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TechnoratiDemocratic presidential candidates crave the Latino and black vote, but ignore the Drug War's unfair toll on people of color.
THERE IS A subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.
While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed "war on drugs" — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.
Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.
Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.
Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them — not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson — even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.
The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.
Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.
As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community's most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.
Located down the road from her Chappaqua, N.Y., home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African American or Latino.
And Bedford, the state's only maximum-security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York's draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws — mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.
Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.
Avoidance of this issue comes at a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we're spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term).
During the 10 years I've been writing about the injustice of the drug war, I've repeatedly watched as politicians paid lip service to the problem but then ducked as the sickening status quo claimed more victims. Here in California, of the 171,000 inmates jamming our wildly overcrowded prisons, 36,000 are nonviolent drug offenders.
I remember in 1999 asking Dan Bartlett, then the campaign spokesman for candidate George W. Bush, about Bush's position on the outrageous disparity between the sentences meted out for possession of crack cocaine and those given for possession of powder cocaine — a disparity that has helped fill U.S. prisons with black low-level drug users (80% of sentenced crack defendants are black). Federal sentencing guidelines dictate that judges impose the same five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine.
"The different sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine is something that there's no doubt needs to be addressed," Bartlett told me. But in the more than six years since Bush and Bartlett moved into the White House, the problem has gone unaddressed. No doubt about it.
Maybe the president will suddenly wake up and decide to take on the issue five days before he leaves office. That's what Bill Clinton did, writing a 2001 New York Times Op-Ed article in which he trumpeted the need to "immediately reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences" — conveniently ignoring the fact that he had the power to solve it for eight years and did nothing.
When it mattered, he maintained an imperial silence. Then, when it didn't, he became Captain Courageous. And he lamented the failures of our drug policy as though he had been an innocent bystander rather than the chief executive (indeed, the prison population doubled on his watch).
The injustice is so egregious that a conservative senator, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), is now leading the charge in Congress to ease crack sentences. "I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy, crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," he said. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."
There's a talking point Hillary and Obama should adopt. It's both the right thing and the smart thing. Because of disenfranchisement statutes, large numbers of black men who were convicted of drug crimes are ineligible to vote, even those who have fully paid their debt to society.
A 2000 study found that 1.4 million African American men — 13% of the total black male population — were unable to vote in the 2000 election because of state laws barring felons access to the polls. In Florida, one in three black men is permanently disqualified from voting. Think that might have made a difference in the 2000 race? Our shortsighted drug laws have become the 21st century manifestation of Jim Crow.
Shouldn't this be an issue Democratic presidential candidates deem worthy of their attention?
Arianna Huffington, a contributing editor to Opinion, is the editor in chief of huffingtonpost.com.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
13 Comments so far
Show Allkucinich has a damn good plan.....
iwarrior is correct....
Prisions,bombs,americans are stupid.
l was in the original "Me that Nobody Knows" and one of the original bits included the thought of how important the criminal is in the criminal (in)justice system. No criminals means no cops means no arrests means no trials means no attorneys (prosicution and defense) means no judges means no prisons means no guards means no probation officers; so how about a nice big thank you for the criminal and the Congress that helps create them.
Wow, my computer started working overtime when I logged on to this article. You don't suppose, as Arianna Huffington suggested, that our government has a problem discussing this issue, do you?
"Avoidance of this issue comes at a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we're spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term)."
Taxpayers are footing the $50 billion a year war on drugs, but the questions I would like answered are: How is that money being spent if not to stop the drugs from entering through our borders, and who is making the profits on this drug money and how is it getting laundered with all the high tech surveillance equipment the government uses (on its citizens) in the fight against terrorism?
Drugs are and always have been one of the most useful tools in life. Cars kill people, ruin lives, are misused. Heard of a war on cars lately?
A young black coke-addict will go to prison. But a young white, well-connected, college-educated individual can pretend to find religion, go on to be elected president of the US by campaigning on a platform of "getting tough" on drugs.
And Arianna gives us one more reason why the war on drugs should be abandoned. We should treat drug abuse the way that we treat alcohol abuse. One reason that 9// was able to get as far as it did was that Bush didn't want to take resources away from the war on drugs.
I think it's more than just a race and class war. if that was the case, you wouldn't see affluent whites using and abusing. Hell, people in the know are aware that there are more drugs in the suburbs than in the cities.
The criminalization of drugs lines the pockets of many, many people, and it's not just the drug dealers. Prisons make money. Politicians get elected due to their stances on the issue.
I actually used to be very much against legalizing drugs since I am very anti-drug (I don't even drink alcohol). I was afraid of legalization creating more addicts. However, after years and years of seeing young men kill each other in the streets over this poison, I decided hop over to the other side so to speak. Communities are being destroyed, not so much by the drugs themselves, but by the violence that surrounds the illegality of it. Legalizing and regulating drugs, especially hard drugs will in my opinion put the thugs and gangbangers out of business.
The way to win the war on drugs is through education and treatment. Teach people about drugs. Don't just tell the kids that drugs are bad, hug them, and send them on their way. Give them real information. And then help the people who are addicted to get clean. Maybe that way we can kill the demand for them.
I agree that the so called war on drugs is a complete failure. I believe that marijuana should be legalized and the more addictive and dangerous drugs ought to be legal, but controlled in some fashion.
I have spent some time in jail as a direct result of drug addiction. I would never have spent a day in jail if it weren't for my use of drugs.
I am a non-violent person who simply never grew out of that phase of experimentation practically all teenagers go through. I have a predisposition to become addicted and that's the simple truth.
A real war on drugs ought to be a two pronged attack. For those already using drugs, treatment is the best. Just sitting in a jail cell is such an enormous waste of time and money that it's hard to express or explain to anyone who hasn't been there.
The second approach is education. And I'm not talking about becoming educated about the very real dangers of drugs; I'm talking about a normal, good education beginning with the first grade until high school. I am a fairly well educated and capable person and I have been able to succeed in many areas in life. While in jail the number one thing I noticed was that most of those incarcerated weren't stupid people but uneducated people. And so it follows that when you have never been given a chance to become educated properly, your choices in life become very limited. And those limits are more often than not imposed by both your physical environment as well as your economic situation.
Naturally, this won't immediately solve this complex issue, but it would be a step in the right direction and would certainly reduce the number of people involved with drugs. I had both a good education and came from an upper middle class home - but that didn't prevent me from becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol. The important thing is that it would help many people avoid wasting their life and hurting those who love them if they were afforded a good education regardless of how much money they could pay for school.
Obviously, there is no simple answer to the issue of drug use. They can be a positive and fun part of life when used responsibly and they can make life a living hell. And I say a living hell not just for the person abusing drugs but for everyone involved in that person's life.
The USA now incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world. And Hispanics and Blacks make up a disproportionate amount of those in jail or prison. These very same groups of people are also those who tend to receive poor educations and live in difficult economic circumstances. They are also those least likely to be able to afford to pay for treatment. It is also more difficult for these groups to become involved in 12 step progams, which are free and have shown to be the most effective means of helping people with addictions.
Like the military - industrial complex, we now have an incarceration - prison building complex. I don't deny that there is a real need for both, but they have ceased to fulfill their original functions and have become black holes where money is poured in and nothing ever comes out of it.
It's time to end this war, just as it's time to end another war because we will never win either of them the way we are fighting them.
It is far more that a war on minorities and people of color. It is a class war which oppresses people trapped in poverty. Drug use, DUI, bad checks, a host of problems with homelessness as well as family breakdown and lost child support leaves many people at the mercy of the court. Without adequate representation and power to work through social difficulties, problems with family services, child welfare, health care and workers benefits; a whole host of problems unknown to white upper middle class Americans are leaving a whole class vulnerable to permanent exile form the American Dream. As a pastor I can tell you that for every adult imprisoned there is likely to be several children affected.
This remember is not only in the context of the war on drugs, and the war on terror, but dare we remember the war on poverty, or what O'Reily calls the culture wars. Indeed, many members of the underclass, feel like war is being made against them. This is especially true rural and urban areas where large numbers live in poverty surrounded by wealthy neighbors. An ever increasing number of desperately poor workers provides a fertile ground for wealthy corporations to increase profit while holding wages down. Unions are becoming a thing of the past, and trickle down wealth, doesn't make it to bottom of the economy. The answer will only be found when the demons of injustice, racism, and prejudice are named and as a society and government we do the work of justice; provide fair employment, equal opportunity and a welfare program which is not regressive, but actually provides a way out of poverty rather than locking people into a system which promotes poverty and punishes attempts to work and bring in extra income. These are not just democratic issues, but American issues that need our attention.
Decriminalize all drugs now. Prohibition does not work, it has never worked and it never will. No one has ever died from an overdose of pot.
Perhaps the least obvious reason why the "war on terror" was declared by the Bush cabal was because they knew the "war on drugs" had become such an obvious failure that the American public was beginning to favor reforms and harm-reduction policies which threatened to put an end to most of the fascist actions used by the DEA, and they needed a greater fear-factor that they could use to control the public by dumbing them down even more.
Along with all the other effects, the war on terror sidelined the war on drugs even further into the margins, such that fewer people and politicians have any time for it any more. The anti-war people are much too busy with the war on terror to spend more than a fleeting minute with the war on drugs today and the DEA is left to continue reaping all the profits, like the vampires and vultures that they are.
Furthermore, the war on terror has also exaggerated the connection between drug dealers and arms dealers, while completely ignoring the fact that it is the criminal status of 'illegal' drugs that puts them so close to 'illegal arms' dealing in the first place.
Before the war on terror was declared, public consciousness about medical cannabis was about to make a great breakthrough and itis quite possible that a popular vote could have made all the difference there. I'm quite sure that given this fact along with the US troop dependency on legal pharmaceuticals, the FDA and the pharmaceutical giants have had no qualms about supporting the Bush cabal and its fear-mongering deceptions.