Since its inception in 1971, America’s War on Drugs has resulted in millions of criminal charges against American citizens a year (in 2015 almost 1.5 million arrests) and each and every night approximately a half a million people go to bed each night in a prison cell as the result of being arrested on drug charges (the majority black or brown).
Despite all of this, since the Pharmaceutical Industry started “pushing” opioids in the 1990’s and over 200,000 Americans died because of Opioid addiction, has even one Pharmaceutical Industry “dealer” been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted?
I think the answer is one (John Kapoor).
We have seen the same story play out over and over again (with crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities starting in the 1980’s and now with opioids) in America the so-called “War on Drugs” is less about social safety then it is about preserving and maintaining racist structures of inequality, political power, and social control.
Am I just another “Social Justice Warrior” playing “The Race Card?”
Let’s look at the facts:
The “War on Drugs” could more appropriately be named the “War On Communities of Color:”
“People of color experience discrimination at every stage of the judicial system and are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced and saddled with a lifelong criminal record. This is particularly the case for drug law violations. Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population,10 and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races.11 But black people comprise 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations,12 and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations.13 Similarly, Latinos make up 17 percent of the U.S. population, but comprise 20 percent of people in state prisons for drug offenses and 37 percent of people.”
This can’t be an accident, can it?
Let’s go back to the beginning and see what Nixon’s Domestic policy chief had to say about the origins of the War on Drugs:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people..."We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
And it was no less an attempt to court racist voters when in 1994 the Clinton Administration used the Fear of a Black Planet to gin up electoral support yet again:
“...the rush to incarcerate was fueled by much less generous motives than the ones Clinton presents. With the Clintons at the helm of the “New Democrats,” their strident anti-crime policies, like their assault on welfare, reflected a cynical attempt to win back centrist white voters, especially those from Dixie and the South Central United States.”
And it was a HUGE part of the victory of Donald J. Trump who took racist animus and hid it in misleading facts about “real issues” that put the lives of real (read white) American citizens at risk:
“Back then, the infamous Willie Horton ad and the relentless “law and order” messaging of the Bush campaign linked crime with Black men to build an electoral victory. The upshot then was a two-plus decade-long merger of crime with racist tropes about Black men. The upshot now is the marbling of economic unease with racism against Mexicans, ethnonationalism against Chinese and fear of Muslim interlopers. And then like now, this powerful style of messaging made it possible to explicitly embrace or tacitly accept prejudicial proclamations that would’ve otherwise been unacceptable. In fact, there’s a certain symmetry to Trump’s meteoric rise and the conclusion that American law enforcement still grapples with systemic racism. His posture as the “law and order candidate” tapped into the backlash against the backlash against the era of mass incarceration. His consciously abrasive style resurfaced a deeply encoded racism that — like hundreds of thousands of Black men — was locked away in the prison system during the War on Drugs.”
And now, over four decades later, we continue this racist insanity despite being fully aware of one overwhelming truth
The War on Drugs is a placebo.
It doesn’t work.
It is Fugazi.
As Alec Regino put it recently:
“The results since have been mass incarceration, increased corruption, political destabilization and violence, and, above all, the loss of liberty. Misguided drug laws and a draconian system of sentencing have led the United States to house nearly 25 percent of the incarcerated population of the world despite having only 5 percent of the world’s population. Furthermore, the war on drugs actually increased drug production and transport as well as violence in Latin America. Ultimately, the war did not complete its stated goal of curbing drug trafficking, but instead exacerbated many other issues around the world.”
In other words, the War on Drugs has NEVER decreased SUPPLY.
No matter how many dealers of color have been removed, no matter how many families and communities have been destroyed by mass incarceration, Nixon’s war (now Session’s War) has NEVER worked to do the only thing the law enforcement leaders promise, removing drugs from our streets.
And let’s not forget, since they love to talk about violence, it is the War on Drugs itself that incentivizes and generates most of the “War” in War on Drugs as Regino continues:
“Drug prohibition also drives narcotics businesses to resort to violence since they cannot settle disputes in court. Economist Jeffrey Miron states in his book Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition that drug prohibition has increased violence by 25 to 75 percent in the United States.”
The American War on Drugs manufactures only misery, it solves nothing, and it is built on racism.
When you remain committed to a policy that ruins millions of lives and costs billions of dollars all while generating only misery and no positive results, you have to ask what our society is really afraid of and what (or who) we are really trying to police?
The Opioid Hustle
Despite overwhelming evidence that the Drug War, incarceration, and tough on addict approaches are total failures the nation's prosecutors are responding to the Opioid Crisis by doing what they do best (overcharging and incarcerating people) according to Injustice Today:
“Drug-induced homicide prosecutions increased by more than 300 percent in just six years, from 363 in 2011 to 1,178 in 2016, according to an analysis of media mentions outlined in a new report by The Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based non-profit.”
This approach to America's drug "problem" is quite literally insane, it incentivizes people not to report overdoses and goes against everything we know about solving economies of addiction. More importantly, it just has not worked:
“We’ve been there before, and it hasn’t worked, though it did substantially increase the size of our prison and jail populations, to the point where we lead the entire world for the numbers of people incarcerated. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2015 there were 2.2 million adults in prisons and jails in this country, and another 4.65 million were on parole or probation. That same year, in the juvenile incarceration system, almost 50,000 kids are imprisoned. The number of incarcerated has more than quadrupled since 1980 and the start of the war on drugs, witnessing a twelvefold increase in the numbers of Americans imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. By 2000, 22 percent of all federal and state prisoners were convicted for drug use, possession, or sale. Soon states were spending more on prisons than schools, as the costs of incarcerating thousands of marijuana smokers and those convicted of petty cocaine possession soared, topping $1 trillion in 2016. As judges and prosecutors around the country came to see that the war on drugs was merely creating overcrowded prisons and an entire class of underemployed and unemployable ex-con Americans— especially black and Latino men — prison sentencing for petty nonviolent drug crimes fell. Today, about 16 percent of our nation’s incarcerated prisoners were convicted for nonviolent drug-related crimes. That “round ’em up and corral ’em” approach didn’t work. Let’s not go down that path again.”
But “round em up and corral them” is exactly what Jeff Sessions Justice Department seems to be doing and it does seem like he is going to keep communities of color and marijuana users as the scapegoat and public face of America’s drug problem. He is doing this as if the cause of the Opioid epidemic was “street-dealers” when we know unequivocally that the main pathway to Opium addiction in the United States is Big Pharma:
Today, 75 percent of people with opioid addictions began with prescription painkillers. The slide starts not on a street corner, but in a doctor’s office.”
The Pharmaceutical Industry spent billions of dollars trying to make opioids Doctor’s prescription of choice:
* Starting in the 1990’s they started massively marketing opioids (even accusing Doctors of “undertreating” pain.
* They created front organizations for pain management pushing opioids
* They encouraged the prescription of opioids for returning veterans, they suggested that the answer to problems (addiction) was generally to prescribe more of the same.
* They have two lobbyists for every member of Congress (Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are unsurprisingly two of the biggest beneficiaries of their largesse and all but three US Senators take money from Big Pharma)
Generally, I am for decriminalization, legalization, and harm reduction strategies. So, I am not calling for more incarceration.
I am calling for an end to “lawless law” and to political posturing and hypocrisy.
Lawless law is, for example, when public safety laws are used primarily to enforce a political agenda designed to disenfranchise, disempower, and silence communities that are likely to vote against your agenda. Continued drug enforcement in communities of color serves exactly this purpose as Professor Marie Gottschalk explains:
“The U.S. Census Bureau counts prisoners as residents of the towns and counties where they are incarcerated, even though most inmates have no ties to these communities and almost always return to their home neighborhoods upon release. This has enormous and unsettling political consequences...In Pennsylvania and 47 other states, imprisoned felons are barred from voting. Yet these disenfranchised prisoners are included in the population tallies used to draw legislative and congressional districts. This practice dilutes the votes of urban areas...For census and redistricting purposes, these urban citizens "reside" in counties far from their homes, often in rural districts that are Republican strongholds. The evidence of political inequities in redistricting due to how the Census Bureau counts prisoners is "compelling," according to a recent National Research Council report.”
From now on, the first question every District Attorney or legislator should face when they push for tougher prosecutions or brag about going after drug dealers is this:
“How many Pharmaceutical executives are included in those prosecutions?”
If they answer “zero” they have exposed their true agenda.
We need to call racism out, speak truth to power, and refuse to allow elected officials to continue to use the politics of fear to imprison and destroy communities of color, addicts, and the families of addicts.
We need to insist on real solutions to addiction (harm reduction, treatment, programming, and diversion have all been demonstrated to be more successful than incarceration) and we need to quit allowing voter suppression to be enforced by mass incarceration.
And when people ask can we really mean that the United States should end the war on drugs entirely? We should respond with an unequivocal YES!!!
Josh is a non-drug-using author, blogger, and freelance writer. Please consider following him on Twitter, throwing a tip into his hat on Patreon, or adding his blog OnPirateSatellite to your feeds.
