A BATTLE OVER THE INJUSTICE OF NATION'S 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 Ron Allen, founder of a religious social activism
group called the International Faith-Based Coalition, has come out
swinging. "Why would the state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay
high?" he demanded last week 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% of blacks (about 3.6 million people) and 8.2% 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% 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.

So while the bishop hyperventilates about blacks "staying" high, he
ignores a clearer and more present danger. As Michelle Alexander
argues in her book, "The New Jim Crow," those absurd sentencing rates,
combined with laws making it legal to discriminate against even
nonviolent former felons in hiring, housing and education, constitute
nothing less than a new racial caste system.

Allen worries about a baby being born addicted to pot, but the
likelier scenario is that she will be born to a father unable to
secure a job so he can support her, an apartment for her to live in,
or an education so he can better himself for her -- all because he got
caught with a joint 10 years ago.

It is a cruel and ludicrous predicament. And apparently Huffman, like
a growing number of cops, judges, DEA agents, pundits and even
conservative icons like the late William F. Buckley Jr. and Milton
Friedman, has decided to call the war on drugs what it is: a failure.
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% between 1970 and 2003, according to an
advocacy group called LEAP (Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition).

And as drug use skyrocketed, we find that we have moved the needle on
addiction not even an inch, up or down. All we have managed, and at a
ruinous cost, is to relearn 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.

LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.