The New Jim Crow?
There has been much talk over the past decade or two about the paucity of leadership in the African-American community and the silence of what leaders there are about the massive incarceration of blacks in America and its connection to the war on drugs. In New York State for instance some 93% of prisoners doing time for drug offenses are Black or Latino. Knowing that these groups drug use per-capita is about the same as in the White community it’s pretty hard how one can’t see racism in that number yet there has been silence on this from the NAACP and most Black leaders.
We’ve known since H.R. Haldeman’s revealing memoir on his years as Nixon’s chief-of-staff that the war on drugs was used as a tool to exercise control over the African-American community without seeming to do so. As Nixon so shrewdly planned, this tactic apparently worked on the majority of White America. What about the Black leadership though? How could intelligent, politically-savvy black leaders not care that their communities were being devastated by mass incarcerations for the same crimes that Whites generally got probation for? How is it that the NAACP focused on the perceived racial imbalance on TV sitcoms while the constituency it purported to represent languished in prison?
A tiny handful of mid-level Black leaders spoke up but were ignored by the higher-ups. Long-time NAACP National Board member Richard Burton started something called Project Reach that focused on the racial injustice in the drug war but his message was apparently ignored by NAACP leaders. Why?
One possible answer may be found in the history of alcohol prohibition in America. Back in the 1920’s and 30’s immigrant groups such as Italians, Jews, and Germans were heavily involved in the sale, smuggling, and production of alcohol because of the economic opportunities the illegal market provided to them because discrimination prevented them from many legitimate avenues to make a living. Understandably perhaps, these groups were reluctant to speak out against the law for fear of being considered un-American. Since they didn’t want to call attention to themselves for their traditional alcohol use and possibly bring down yet more difficulties on their communities they remained largely silent. If the alcohol prohibition laws were like today’s drug laws and users and small sellers were going to prison for years things might have been different.
Another possibility is that some sort of understanding was reached whereby silence on the drug policy issue would ensure continued social benefits in the form of welfare and other government aid to communities of color.
Whatever the reasons things may be starting to change. With the growing understanding in America that the war on drugs is a failure there are signs that at last the Black community may be ready to speak out about this horrible injustice. There is a new book out called “THE NEW JIM CROW” by Attorney Michelle Alexander. She says “…I wrote this book because I was so deeply alarmed by the relative quiet of the civil rights community and African-American leaders in the face of mass incarceration. And I admit, at the outset, that I, myself, failed to fully grasp the extent of the devastation caused to communities of color as a result of the Drug War. There was a time when I didn’t fully get it.”
Alexander makes a compelling case for the idea that Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status-much like their grandparents before them.
Another promising sign comes from California where that state’s chapter of the NAACP has endorsed state representative Tom Damiano’s bill to legalize and tax the sale of marijuana in the state. That is a bold step. Still no word from the national NAACP about this issue but a step like this from a major chapter like California’s must have been noticed on high.
It’s a terrible shame that this travesty of justice didn’t get the attention it deserved before a generation or two were hammered mercilessly by this senseless drug policy but, as we see all too often in America, change comes slow.
New York: Shouldn’t we be Progressing not Regressing?
I just spent a wonderful weekend in one of the most beautiful places on the world… The Thousand Islands. It’s a part of the St. Lawrence river near Lake Ontario. The river separates the US and Canada and the stretch just above the lake is chock full of small islands, about 1800 of them actually. It was a haven for alcohol smugglers back in the 20’s because of the ease, if you knew the islands and shoals, of evading the law. Today there are all sorts of craft from Jet-ski’s to massive freighters that ply the Great Lakes crossing back and forth across the border all summer long. People have summer camps on many of the islands and all along both the US and Canadian shorelines. Americans own property on the Canadian side, Canadians own property on the US side. It’s very porous border.
In one direction the river opens up into the easternmost of the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario, then over Niagra Falls into Lake Erie and points west. In the other direction it flows through sparsely populated areas of Canada and eventually into the North Atlantic.
Well along comes New York’s Democratic Senator “Chuck” Schumer, with New York’s best interests at heart of course, with a plan. A plan to “to make sure we devote resources to stop drug trafficking at the northern border, just as we have at the southern border.”
Well doesn’t that sound a bit passé ? I mean I thought the country was moving in the opposite direction regarding the war on drugs? The cocaine sentencing disparity was shrunk. New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws were gutted. Fourteen states now have legalized medical marijuana and there is a referendum in California to legalize marijuana altogether. Almost everybody you talk to these days will tell you the drug war was a monumental failure that cost billions and kept these drugs away from no one who wanted them but it seems the good Senator is nostalgic for the old drug war.
Let’s see… there is already a customs checkpoint if you drive across one of the bridges that span the river so drug smuggling by car is somewhat risky. Boats are another story. Small pleasure craft come and go all summer long , back and forth from Canadian to US waters and back again. You are supposed to check in if you land anywhere but that clearly unenforceable… or is it? Perhaps we could build a wall down the center of the river? Or we could significantly increase the number of patrol boats and have make frequent stops of recreational boaters and demand papers and search their boats. Such a plan would certainly hurt the area’s property values as well as hurt countless businesses in the US and Canada but would it reduce the flow of drugs into the US? Since the best efforts of the Senator and his state’s Department of Corrections have failed to come up with a single drug-free maximum security prison, I doubt it.
Shame Senator… New York should be leading the move toward a rational drug policy not wasting money we don’t have repeating the mistakes of the past 40-odd years and expecting that somehow this time it’ll be different. Our school budgets get cut. Our taxes go up. Our roads are full of potholes yet we should spend millions trying to stem the flow of drugs across New York’s immense northern border? C’mon Senator… it’s 2010. New York is in the midst of a serious economic crunch. Can’t we stop throwing millions down the toilet and do something that might improve the lives of New Yorkers?
Guns & Drugs… What’s the connection?
From the high-level meetings at the White House down to local news stories in places like Syracuse, New York and Los Angeles, California the subject is guns. How stop them getting to Mexico… how to keep them from inner-city youth… how to reconcile the Constitution vs. a fearful public… it’s more and more about guns. But this is blog about drug policy not gun policy so why am I writing this? Because there is a clear connection between the two issues.
From Hillary Clinton to Diane Feinstein, to Mexican President Calderon, to the New York Times, the commonly accepted story is that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico’s drug war were sold in the United States. So let’s take a closer look at that figure. The 90 percent statistic actually concerns only those guns Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing. Since the U.S. really has no means of tracing guns not manufactured in the U.S., Mexican authorities don’t bother sending U.S. officials guns that lack a U.S. serial number or that were obviously manufactured elsewhere. So the 90 percent figure isn’t surprising. It means that 90 percent of the guns Mexican authorities thought were probably made and sold in the U.S. were indeed made and sold in the U.S. That is quite different from claiming that nine of 10 guns used in all Mexican drug crimes came from the U.S.
Most of the weapons used by Mexico’s drug cartels are actually fully automatic weapons that have been basically illegal in the U.S. since the 1930’s. Even if they weren’t, do you really think drug cartels are going to go through the complicated, labor-intensive, and risky procedure of sending thousands of “straw buyers” across the border to legally purchase guns in America and smuggle them back into Mexico when more powerful black market weapons are available from Russia, South America, China, and Guatemala without the bureaucracy and risks. It seems obvious that if the cartels are armed with weapons that are not available in the US the 90 percent figure trumpeted by U.S. politicians isn’t correct.
There’s more… The U.S. is also continually sending more money and arms to Mexico to support President Calderon’s military crackdown on the drug trade in spite of knowing full well about the high rate of defection among both soldiers and Mexican police officers, and the high rate of corruption and high percentage of Mexican officials on the cartels’ payrolls. According to one Mexican official, 150,000 Mexican soldiers have defected in the last year, taking their government-issued M-16s with them. Do you doubt that many of these guns end up in the hands of the cartels?
Also fully automatic versions of M-16’s and the like are legitimately shipped to the government of Mexico, by Colt, for example, in the United States. They are approved by the U.S. government for use by the Mexican military service.- they are not smuggled in across the river.
So not only are U.S. politicians wrong when they say that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexico’s drug war are coming from U.S. gun dealers recklessly selling legal American guns to cartel straw buyers, they’re ignoring the fact that a large number of the guns used by the cartels likely came from the U.S. government, in the form of the drug war aid. Once again our drug policy simultaneously manages to create a problem and then attempt to solve that problem by pretending the fault lies elsewhere.
On a local level mayors and police chiefs are cracking down on illegal guns in their cities. There is a gun culture in most of our urban areas that has grown at an alarming rate in the past decade. Frequent stories about teenagers shooting each other in all sorts of disputes make headlines in newspapers across the country. Where did this come from? When I was a teenager growing up in New York City beefs were settled with fists. Teens shooting teens went out with the end of alcohol prohibition when teenage gangsters vied for control of turf (Al Capone was in his 20’s when he took control of the Chicago mob). There’s your clue!
A steady growth in the war on drugs led to seemingly easy money for teens. All they needed to do was protect themselves from other aggressive teens seeking to take over their turf. The solution? Get a gun. First one gang member has a gun… then two… then several. Before long lots of teenage criminals are armed and they shoot each other not just for business reasons but over perceived insults, over girlfriends, over all sorts of things.
The popularity of the drug war has been faltering recently. Law enforcement doesn’t find it so easy to run roughshod through entire neighborhoods under the guise of getting drugs off the streets. More and more people realize that those sort of efforts don’t pay off. After decades of that the drugs are still there. So what can law enforcement do to maintain their budgets in this poor economy? Shift the focus to guns - a problem created largely by drug prohibition but not clearly linked to it in the public’s mind.
The government’s insistence on pursuing its failed drug policy combined with the jumble of state laws regulating gun sales are responsible for the gun violence in the US and abroad, especially in Mexico. The failure of American citizens and their elected representatives to connect the dots ensures thousands of gun deaths each year. There it is… another tragic story from the ongoing story of prohibition.
Pauline Morton-Sabin: heiress, Republican, mother & drug-legalizer
Pauline Morton-Sabin was a star amongst elegant society in the years following World War One. She was often written about in the society columns and her photograph appeared frequently. She was president of the Women’s National Republican Club and the first female ever appointed to the Republican National Committee.
Pauline Sabin grew up in a wealthy, political family. Her grandfather, J. Sterling Morton, had been a Democratic Senator, Nebraska’s governor and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. Her father, Paul Morton, a Republican, was a railroad executive, U.S. Secretary of the Navy and the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s president. In 1934, Pauline inherited millions from her uncle Joy Morton, the founder of Morton Salt.
She was a strong supporter of the 18th amendment saying later “I felt I should approve of it because it would help my two sons. The word-pictures of the agitators carried me away. I thought a world without liquor would be a beautiful world.”
Gradually she revaluated her prohibitionist position. She saw the politicians who would support resolutions for stricter enforcement and half an hour later be drinking cocktails. She saw how ineffective the law was and how drinking had become glamorous with moderate social drinking being replaced by excessive consumption of alcohol. What was even more worrisome to her was the growing prestige of bootleggers. Mothers, she explained, had believed that prohibition would eliminate the temptation of drinking from their children’s lives, but found instead that “children are growing up with a total lack of respect for the Constitution and for the law.“”
With social workers reporting increasing drunkenness amongst their clientele she worried, “The young see the law broken at home and upon the street. Can we expect them to be lawful?” Mrs. Sabin complained to the House Judiciary Committee: “In pre-prohibition days, mothers had little fear in regard to the saloon as far as their children were concerned. A saloon-keeper’s license was revoked if he were caught selling liquor to minors. Today in any speakeasy in the United States you can find boys and girls in their teens drinking liquor, and this situation has become so acute that the mothers of the country feel something must be done to protect their children.”
Sound familiar? Here was a woman who realized that her dream of a totally alcohol-free country was not going to happen and that the pursuit of it was causing far more harm than was ever caused by the alcohol. Not ashamed of changing her mind (a woman’s prerogative, after all?) She reversed her position and campaigned for repeal of prohibition. She was key in making repeal respectable.
Unfortunately, despite over four decades of drug prohibition few influential people today seem to have been able to figure this out or perhaps lack what it takes to publically reverse themselves on the issue. So many people these days just keep ignoring the reality of the harms caused by prohibition and urge staying the course even when half the country sees that our course has left a wake of death, violence, increased drug use and profligate government spending. Next time you hear a mother calling for tougher drug prohibition laws remember Pauline Morton-Sabin.
Obama’s New Drug Control Strategy
President Obama’s long-awaited “new” drug control strategy was released May 10th and I think it was miss-named. It’s neither new nor does it look like it will result in any more “drug control” than past drug control strategies. Let’s take a look at the Executive Summary.
“The Strategy calls for a 15-percent reduction in the rate of youth drug use over 5 years and similar reductions in chronic drug use and drug-related consequences such as drug deaths and drugged driving”. I suppose that shows a slightly more realistic attitude than some past anti-drug strategies that promised “a drug-free America” but just how realistic is it? Part of the new strategy focuses on young people with the idea of preventing drug experimentation before it starts. They intend to accomplish this by promising to “help communities implement evidence-based prevention initiatives” Who decides just what constitutes “evidence-based prevention initiatives”? This administration’s track record on relying on scientific evidence to form policy as promised in the President’s campaign has not been forthcoming. Just one example… How is it that marijuana is Schedule One in the governments Controlled Substances Act list signifying “no medical use” but synthetic marijuana (Marinol) is a legal prescription medication. Is it medicine or isn’t it?
The strategy promises to provide “sound information about the dangers of drug use to young people, their parents, and other caring adults through the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, at the workplace, and through schools, faith communities, and civic organizations” So far government information on drugs has been largely alarmist and highly selective.
One of the more troubling efforts in the strategy will be a major effort aimed at “ Curtailing drugged driving by encouraging States to establish and enforce laws that impose penalties for the presence of any illicit drug while driving”. The presence of a level of alcohol likely to impair driving may be ascertained by using a breathalyzer but what about other drugs? How can an officer ascertain the presence of tranquilizers? Amphetimines? Does this mean roadside blood tests? What about marijuana? It remains in the body chemistry long after any effects of the drug have dissipated. Testing positive for marijuana does NOT mean you are impaired. Getting impaired drivers off the road sure sounds good and I’m sure it tested well in focus groups but it’s not going to work.
Next covered in the Executive Summary is a section on drug treatment, mostly involving court-ordered programs for those arrested for drug offenses. It calls for increased “screening and early intervention for substance use in all healthcare settings”. Just what will that involve and how will that affect our medical privacy? Will all blood tests include drug screens? It calls for “Improving the quality and evidence base of substance abuse treatment” but that is a difficult area. Data showing the efficacy of drug treatment is far from clear in its indications of what works and what does not. Again… who decides what is scientific evidence? Which “scientific evidence” to believe?
The rest of the strategy focuses on the usual criminal justice efforts to interdict smugglers and growers both here and abroad that have failed so completely for decades. “Maximizing Federal support for law enforcement drug task forces”… “Eliminating high-potency indoor grow labs and marijuana cultivation on public lands”… “Conducting joint counterdrug law enforcement operations with international partners…”… Absolutely nothing new there.
The document closes with the following statement : “The Obama Administration’s National Drug Control Strategy relies on a comprehensive approach, informed by experience and evidence, to reducing drug use and its consequences in the United States The Strategy is a collaborative effort by dozens of departments, agencies, Members of Congress, and the American people…” Accurate when it mentions the “dozens of departments, agencies”, (all of which rely on the continuation of drug prohibition for their funding) “Members of Congress” (who gladly use tough-sounding prohibition rhetoric to get elected), but as for “the American People”… I’m not so sure. Depending on the poll you look at somewhere in the immediate neighborhood of 50% of them support, for example, the complete legalization of marijuana.
It sounds like the administration is treading water until the poll numbers supporting serious change in our drug policy become irrefutable …( 70% perhaps? 80%?) before proposing a strategy that would be good for America. Of course by then we will have wasted several hundred billion dollars and thousands of lives but hey! That’s politics.
