WAR ON DRUGS COSTLY FOR BLACKS

When the Draconian drug laws were being enacted African American
legislators went along with "law and order" politicians with practices
that would incarcerate millions of drug offenders from inner city
neighborhoods and help rural politicians make the business of
imprisonment a major industry in their districts.

Every passing year the drug problem gets worse and its time African
Americans make legislative representatives face up to the impact the
War on Drug has on us. The U.S. government spends $600 per second in a
"war without end." Of the $19 billion the U.S. spent last year on drug
laws, 61 percent went to criminal justice and just 30 percent for
treatment and prevention programs.

The War on Drugs is a prohibition campaign intended to reduce the
illegal drug trade - to curb supply and diminish demand for certain
psychoactive substances deemed "harmful or undesirable" by the
government. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that
are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and
consumption of targeted substances.

Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we've become blind to the
reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is wasting
unimaginable amounts of tax dollars, increasing crime and despair and
severely and unnecessarily harming millions of peoples' lives. "Law
and order" politicians have exacerbated drugs laws and practices.

After all, drugs are bad so why not escalate the war against
drugs?

Politicians get to look tough in front of voters and the drug war
bureaucracy gets ever expanding budgets.

African Americans comprise 12 percent of the population and 13 percent
of drug users, but make up 38 percent of those arrested for drug
offenses and 59 percent of those convicted.

Among the war's tragic consequences, by far the worst is the
criminalization of a vast percentage of our population, destroying
families and individuals by the millions.

Since 1995, the U.S. prison population has grown an average of 43,266
inmates per year. It costs approximately $450,000 to put a single drug
dealer in jail - costs of arrest, conviction, room and board.

But, treatment is 10 times more cost effective than interdiction in
reducing drug use in the U.S. Every additional dollar invested in
substance abuse treatment saves taxpayers $7 in societal costs, and
that additional domestic law enforcement costs 15 times as much as
treatment to achieve the same reduction in societal costs.

The War on Drugs thrives on the backs of minority populations. It has
a big payroll, and everyone on that payroll has some interest in
seeing the war continue. It supports the prison industry.

Putting people behind bars, building, supplying, and running prisons
have become big business.

This alignment of government and business in running the prison system
is sometimes called the prison-industrial complex.

It's time African Americans acknowledge the cost, destruction,
failure, and ultimate futility of the War on Drugs and take actions to
end it. Black families are on the losing end of this fiasco and have
to confront those in power currently benefiting and profiting from it.
Support for the War on Drugs in this country is broad and deep, and
the interests that it serves overlap and interlock in complex ways.
Furthermore, most of the people running the War on Drugs don't think
they are doing something evil. Most of them think they are doing their
jobs. And they think those jobs are important and necessary.

What Blacks need to do is call a check on politicians and insist on
alternatives to the War on Drugs. A public-health action, sometimes
called regulated distribution, would be better all around.

Under this alternative the government sets up regulatory regimes to
pull addicts into the public-health system.

The government, not criminal traffickers, would control the price,
distribution, and purity of addictive substances - which it already
does with prescription drugs.

This would take most of the profit - which drives the crime - out of
drug trafficking. Addicts would be treated - and if necessary
maintained - under medical auspices.

(William Reed - www.BlackPressInternational.com