WAR ON DRUGS IS A WAR ON THE POOR

One of the favorite pastimes of the American government is to wage a
righteous, divine and equally idiotic war on drugs. The government
loves it so much that they have an entire agency devoted to it - the
DEA - and countless other organizations that jump in for fun. The
reality of the situation is that this so called "war" on drugs -
though in fact a war - is not against substances, but the poor and
economically-disadvantaged of our society.

There is a massive dose of paranoia in American culture about drugs.
Sure they are bad and destroy lives, but hey, so do cars. If there is
really going to be this much effort put forth this much effort to
combat an epidemic that as we can all see is sweeping across the
American landscape like a wildfire, then there should be full cavity
searches every time someone enters a public building and submission
to daily blood and urine tests.

The basic and most fundamental reason why the government and
contemporary society is so interested in purging this threat to
mankind is that large amounts of drug is known to occur in the poorer
subsets of society. And nothing angers a rich white guy more than
having to see someone poor walking on their streets, so they get
thrown in a cage for a couple months.

A case in point is the dichotomy between crack and cocaine. Crack
cocaine carries with it much stiffer penalties than cocaine, and
enforcement of anti-crack laws has been pushed in recent years. One
only needs to look at the usual clientele of crack users, a wide
majority of which are poor minorities, to see why. It's easy and
convenient to target groups who use crack - being commonly segregated
as they are in low income areas. Its also easier to throw them in the
slammer instead of that stock broker who is having a cocaine power
hour before he's off from lunch to go impoverish some other third world nation.

The evidence is two-fold: not only do affluent white people not get
arrested as often for illicit drug possession, but the poor and
minorities of our society are often caged into situations where the
only way the can make a substantive living is to sell drugs.

This is clearly illustrated in the Uniform Crime Report statistics
for Connecticut, where the poster-child of Fairfield Country, the
ambivalent and caring town of Westport had 26 total drug violations
in 2002, versus the picturesque home of that other university that
takes our parking spots on the weekend, Willimantic, which had 222
arrests in the same year.

It is obvious the poor have been caged in to a particular lifestyle
from which they cannot emerge and this notion has been supported with
study after study.

A common conservative argument is that if poor people really wanted
to succeed in life, they would work harder and pull themselves up by
their bootstraps. On the contrary, many of these individuals have
tried to succeed legitimately, and due to the poor quality of
education offered in these neighborhoods - and the real life dangers
they face every day - many of these individuals cannot gain a better
life through socially accepted channels. As surprising as it may
seem, working at McDonalds isn't going to pay the bills.

The solution to this cyclical conundrum is simple: either legalize
drugs already or make all mind-altering substances illegal.
Cigarettes alone kill "more people in the United States each year
than car accidents, alcohol, AIDS, murders, illegal drugs and
suicides combined" according to a University of Pennsylvania study,
and they have been legal for centuries.

So instead of adding to the already overcrowded, ironically titled
'corrections' system - as if throwing someone in a cage is going to
'correct' them - in following the American notions of greed and
avarice, just legitimize the source and tax it. This goes hand in
hand with many American capitalist notions; Americans are good at
profiting from death, hence the war in Iraq, the massive arms,
alcohol and tobacco industries.

So in order to make things simple for once in this country, where
states such as Connecticut still have laws on the books that make
biking over 65 miles per hour illegal, either legalize everything, or
make all substances illegal and actually enforce the law.

While the latter would be optimal for the welfare and benefit for all
of its citizens, the government would not do something that rendered
no profits.

Staff Columnist Chris Donnelly is a 5th-semester sociology and
political science double major.