Attorney General Eric Holder called for sweeping changes to America's 40-year war on drugs. Holder is the first African-American in the nation's top law enforcement post. He's also part of a growing movement of black leaders who have pushed for major reforms to the War on Drugs. Four years ago, New York's then-Gov. David Paterson stood in a drug treatment centre in Queens and made history. "And finally today, on this sunny day, with the stroke of a pen, we will end the regime of the Rockefeller drug laws."New York's first black governor rolled back the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, first passed in 1973, that disproportionately locked up African-American men."The war on drugs is now 30, 40 years old. There have been a lot of unintended consequences. There's been a decimation of certain communities, in particular communities of colour," says Holder.
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| Attorney General Eric Holder |
targeted action that has led to disproportionate arrest, conviction and incarceration of Blacks for decades. “The Waron Drugs was started by a president and it needs to end with the president,” said Courtney Stewart, chairman of The R.N.R.C a group that helps ex-offenders find jobs, housing and access to social services. “Everything starts with leadership. President Obama is the leader of this great nation. He needs to end the War on Drugs.” Jesse Jackson said it best during the recent forum on the drug war.
"This is a crime against humanity. War on drugs is a war on Black and Brown and must be challenged by the highest levels of our government in the war for justice," said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
"This is government-sponsored terrorism," Jackson said. "It raised the price on Black existence; it is an attack on the Black family; it has destroyed a generation. Those who are the least users have paid the most price because of race; those with money and attorneys have paid the least price. Those without attorneys remain behind bars today."
After 40 years, a trillion dollars and 45 million arrests,America's War On Drugs has achieved basically nothing, besides the incarceration of a hugely disproportionate number of black people . What it has done, however is create a huge industry that allows big business to profit from the imprisonment of low-level criminals and vulnerable addicts.
Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of increased prevalence of drug use or sales in these communities, but rather of a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities and on communities of colour as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system.
Winning the War on Drugs?
Isn’t that “War” just a construct designed to achieve political and economic aims, while
oppressing with it one particular sector of the population? How can it be “won?”
The “War on Drugs” has never been such a thing. From its inauguration by Richard Nixon
it has always been a War on Drug Users, for the most part minority drug users at that,
although some non-minorities have occasionally been caught up in its tentacles. The correctly labelled “War on Drug Users” has primarily been a racist enterprise. It has
been aimed at the users of one minor class of the Recreational Mood Altering Drugs (RMADs), those that are currently “illicit” (as alcohol was nationally between 1920 and 1933 and cigarettes were in 15 states at various times during the 19th century. Although the ratios have declined a bit in the last few years, for most of its duration under the War on Drug Users, while approximately 75% of those in prison for drug-related offences are non-white approximately 75% of illicit-drug users are white. Further, the War on Drug Users has been race-based in terms of the neighbourhoods in which it has been waged. There was one major previous true War on Drugs, Prohibition. It was for the most part actually aimed at the drug, ethyl alcohol, not at the users.
meth amphetamine In terms of negative outcomes of RMAD use, for example, tobacco kills about 430,000 people per year, alcohol between 60,000 and 100,000, depending upon how one counts, and the illicits kill about 20,000, half that number as a result of drug-trade violence that would not exist absent the War on Drug Users and some of the other half due to forced unsterilised use of the drugs. Tobacco and alcohol are not only the major drug killers but they are the “starter drugs,” most often in childhood, for almost every problem-user of them in adult life and almost every user of the illicits, regardless of age.Logic has not ended the War on Drug Users. Neither has the mainstream drug policy reform movement which views RMAD use as the same false duality the Drug Warriors do. Logic did not end Prohibition either. Over-riding policy concerns did: rampant crime on the one hand and a major need for new tax revenues to deal with the Depression on the other.
Legalizing the currently illicit would create a major new source of tax revenues. Doing so would significantly reduce the prison population resulting in major reductions in Federal, state and
local spending on incarceration. Doing so would significantly unclog the courts, especially at the Federal level where they are so over-burdened with drug cases that the waits for trials on much more important matters, especially in the civil realm, can become interminable. Obviously, there would be a significant reduction in the demands on the law enforcement sector of government, which could either save money or enable the diversion of resources to other important areas, such as financial fraud, that do not always receive the attention they deserve.The Corrections Corporation of America opened its first immigration detention centre in a renovated motel in Houston, Texas nearly 30 years ago and now leads the nation’s for-profit prison industry, generating billions of dollars in revenue for housing prisoners, most of whom are Black and Hispanic. Over the last 30 years, CCA has benefited from the dramatic rise in incarceration and detention in the United States,” the report stated.
population and are incarcerated at roughly six times the rate of Whites.Now a multi-billion dollar corporation, CCA manages more than 65 correctional and detention facilities with a capacity of more than 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia,” stated the report. CCA's revenue in 2012 exceeded more than $1.7 billion.The drug war has been, for the most part, a racially-tinged fabrication that gives easy excuses to those who once felt that black empowerment had become a threat to national security. Not only has it been proven that the government consistently looked the other way as drugs flowed into black neighbourhoods, but there was the double-whammy of giving black men long prison sentences as a result of possessing those very same drugs.
