DRUG LAWS AND MINORITES

THE FAILURE of the war on drugs has been known for many years, but
the impact that it causes in poor, urban black and Latino communities
is an issue that deserves urgent attention.

The Justice Policy Institute says in a new report that the United
States has 19.5 million users of illegal drugs. About 1.5 million of
them were arrested for a drug-related offense, and 175,000 people
went to prison in connection with a drug offense. More than half of
those sent to prison were African-American.

In Bergen County, African-Americans are sent to prison for drug
offenses at 19 times the rate of whites, the institute's report says.
The discrepancy is the same in Passaic County.

You can't separate drug policy from the drugs themselves when you're
talking about destruction of black communities.

"The exponential removal of people of color who have substance-abuse
problems from their communities and into prisons undermines and
destabilizes neighborhoods; it does not make them safer," says Ethan
Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance's national
organization. "Drug addiction doesn't discriminate, but our drug policies do."

Researching the relationship between race, poverty, geographic
location and drug convictions, the Justice Policy Institute study
documented disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in
drug cases in 97 percent of the nearly 200 counties studied.

The report's release comes in advance of the 2007 International Drug
Policy Reform Conference, set to begin in New Orleans this week.
While African-Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar
rates, African-Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to be
imprisoned for drug offenses, it says.

Although African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population in
the United States, they accounted for 53 percent of drug offenders
sentenced to state prisons in 2003, according to the report.
Significantly, the researchers point out that while previous studies
have shown black and white drug use being about equal,
African-American kids' cases go to court more than the cases of white
youths committing the same offenses.

Plenty of drugs come into the United States. A United Nations report
this summer noted that the poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased
by an astounding 38 percent over the previous year. While we're
fighting for Afghanistan's stability, much of the country's illicit
export crop comes to the United States in the form of heroin. But why
does such a high proportion of it always end up in the black community?

Drugs Are Still Pouring In

In spite of a 25-year war on drugs, the drugs are still flowing in,
and young people see drug distribution as a way of becoming
neighborhood entrepreneurs.

New Jersey for a long time has reported drug offenders as the highest
percentage of people in its general prison population.

An earlier Justice Policy Institute survey, comparing 50 state
corrections departments, found New Jersey leading the nation with 36
percent of its prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses five years
ago. Nationally, drug offenders made up only 20 percent of the prison
population.

But despite all the documentation of this devastating phenomenon and
the horror expressed by well-meaning people, the only attempts to
reverse the trend are moving at a glacial pace.

"Basically, we're making these people social lepers," says Roseanne
Scotti, the director of the New Jersey office of the Drug Policy
Alliance. "You have this huge proportion of African-American men and,
increasingly, African-American women taken away from their families,
taken away from their communities and returned to those same places
much worse off than they were before."

How can communities like that be expected to move forward or recover
any semblance of normalcy and productivity?

The remedies are obvious, but destined to be effective only after
many decades. The damage is already nearly irreversible.