STUDY SUGGESTS DRUG LAWS RESEMBLE NOTORIOUS PASSBOOK LAWS

Ever since Al Gore and George W. Bush clinched the nominations of
their respective parties, I've been pondering the significance of the
apparent fact that both of the major party presidential candidates
have an illicit drug history.

Gore admits past use of pot, while Bush rebuffs inquiries into the
party-animal period of his life, issuing instead Clintonesque
statements about the duration of his illicit behavior.

Both candidates, to be sure, now stand squarely behind the nation's
war on drugs, although Gore has broken ranks with Bush on the issue of
a patient's use of medicinal marijuana.

Yet I keep asking myself, what does it mean to elect a president who
champions a war on drugs even though he broke those very laws during
his coming of age years?

Does it mean that taking illicit drugs for a time in one's life won't
prevent you from obtaining the highest elected office in the land? Or
does it mean that one criminal standard applies to the "right kind of
people" and a different standard to everyone else?

A study released a week ago by the nonprofit Human Rights Watch sheds
light on the latter question, leveling the troubling accusation that
drug laws are selectively enforced against African-Americans in the
United States.

Using prison admission data from the 1996 National Corrections
Reporting Program, Human Rights Watch calculated per-capita
incarceration rates for drug offenders in the 37 states that
participated. Looking at prison rates for men, the New York-based
Human Rights Watch found that 482 of every 100,000 African-American
men are in prison for a drug offense compared with 36 of every 100,000
white men.

That means 14 times more black men are sent to prison for drug
offenses than their white counterparts, despite evidence that suggests
just as many whites use illicit drugs as African-Americans.

In Illinois, a black man is 57 times more likely to be sent to
prison, in Wisconsin he is 54 times more likely and in Minnesota 39
times. In California, black males are a "mere" five times likelier to
be imprisoned than white males.

"These racial disparities are a national scandal," proclaimed Ken
Roth, Human Rights Watch executive director.

At best, one has to concede that the nation's war on drugs has not
been fair in how it treats those raised in privileged homes, such as
Gore and Bush, and those raised in a different part of town.

"When it comes to addiction, the rich go to Betty Ford, the poor go
to county jail," remarked the Rev. Scott Richardson in a sermon to the
congregation of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Richardson's
comment was quoted in a June 3 Los Angeles Times article by religion
writer Larry B. Stammer on the creation by more than 500 clergy of
"Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy."

I should add that the Human Rights Watch study was funded by the Open
Society Institute, the creation of billionaire currency dealer George
Soros. An emigre to America from Europe, Soros compares his adopted
country's war on drugs to the two forms of totalitarianism he
experienced in Europe growing up -- communism and fascism.

Because of his views, Soros subsidizes several key players in the
academic assault on today's drug laws, including the Lindesmith Center
of New York, a drug policy think tank. A growing number of such
critics are writing a revisionist history of drug laws in this
country, comparing many such laws as the equivalent of Great Britain's
anti-gin laws, which were aimed at the lower classes that indulged in
that particular spirit.

They cite the overt racism that fueled the first criminal statutes
against drugs in this country, how opiate use was identified with
Chinese immigrants, cannabis with Mexicans and cocaine with
African-Americans.

William Randolph Hearst almost single-handedly demonized the use of
marijuana by Mexican immigrants, popularizing the Mexican slang
"marijuana" in the pages of the tabloid newspapers he owned. In fact,
when America's first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, proposed the
Marijuana Stamp Act in 1937, the American Medical Association told
legislators it had no idea the "marijuana, assassin of youth" was the
same substance that physicians had used safely to treat hundreds of
illnesses.

A more recent example of the link between drug laws, race and class
was the harsher penalties created for rock cocaine, which is more
widely used in inner-city neighborhoods than in the suburbs. The
bottom line is that drug laws historically have been used to keep the
wrong sort of people in line.

In that sense, America's drug laws have come to resemble the
abhorrent passbook laws that South Africa used to enforce apartheid,
the system of laws that restricted where people could live and visit
based on the color of their skin.

As the number of people in our prisons exceeds that in all other
countries, the drug laws have created millions of political
casualties, who can neither vote nor hold a responsible job because
they chose the wrong type of drug. According to the ACLU's Sentencing
Project, 3.9 million Americans have now permanently lost their right
to vote because of felony convictions. The percentage of black men who
are disenfranchised -- 13 percent -- is seven times higher than for
whites.

But perhaps we've become jaded about such unpleasant facts, inured to
the loss of civil rights and human lives that have been sacrificed to
a seemingly endless war on drugs.

For after all, isn't that what it really means to elect a president
whose "youthful indiscretions" would send someone less privileged to
prison?