LEGALIZING DRUGS JUST ONE SOLUTION

During a recent visit to New Orleans, where I represented the Louis
Armstrong Educational Foundation and gave the keynote address at the
Satchmo Festival, I began testing a theory I have about what has to be done
to get black people down at the bottom up from the impoverished,
crime-ridden and poorly educated extension of slavery into our moment.

I laid it out for Bob Hubbard, who was one of the central figures in the
civil rights movement in New Orleans and who was also in Mississippi during
that tragic Freedom Summer of 1964, when James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and
Andrew Goodman were murdered by local bigots. Hubbard had driven the car
from New York that the three had been in the night they disappeared.

Hubbard is now a businessman interested in real estate and providing
bed-and-breakfast lodging for visitors and tourists. I had stayed at his
Hubbard Mansion on St. Charles St. the last time I was New Orleans and had
gotten a much deeper sense of recent Crescent City history and what it had
taken to break down segregation.

I told Hubbard that the things I considered essential to black uplift were
basic. They were high-quality public education, which meant rebuilding the
public schools; removing the burden of heavy crime from communities
dominated by it, and legalizing drugs.

At this point, I explained, there needs to be a thorough national
rebuilding of public schools so black kids at the bottom will not be left
out of the Internet age. Poorly educated, they are destined to become
burdens on our society, one way or another.

For people at the bottom to live in civilized neighborhoods, the anarchic
criminals who dominate the streets have got to go, either behind bars or in
honest directions. The civil rights establishment and local leadership need
to work on developing an alliance between the community and the police.
Such an alliance could result in hotlines that residents can use to report
criminals, cops on foot patrols and support of strong policing by community
people - support that is central to success.

Hubbard agreed with those ideas but questioned the idea of legalizing
drugs. He had remembered when public education was of far higher quality
and what that had meant to the black people of his generation in New
Orleans and wherever else he had traveled. He also knew how oppressed the
poor were by the threat and the fact of violent crime.

But he did not believe that legalizing drugs would lead to anything other
than more chaos unless all drug addicts were registered and supplied with
their drugs through programs provided by the state.

Simply, we cannot fight a crime business that brings in so many billions of
dollars and is responsible for so much of the violent death in the streets
as well as the presence of so many young black men in penal institutions.
Legalized and taken over by our pharmaceutical industry, those illegal
plants and substances would bring mountains of tax dollars into the
national coffers, allowing for the setting up of treatment programs as well
as whatever else the nation needs.

It would not be without costs. There would be those lost to drugs, just as
there are those lost to alcohol. But we were able to handle the
legalization of alcohol following Prohibition, and we could handle the
legalization of drugs.