BATTLE OF WORDS IN WAR ON DRUGS

Ron Allen probably thinks Alice Huffman has been smoking
something.

Huffman, president of the California Conference of the NAACP, recently
declared support for an initiative that, if passed by voters in
November, will decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana.
Huffman sees it as a civil rights issue.

In response, Bishop Allen, founder of a religious social activism
group called the International Faith-Based Coalition, came out
swinging. "Why would the state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay
high?" he demanded this month at a news conference in Sacramento.
"It's going to cause crime to go up. There will be more drug babies."
Allen wants Huffman to resign.

But Huffman is standing firm, both in resisting calls for her head and
in framing this as an issue of racial justice. There is, she notes, a
pronounced racial disparity in the enforcement of marijuana laws.
She's right, of course. For that matter, there is a disparity in the
enforcement of drug laws, period.

In 2007, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, 9.5
percent of blacks (about 3.6 million people) and 8.2 percent of whites
(about 16 million) older than 12 reported using some form of illicit
drug in the previous month. Yet though there are more than "four
times" as many white drug users as black ones, blacks represent better
than half those in state prison on drug charges, according to The
Sentencing Project. The same source says that though two-thirds of
regular crack users are white or Latino, 82 percent of those sentenced
in federal court for crack crimes are black. In some states, black men
are jailed on drug charges at a rate 50 times higher than whites.

And so on.

It is time to find a better way, preferably one that emphasizes
treatment over incarceration.

You'd think that would be a no-brainer. We have spent untold billions
of dollars, ruined untold millions of lives and racked up the highest
incarceration rate in the world to fight drug use. Yet, we saw casual
drug use "rise" by 2,300 percent from 1970 to 2003, according to the
advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. All we have
managed, and at a ruinous cost, is to re-learn the lesson of 1933 when
alcohol Prohibition collapsed: you cannot jail or punish people out of
wanting what they want.

I've never used drugs. I share Bishop Allen's antipathy toward them.
But it seems silly and self-defeating to allow that reflexive
antipathy to bind us to the same strategy that has failed for 30
years. By now, one thing should be obvious about our war on drugs.

Drugs won.