DEVALUING LIFE IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

THE recent shooting deaths at a Berkeley Jack in the Box of one suspected
low-level drug dealer and his friend, who was under no suspicion of
wrongdoing, is sickening at best.

We have become so twisted in our selective moralistic outrage over drug
use, that we as a society have enabled our public servants, the police, to
devalue some lives to the point where taking a life is somehow justified.

The fact that these lives are largely males of color is inextricably linked
to the selective moral outrage over drugs. Statistically, whites are more
likely to use and abuse drugs than people of color. Can you imagine two
white men, one a cocaine user or dealer and the other completely
uninvolved, being shot to death in the parking lot of the Jack in the Box
in Chesterfield as they attempted to flee the scene?

It is time we, as a society, start valuing all of our citizens. It is time
we, as a society, admit the war on drugs is a farce that has been
selectively and inordinately destructive to our poor and minority citizens.
It is time we, as a society, are morally outraged when the lives of certain
of our citizens are taken but are so devalued that the protest comes only
from citizens of the affected group.

It is time we become a society and not groups of disengaged societies.

Dave Gocken, Edwardsville