DON'T FORGET THE DRUGS

Martha Miller's feature article on Springfield's gangs [see Illinois Times,
"People & folks," July 5] missed the mark by failing to address the role of
drug prohibition.

Drug prohibition creates black markets that foster street gangs. If we were
serious about solving the gang problem, we would regulate drugs instead of
prohibiting them. We learned the lesson of prohibition regarding alcohol,
so why do we seem to need to relearn it regarding other recreational drugs?
The answer lies in the central element of the story that Miller and the
gangbusters tried, but failed, to obscure: race.

Drug prohibition was racist in its inception and remains a racist
institution in the post-civil rights era.

Consider the following: in Illinois, African-Americans comprise 90 percent
of drug offenders admitted into prison, making the state the worst offender
in the national scandal of racial disparities in drug offender incarceration.

Hispanics comprise less than 8 percent of the Illinois population (and take
fewer than 3 percent of the personal vehicle trips in the state), and yet
comprise approximately 30 percent of the motorists stopped by Illinois
State Police drug interdiction units over a five-year period.

Of the 259 juveniles in Illinois automatically transferred to adult court
for a drug crime in 2000, all but one were minorities.

Among the original arguments made for drug prohibition by our
great-grandparents' generation there were overtly racist warnings of
"hopped up Negroes", marijuana-smoking Mexicans and Chinese opium fiends.
Is it any wonder that today we have racial profiling and racially
disproportionate incarceration rates?

As long as we remain in a state of denial about this and continue to
support our Jim Crow drug war, street gangs are going to continue to serve
our despised and dispossessed neighbors as the only survival mechanism
available to them.

Larry Stevens

Springfield