From Common Sense For Drug Policy
Spring, 1999
Vol: 1, No. 3
info@csdp.org
http://www.csdp.org/

By Cliff Thornton, President, Efficacy http://www.efficacy-online.org/
(Marijuananews note: Cliff Thornton is one of the more impressive individuals that I have met in the anti-prohibitionist movement. I am delighted that Common Sense For Drug Policy has seen fit to publish this. CSfPD is a tabloid newspaper widely distributed on college campuses and at various cultural and political events in the U.S.)

IS RACIAL DISCRIMINATION SUSTAINED BY THE DRUG WAR?

During and after the years of slavery, there was a great bond among African-Americans. There was love and respect for one another based on common experience. This brotherhood/sisterhood,has sadly diminished in the last two decades.

The drug war is the insidious cause of the cultural retrogression. It has succeeded because minorities have embraced the war. Deliberate or not, the drug war is an ingenious ‘divide and conquer’ scheme. It is so brilliant that most people support it as it tears society, freedom, and democracy apart.

The so-called ‘peace dividend’ after the end of the cold war was immediately diverted to the drug war. Funds that should be used for urban renewal and educational programs are used to fight the war, while schools literally crumble around the children.

Overt racial discrimination is not tolerated in any public or private business. But it has gone out of control in the criminal justice system and been sustained by the attitude of the drug war. The war against crack cocaine has led African Americans to support the incarceration of their own. Fear is the driving force in this paradigm. Fear that has been instilled by government propaganda, heightened by questionably motivated private interests, such as the Partnership for a Drug Free America & Private Prison Industry.

We often hear that the US has five to ten times the rate of incarceration of any European nation. We don’t hear as much about the fact that it has been so totally unbalanced from a racial point of view. While the rate of imprisonment of whites is about two times that of other nations, it is more than ten times greater for blacks in most states. Blacks get longer sentences than whites, on average, for the same crimes. These numbers are new in the last several years, and it is strictly drug arrests that have created them.

We, in effect, have gone into the poorest areas, taken help away, turned them into battlefields, and put a tempting basket of goodies in the middle of the street, seducing children who see no hope in their futures. The big bright basket of drug dealing offers youngsters the things they otherwise will not attain. Then we tell them they must not touch, and have imposed terrible penalties for doing so. It is as if we deliberately have set these traps to destroy them.
See
HOW THE NARCS CREATED CRACK

While people can see that prohibition has made drug dealing ever more lucrative, they won’t consider any alternative. It is obvious to many of us that the drug war is the root cause of violent gangs that terrorize inner city residents. In my neighborhood in my youth, there were drugs and dealers, but they did not use guns in their business. Unleashing police to do war on Americans initiated the violence, causing dealers to begin to arm themselves and become increasingly violent against the cops and everyone else.

The stereotype of a young, dangerous minority criminal has done incalculable damage to race relations. The fear shown by whites has caused a backlash of loathing from young blacks. The real enemy is displaced.

The unfairness of this burden is heightened by the fact that blacks do not use drugs any more than whites do and whites are not arrested as frequently or punished as severely as minorities.

The thinking that infliction of pain is the best way to teach people has seeped into the values of our society. The culture of punishment has developed with and sustains the drug war.

The stigma of drugs and the drug war’s denigration of addicts, users and dealers has exacerbated intolerance. It is used by drug warriors and has become another ‘divide and conquer’ device.

We must reap the bitter harvest others have sown, the harvest of exaggerated and growing race and class distrust, the harvest of fear and violence, the harvest of a lost generation, the American un-culturated, displaced persons who are simply trying to survive in our cities the only ways they have learned to do so. These ways are contrary to the avenues to success in the mainstream. .

The drug civil war has little to do with drugs. It is about controlling human beings—physically and morally. It has twisted values and beliefs.

The saddest thing about the war on drugs is that most minorities support it. The disaster of the drug war blurs the effects of the drugs. Through the eyes of fear, people don’t see that the problems associated with drug use are made worse by the mentality of the drug war. Because of the insidious nature of the war on drugs, inner city people tend to cling to it as their only hope, while it is actually this century’s instrument of their destruction.