AMERICA'S 'WAR ON DRUGS' LOOKS UNFAIRLY WARPED

The United States, rarely shy about condemning other nations for human
rights abuses, will get a dose of its own medicine when the World
Conference Against Racism opens in Durban, South Africa, on Aug. 31. The
target will be America's "war on drugs," in which black men are being
imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times the rate of white men.

A team of American lawyers, clergy and drug experts, organized as the
Campaign to End Race Discrimination in the War on Drugs, will assert that
America's criminal justice system has been turned into an "apartheid-like"
device.

"We don't want to see the United States continue to get off the hook on
this," says Deborah Small of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation,
one of the American delegates. "There has been a lot more attention about
racial profiling and to the death penalty internationally than to the drug
war. But there is no other public policy in the U.S. that affects so many
people detrimentally."

The campaign last week released a letter to Secretary-General Kofi Annan
calling on leaders in Africa and the international community at large to
speak out against the United States for allegedly racist pursuit of its
drug war. What are we to make of this attempt to make an international
cause celebre of U.S. drug and incarceration policies? I would like to say
it is based on exaggeration, oversimplification and half-truths. But I can't.

The motivation behind America's drug wars, its mandatory minimum sentences,
its willingness to let the incarceration rate balloon to the highest in the
world, was not race but "law and order" politics. Yet the impact of the
policies has become profoundly racist. People know it. They just do
precious little to correct it.

According to the Washington-based Sentencing Project, African-Americans are
13 percent of drug users but represent 35 percent of arrests for drug
possession, 55 percent of convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences.

And there is little mystery why. First, there is location. Poor black city
neighborhoods, not calm white suburbs, are the scene of big street sweeps.

And then there is class. Jenni Gainsborough of the Sentencing Project
notes: "If you're white middle-class and your kid is on drugs, you call the
treatment center. In the inner city there's no treatment. Your first port
of call is the criminal justice system - and it escalates. Once you have a
record, every interaction leads to a stronger sanction."

States fed these fires with their tough laws of recent years, and the
federal government, if anything, is worse. Under a 1986 federal law it
takes only one-hundredth the amount of crack cocaine (generally more
popular in black neighborhoods) to trigger the same mandatory minimum
sentence as powder cocaine (more popular among affluent whites).

In many city neighborhoods, more than half of young black men spend time in
prison. Even those inclined to form permanent relationships can't do so
from behind bars. For ex-felons, jobs are rare. Official policy, says James
Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League, is leading to
"incapacitation of future generations ... hopelessness and despair in the
black community."

"Drug prohibition has become a replacement system for segregation," says
Ira Glazer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It has become
a system of separating out, subjugating, imprisoning ... substantial
portions of a population based on skin color."

Few of the legislators who wrote today's laws anticipated such outcomes.
But the results give strong credence to the charges of racist policy being
leveled against the country.