SMOKE AND HORRORS

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.'s recent chest-thumping against the
California ballot initiative that seeks to legalize marijuana
underscores how the war on drugs in this country has become a war
focused on marijuana, one being waged primarily against minorities
and promoted, fueled and financed primarily by Democratic politicians.

According to a report released Friday by the Marijuana Arrest
Research Project for the Drug Policy Alliance and the N.A.A.C.P. and
led by Prof. Harry Levine, a sociologist at the City University of
New York: "In the last 20 years, California made 850,000 arrests for
possession of small amounts of marijuana, and half-a-million arrests
in the last 10 years. The people arrested were disproportionately
African-Americans and Latinos, overwhelmingly young people, especially men."

For instance, the report says that the City of Los Angeles "arrested
blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites."

This imbalance is not specific to California; it exists across the country.

One could justify this on some level if, in fact, young blacks and
Hispanics were using marijuana more than young whites, but that isn't
the case. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health,
young white people consistently report higher marijuana use than
blacks or Hispanics.

How can such a grotesquely race-biased pattern of arrests exist?
Professor Levine paints a sordid picture: young police officers are
funneled into low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods where they
are encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk young men. And if you
look for something, you'll find it. So they find some of these young
people with small amounts of drugs. Then these young people are
arrested. The officers will get experience processing arrests and
will likely get to file overtime, he says, and the police chiefs will
get a measure of productivity from their officers. The young men who
were arrested are simply pawns.

Professor Levine has documented an even more devious practice in New
York City, where possessing a small amount of marijuana is just a
civil violation (so is a speeding ticket), but having it "open to
public view" is a misdemeanor.

According to a report he issued in September 2009: "Police typically
discovered the marijuana by stopping and searching people, often by
tricking and intimidating them into revealing it. When people then
took out the marijuana and handed it over, they were arrested and
charged with the crime of having marijuana 'open to public view.' "

And these arrests are no minor matter. They can have very serious,
lifelong consequences.

For instance, in 1998, President Bill Clinton signed a provision that
made people temporarily or permanently ineligible for federal
financial aid depending on how many times they had been arrested and
convicted of a drug offense. The law took effect in 2000, and since
2006 lawmakers have been working to soften it. But the effect was
real and devastating: the people most in need of financial aid were
also being the most targeted for marijuana arrests and were therefore
the most at risk of being frozen out of higher education. Remember
that the next time someone starts spouting statistics comparing the
number of black men in prison with the number in college.

The arrests also have consequences for things like housing and
employment. In fact, in her fascinating new book, "The New Jim Crow,"
Michelle Alexander argues that the American justice system is being
used to create a permanent "undercaste - a lower caste of individuals
who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society"
and to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics in the same way that
Jim Crow laws were once used to discriminate against blacks.

This wave of arrests is partially financed, either directly or
indirectly, by federal programs like the Byrne Formula Grant Program,
which was established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to rev up
the war on drugs. Surprisingly, this program has become the pet
project of Democrats, not Republicans.

Whatever his motives, President George W. Bush sought to eliminate
the program. Conservative groups backed his proposal, saying the
program "has proved to be an ineffective and inefficient use of resources."

But Democrats would have none of it. In the last year of the Bush
administration, financing had been reduced to $170 million. In March
of that year, 56 senators signed onto a "bipartisan" letter to
ranking members of the Senate Appropriations Committee urging them to
restore nearly $500 million to the program. Only 15 Republicans
signed the letter.

Even candidate Obama promised that he would restore funding to the program.

The 2009 stimulus package presented these Democrats with the
opportunity, and they seized it. The legislation, designed by
Democrats and signed by President Obama, included $2 billion for
Byrne Grants to be awarded by the end of September 2010. That was
nearly a 12-fold increase in financing. Whatever the merits of these
programs, they are outweighed by the damage being done. Financing
prevention is fine. Financing a race-based arrest epidemic is not.

Why would Democrats support a program that has such a deleterious
effect on their most loyal constituencies? It is, in part, callous
political calculus. It's an easy and relatively cheap way for them to
buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police
unions. The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of
thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the
communities they belong to barely seems to register.

This is outrageous and immoral and the Democrat's complicity is
unconscionable, particularly for a party that likes to promote its
social justice bona fides.

No one knows all the repercussions of legalizing marijuana, but it is
clear that criminalizing it has made it a life-ruining racial weapon.
As Ms. Alexander told me, "Our failed war on drugs has done
incalculable damage."

When will politicians have the courage to stand up, acknowledge this
fact and stop allowing young minority men to be collateral damage?