In all the excellent posts about brutality and practiced racism by the police across the country, one thing stands out consistently. Or rather, the failure to mention it stands out. Perhaps it is so solidified in our culture and society as to not even be thought of as something that can be eliminated. This subject I am alluding to is the drug prohibition policy enacted by the US government decades ago, escalated by Nixon in 1971 as the declared “War on Drugs”; and then seeing Reagan double-down on it in the ‘80s.
Take this excerpt from Britney Cooper’s personal and excellent blog at Salon on the subject of the recent verbal escalation by the NYPD and the authoritarian right:
I refuse, then, to publicly affirm a statement like Blue Lives Matter. Tethered to that affirmation is my affirmation of a system that values blue lives over all other lives, that believes that black lives are an acceptable casualty of a longstanding war that the police have declared on communities of color. That kind of affirmation would constitute my complicity in the denial of legitimate grievances that black communities have against the state and against white people more generally.
Though there is a reference to “the state” in this piece, it still seems to proffer the police as the origin of the war on black communities. This is avoiding the larger picture of the fact that the police are there to carry out the will of the state. And the state wills a war on the American people through its criminal justice system. This system starts with the police; and racism is a key motivator for it. But let’s be clear, if the United States decriminalized most drugs, the excuse that so many cops use to profile people of color wouldn’t exist in the first place.
The police are real people with an agenda that has been handed to them by those much higher on the food chain. If we are to move forward as a unified people, the citizens must recognize that we are being manipulated to discriminate, being caught up in the fear and violence that is instigated by the War on Drugs.
The knee jerk reaction to propose a reverse in US’s drug policy is usually incredulous denial that it should even be considered. This is true whether the person is liberal or conservative. To ponder legalizing – or decriminalizing at the least – all or most drugs is to conceivably endorse drug use; to encourage our children (!) to become lazy degenerates with addiction as their only possible future. To entertain this opinion though, one must ignore our own history; and it is ignorant of current policy elsewhere in the world that succeeds in spite of its “leniency” towards drug use.
First, our history – we have a real life example: Prohibition. If you have the time, watch Ken Burn’s excellent mini-series by the same name. The gangsters, the Tommy guns, the bloody street violence associated with organized crime in the 1920’s all became accelerated. It’s simple: when you make something that a lot of people demand illegal, the criminally minded and desperate will find a way to get it to the consumers that demand it. Once it moves to the black market, there is a big risk associated with trafficking in these products, so the price spikes to cover the risk. The high prices continue to lure the criminally minded and the desperate because it makes a lot of money. It is a never-ending cycle because most people like their recreation; and, unfortunately, some fall into addiction (which is a grim reality whether it is legal or not).
Second, look at the facts regarding drug use and drug policy. With few exceptions, tough policy does not correlate with less usage. The Netherlands and Portugal probably the two most well known states in the world with lenient policy actually have less users than the United States by quite a large margin - cannabis for example is a US 14.1% usage rate to The Netherlands 7%. And hard drug statistics tell a similar story.
The US learned its lesson and repealed alcohol prohibition after only a decade. So why does our policy against other mind-altering substances (besides the other big one – nicotine) prevail? Especially when the War on Drugs is clearly a failure with America sporting the largest prison population with no real reduction in drug use?
(In fact, we have a current example being played out currently in the US with Colorado and Washington experimenting with legal marijuana for recreational use with so far, mostly positive consequences. In contrast we have two bordering states suing Colorado with its reason being that it has to use more resources to catch and prosecute drug users. So says Nebraska's AG: "While Colorado reaps millions from the sale of pot, Nebraska taxpayers have to bear the cost." The remedy for reasonable people to this is elementary – cease arresting people for using marijuana! The whole episode would be comical if the suit didn’t have a real chance - with cannabis still being outlawed on the books by the federal government - of succeeding in reversing Colorado’s grand experiment.)
To reiterate, why when the numbers point to abject failure of the War on Drugs does it prevail still? First, the American people have been convinced that it is necessary due to a systematic propaganda campaign to instigate fear of the legalized drug. This was necessary because the initial reason the war was declared in the first place leads us to come full circle: xenophobia and racism.
The New York Times ran a terrific series on marijuana legalization where the most important part of the series was the history of criminalization of pot use. It was completely enacted to suppress certain populations aka black and brown people. If you dig into the other types of drugs – opium, cocaine, heroin – you’ll find a similar story.
Just like the large prison population that houses a disproportionate number of minorities compared with white people, it of course starts with the police. If black communities want to stop the violence against them, they need to advocate an end to the War on Drugs because this is what gives the police the power over the American people. It is law enforcements' justification for profiling, for random stops, for their militarization.
And the police are being honest they should get behind it too. The drug war causes the violence they so scream about as a reason they fear for their lives. If you remove the bootleg-market, you remove the criminals that sell it and take the guns associated with the illegal drug trade off of the streets.
What you’re left with is a society that has a regulated substance with taxes that can go to rebuilding schools, communities, and addiction programs; this last one of which may be needed less because we’ll be spending money on positive things that lead to job growth and opportunity, already mitigating drug abuse.
There are many both inside and outside of inner city communities that decry this view and cite the lives that have been torn apart by drugs. I say, again, that it is not the drugs, but the battles that are being waged against them in the name of drugs. Because let’s be honest, this is not a war against inanimate objects, it’s a war against people. There is also the fact that affluent white people also use drugs and yet are not being systematically raided by the police. Drugs don't kill people; using the war against drugs as an excuse to arrest certain groups of citizens kills people.
The real problem with facing such a radical shift in drug policy in the US would be the details, like what to do with all the prisoners wasting their lives away for being caught up in the dealing system, or even just for being caught with low quantities of the most benign substance of them all, marijuana. It is this problem, I surmise, that keeps many otherwise courageous policy-makers from strongly advocating for such a shift (well, or being smeared as soft on crime, still a winner in political campaigns). Because this is the other aspect to the War on Drugs (besides covering for discrimination and real racial hatred): it sweeps our big problem of inequality and poverty and joblessness under the rug. It warehouses a huge group of people that might otherwise add to the statistic of those that are struggling and underpaid as a result of our brutal economic system in this country. To end the War on Drugs is to have to really face the reality that our country has a lot of root problems with a lot of people suffering from these problems.
For those that fear the consequences of such a radical shift, I'd like to use the movie Touching the Void as an analogy. This is a movie about an injured mountain climber that to save himself from immanent hypothermia and death, he had to find a way off of the mountain. The route he ended up taking was a small dark tunnel with not a glimmer of light. This tunnel ended up being his salvation and led him out to the safety of his camp; and life.
Our fear of legalizing drug use is that dark tunnel. But our society is severely wounded. We need to climb down into that dark hole to escape a policy that the state has been telling us for decades is necessary to save ourselves from depravity. Well, it is not true. Don’t believe the hype anymore. To legalize drugs is to find the light at the end of this tunnel of violence against the American people – for both black communities and the police forces in America that are asked by the powers-that-be to carry out this unjust war.
Keep protesting. But make some new signs: End the War against the American People. End the War on Drugs.