FROM COLOMBIA TO COLUMBIA, THE 'WAR ON DRUGS' IS A CLASS WAR

From Colombia, South America, to Columbia, South Carolina, the "drug war"
is being exposed by human rights organizations as a failed war on drugs,
but a disastrously effective war on poor South Americans and black citizens
of the United States. The phony drug war is being escalated by a president
who "didn't inhale" when they passed the joints around, and its primary
victims are Colombian peasants and racially profiled blacks in the United
States.

Before he left for Colombia this week, Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch and the Washington Office On Latin America called on President
Clinton to make the protection of human rights the priority in his meeting
with Colombian leaders .

These leading human rights groups released a report demonstrating how
Colombia failed to meet a single human rights condition contained in a $1.3
billion military aid package, which is more than the military aid we give
all the other countries in Latin America combined.

On Aug. 23, Clinton signed a so-called national security interest waiver of
human rights conditions placed on military aid by Congress.

This past weekend, 28 people lost their lives in Colombia in the Western
Hemisphere's oldest civil war. According to Human Rights Watch, 35,000
people have been killed, and most of them were poor civilians accused by
the Colombian army or right-wing paramilitaries of collaborating with
left-wing guerrillas. Last Sunday, 60 armed men entered a poor neighborhood
in the town of Cienaga and dragged 10 residents from their homes to an
isolated part of town where they were questioned, then executed.

While poor people are being slaughtered by U. S. armed thugs, The New York
Daily News reports that nearly 2 million Colombians have been displaced by
the war and 10 percent of Colombia's population now lives abroad. Arturo
Sanchez, a Colombian-born professor in New York, said that middle-class
professionals are leaving the country in droves and that "this could be the
beginning of another Vietnam."

Colombia's drug production, which is estimated to provide 90 percent of the
cocaine consumed in the United States, has doubled in five years as more
armed insurgent groups have entered the drug trade to pay for military
campaigns.

As the "war on drugs" kills and dislocates the poor people of Colombia, in
the United States, it is incarcerating an alarmingly disproportionate
number of black people. Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive study
on June 8 describing the stark racial disparities in drug incarceration.
Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, but comprise 62 percent
of drug offenders in our state prisons. Nationwide, black men are sent to
prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men, although studies
reveal that five times as many whites use illegal drugs.

In South Carolina, with a black population of 30 percent, the S.C.
Department of Corrections reported that blacks comprise 86 percent of the
drug offenders in our state prisons.

As in most other states, those with felony convictions forever lose their
right to vote and prospects for good jobs after prison.

The hypocrisy of "didn't inhale" Clinton, "recreational" smoker Gore, and
"born again" party boy George W. Bush, now a fierce drug warrior like his
dad, is sickening when we are faced with such unjust and tragic
consequences of the "drug war".

Human Rights Watch suggests some solutions to blatant racial and class
inequity: States should eliminate racial profiling, repeal mandatory
sentencing laws for drug offenders, increase the availability of
alternative sanctions; increase the use of drug courts and increase the
availability of substance abuse treatment.

White, privileged politicians who never spent a day in jail for their
illegal substance abuse activities must end the dirty "war on drugs" that
oppresses poor and black people. Can they muster the courage and empathy to
advocate such sensible solutions?