REEFER MADNESS, REDUX

The War On Drugs Destroys Lives But Does Nothing To Mitigate The Abuse Of
Drugs In This Country

OUR OBSESSION WITH drugs and our national failure to distinguish among them
- equating the effects of pot, for instance, with those of heroin - have
corrupted our criminal-justice system.

Consider the following: as of 2000, United States prisons held 458,131
people incarcerated for drug offenses alone.

That's 100,000 more inmates than the 356,626 people incarcerated throughout
the European Union for all offenses combined.

The statistic is even more startling when you consider that the EU has 100
million more people than the US.

Nearly 25 percent of those locked up in the US today are in prison or jail
for a crime related to the use or sale of drugs.

Federal spending alone on the incarceration of inmates convicted of drug
charges is $3 billion annually.

In the last decade, from 1990 to 2000, federal inmates imprisoned for drug
offenses jumped 59 percent, while the rates of incarceration for violent
offenders fell. In 2000, the average federal drug offender was sentenced to
75.6 months in prison while the average federal offender sentenced for a
violent crime was given just 63 months behind bars. And as of 1999, the
total number of people incarcerated in state and federal prison for
nonviolent offenses - which includes, for the most part, those convicted of
drug charges - exceeds the populations of Alaska and Wyoming.

This is madness.

The US war on drugs is a failure.

The former US drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, admitted as much in
remarks to the Criminal Justice and Substance Abuse Conference in New York
in 1999, as quoted by the Justice Policy Institute in a report on the
impact of incarcerating drug offenders (available online at
http://www.justicepolicy.org/downloads/pp.pdf). There, he said: "It is clear
that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of chronic drug abuse and
drug-driven crime. We cannot continue to apply policies and programs that
do not deal with the root causes of substance abuse and attendant crime.

Nor should we expect to continue to have the widespread societal support
for our counter-drug programs if the American people begin to believe these
programs are unfair."

Well, guess what? They're unfair.

The Justice Policy Institute report from July 2000 clearly documents that
African-Americans are bearing the "brunt of the war on drugs." In 1996, the
latest year for which data were available, 63 people out of every 100,000
were sent to prison after being found guilty of a drug charge.

But blacks are sent to prison on drug charges at a rate 14 times higher
than that of whites (279 per 100,000 versus 20 per 100,000). Incarceration
rates by race in Maine - a state with a relatively low population of blacks
- are instructive: in 1996, African-Americans accounted for 39.13 percent
of all admissions to prison on drug charges. Whites, by contrast, made up
just 8.42 percent of all such admissions. The implications of this are grave.

The Human Rights Watch found that by 1998, 13 percent of the adult-male
African-American population had lost the right to vote after being
convicted of felonies.

Thirteen percent.

Not all of these convictions were related to drugs - but many were.

Despite compelling evidence of the bloated costs and wasted resources
devoted to our two-decade-long war on drugs, not to mention shocking racial
disparities in arrests and sentencing for drug charges - all documented by
organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the Justice Policy Institute, and
the Sentencing Project - the Bush administration has embraced the gulag
approach to dealing with the societal problems caused by drug abuse.

This, more than anything else, was evident at last week's anti-drug summit
organized by the Office of National Drug Control Policy (see "Drugs").
There, we saw ONDCP director and national drug czar John Walters suggest
routine drug testing of high-school students as a deterrent to drug use by
teens.

We heard Mayor Tom Menino and Boston police commissioner Paul Evans warn
that heroin dealers are targeting children by putting cartoon characters on
their drug packets.

We heard Governor Mitt Romney gravely intone that the marijuana available
today is not your father's weed - it's much more potent, addictive, and
dangerous.

As Walters brings his dog-and-pony show across the country - attacking
medicinal marijuana (see "Snake-Oil Salesmen," page 30), advocating
incarceration over rehabilitation, and exploiting the vulnerability of "the
children" to make political points about a very real heroin epidemic that
is destroying adult lives - people are going to jail for nonviolent
drug-related offenses in record numbers; judges are being forced to
sentence them to ridiculous punishments thanks to draconian
mandatory-minimum laws; and people with cancer, AIDS, and other
chronic-pain-related ailments are being denied the one drug that might
offer relief.

You can take action against this madness on the local level.

Write to your state representative and tell him or her that you support
House Bill 2965, sponsored by State Representative Frank Smizik
(D-Brookline), which would allow the use of marijuana by patients who've
been prescribed the drug by their doctors. Visit
http://www.state.ma.us/legis/legis.htm
to find contact information.

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