been influenced by last minute anti-crime, anti-drug legislation which grows more coercive with each legislative session. (U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) once quipped that anti-drug legislation is the "crack cocaine" of politics.)
For political speech writers and press secretaries, few issues have the rhetorical zing of the "scourge" or "epidemic" of drug abuse, with its dastardly cartels and kingpins. The scary and exotic argot of drugs - crack, crank, date rape drugs, club drugs, designer drugs, ice, ecstasy, and on and on - is ideal to spice up an otherwise boring speech, and attracts more public interest than the details of taxation, appropriations, or regulation.
For every other serious and complex issue - the environment, tax policy, health care, trade, foreign relations, etc. - there are legitimate competing interests and organized lobbying groups and associations on all sides. But there is no organized opposition to increasing the war on drugs. Drug users or drug dealers who are explicitly targeted by tough-on-crime politics do not have political action committees to raise funds or fight legislation.
More generally, drug users are inevitably portrayed as social outcasts. Without regard to whether their individual lives are successful or not, they are stereotyped as vermin, as insidious corrupters of society and its morals. Drug users are not allowed to be responsible drug users. Parents who use drugs can have their children taken away without any proof that their children are being harmed. A child who seeks help for his or her parent and calls the police ends up with the state sending the parent to prison, leaving the child parentless. This is inhumane.
Discussion of drug policy is subject to political correctness. The principal government argument against discussing "legalization" of drugs or permitting seriously and chronically ill medical patients from using marijuana is that to do so would "send the wrong message" to our youth. In fact, the war on drugs is supported by an enormous government propaganda effort to the contrary. The ONDCP is buying $2 billion in advertising on television, in magazines, newspaper, billboards and bus shelters. Sadly, much anti-drug education in schools has been proven ineffective at reducing drug use, although programs such as D.A.R.E. carry a national price tag of almost $750 million.
Drug enforcement as practiced appears to be racially discriminatory. While African Americans constitute about 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of drug users, they make up 38 percent of persons arrested for drug offenses, 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses, and 63 percent of those convicted of drug trafficking. In addition, blacks convicted of drug offenses get sentenced to prison at much higher rates than whites convicted of the same offenses: In 1994, 33 percent of the white convicts and 50 percent of the black convicts were sentenced to prison. Furthermore, blacks who are sentenced to prison get longer sentences than whites sentenced to prison for the same crimes: For state drug defendants, the average maximum sentence length in 1994 was 51 months for whites and 60 months for blacks. Federally, last year, less than one of four of federal drug defendants sent to prison was white.
|
|
Federal crack cocaine defendants are disproportionately black: 88.3 percent African-American, 7.1 percent Hispanic, and only 4.1 percent white in 1993, a typical year. Many observers blame this gross disparity on federal mandatory minimum sentences, which are triggered for much smaller quantities of crack cocaine than powder cocaine (the current ratio is 100-to-1). However, 95 percent of federal crack defendants are low and medium level offenders, and thus not yet subject to mandatory sentencing. I believe a more accurate explanation of the racial disparity is improper case selection practices by DEA and U.S. Attorneys Offices, tolerated by high-level officials at the Department of Justice, and reflecting unconscious racial discrimination. Congress has failed to reform the sentencing disparity, despite the U.S. Sentencing Commission's recommendation to do so.
Racially disproportionate outcomes in drug cases are a major factor in the massive disenfranchisement of black men. Approximately 1.4 million black men (13 percent of black males in the U.S.) have had their right to vote taken away because of felony convictions. Blacks constitute more than one-third (36 percent) of the approximately 3.9 million people nationwide who are temporarily or permanently unable to vote because of felony convictions. The rate of black voter disenfranchisement is seven times the national average.
Prohibition approaches conflict with public health policies and lead to the spread of disease. Tens of thousands of ordinary Americans suffer pain that could be relieved because physicians' prescriptions and choices of medication are made in fear of DEA investigation and license revocation, not solely on medical grounds. HIV and AIDS are spreading more rapidly through the sharing of injection equipment by drug users than by any other activity. Overwhelmingly, pediatric AIDS is a result of needle sharing. Almost every public health authority has recommended needle exchange programs to get used and infected needles out of the environment, and to stop the spread of HIV. This public health strategy is blocked by prohibition ideology that insists that clean needle programs "send a message" that drug use is okay. This is absurd&emdash;with the every-day risk of arrest and imprisonment, every drug user or potential drug user knows that drug use is not okay.
Prohibition approaches lead to environmental degradation. The unregulated cultivation and processing of drugs is a major environmental problem. (I wrote the federal law in 1988 that punishes environmental crimes on federal land in connection with growing or producing drugs.) Enormous acreage in Latin America is cleared to grow coca, marijuana and opium. The hundreds of tons of chemicals used to process coca into cocaine are dumped into the watersheds of the Amazon River and other Latin American watersheds. If drugs were not prohibited, environmental controls could be applied to these processes. In the U.S. there are thousands of operations manufacturing methamphetamine, which results in toxic releases into the environment. Marijuana is illegally cultivated in national parks and forests to avoid property seizure penalties and to hide in remote areas. These are the result of the prohibition approaches and hearken to the era of moonshining.
It is known that paper made from hemp may be substantially less harmful to the environment than the production of paper from wood pulp, an extremely dirty enterprise. Although hemp is not a drug, law enforcement officers fight its cultivation because of its botanical similarity to marijuana. As with clean needle programs, it is argued that permitting hemp cultivation would send the wrong message about drugs to our youth.