REFORMERS CHALLENGE PREACHERS: 'PROTECT PEOPLE, STOP DRUG WAR'

DETROIT - The war on drugs is a war on people, and churches cannot be
reticent on such issues, said Anthony G. Holt, program director of the
city's Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities, at a
drug policy forum at Wayne State University.

The two-day forum, held on Oct. 3-4, brought together health activists
and civic and community leaders from across the country.

The theme for the forum, which was sponsored by the Drug Policy Forum of
Michigan and Wayne State University Students for Sensible Drug Policy, was
"And Justice For All: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs."

"With all the big churches in the city, what are they doing about the
war on people? The faith-based community must do something now," Holt
said.

According to Holt, most of the churches are financially sound enough
to help in the tackling of issues that affect minorities.

"They make a lot of money. Some of them have large congregations of up
to 4,000," he said.

The Rev. Oscar King III, vice president of the Detroit Council of
Baptist Pastors, agreed.

"We spend 75 to 80 percent of our budget maintaining church buildings
when our primary role is to find the lost, which includes the drug
addicts," he said. "While we are building bigger churches, more people
are getting hurt. There are people out there engaged in massive church
building programs at the expense of bringing solutions to the issues
confronting our communities."

Some critics question the wisdom of spending money on building new
churches amidst neighborhoods with drug houses, abandoned buildings
and dissipated city services, instead of using the same money to
address the city's socio-economic problems.

Some say churches could play an active role, not only advocating for
sound drug policies, but also helping to rehabilitate drug offenders.

Statistics reveal African Americans make up only 14 percent of the
statewide population but a staggering 76 percent of those in prison
for drug-related offenses.

"You can say, metaphorically, that the criminal justice system in
America today is like a pipeline, like a slave ship transporting human
cargo, primarily Black cargo, along interstate triangular
trade-routes, from black and brown communities, through the middle
passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and court
rooms to upstate or rural jails - and then back to communities as
un-rehabilitated felons, and then back to jail, in a vicious cycle,"
said Deborah Peterson Small, public policy director of the Drug Policy
Alliance in Washington D.C.

Small said the disparity in drug arrests and incarceration is not
related to any substantial differences in the use of illicit drugs.

"Statistical and other evidence compiled by the government
demonstrates that drug use and selling cuts across all racial,
geographic and socio-economic lines," she said.

A recent survey regarding drug users, she added, showed there were
almost five times as many white marijuana users as Black users, four
times as many white cocaine users as Black users, and almost three
times as many whites as Blacks who have ever used crack-cocaine.

"Yet when it comes to enforcing the drug laws, it has been poor urban
minority communities that have been the principle fronts of the war on
drugs," Small said.

"More Blacks have been prosecuted for crack offenses than whites,
which has made [Blacks] subject to the outrageously harsh sentencing
disparity - five hundred to one - for crack versus powered cocaine
under the federal system."

Several measures have been taken to address the problem of having what
reform advocates call a "prison industrial complex."

Last year, the Michigan Campaign for New Drug Policies petitioned for
treatment instead of jail time for first time drug offenders.

Despite having 454,584 signatures, more than enough to qualify for the
Nov. 5th ballot, the state's highest court refused Sept. 10 to grant
drug reform advocates a spot on the ballot.

Instead, the state Supreme Court upheld an earlier appeals court
decision, which said that sponsors of the initiatives failed to
clearly show a legal right to certification by the board of canvassers.

The board said it would not certify the MCNDP drug reform initiatives
because the section to be amended in the constitution was numbered
incorrectly.

"If we had fewer prisons and higher quality societal resources, this
mess the drug war has put us in would be significantly less," said
Amanda Brazel, who coordinated the forum.

"Our communities cannot wait for politics to stop being politics long
enough to remedy drug war injustice. We have to take the initiative, and we
will overcome."