ACTIVISM AGAINST THE US DRUG GULAG GROWS

Journey for Justice Comes to Washington, DC

"If George W. Bush is good enough for the White House, my brother is
good enough for my house," proclaimed Nora Callahan of the November
Coalition at the Journey for Justice demonstration at the White House
on November 1, 2002. She was urging the release of her brother who is
serving a 27-year drug offense sentence of which he has served 14 years.

Approximately 50 demonstrators highlighted the racism and hypocrisy of
the drug war by placing 20 cardboard cutouts in front of the White
House. Four of the figurines were of Presidents Bush and Clinton, Vice
President Gore and Speaker Gingrich - highlighting their past drug
use. Six figurines described the stories of twelve children of
politicians who got caught and received gentle treatment by the
justice system. And, ten of the figurines were a life-sized bar graph
of the prison population - six black, two brown and two white with
facts and figures about the drug gulag. The dark colors of the real
prison population contrasted with the all-white make-up of the elites
who avoid the drug war treatment despite their drug use. Photos of the
DC demonstration and others stops along the Journey for Justice are
available at http://www.journeyforjustice.org/archive.html.

Speakers at the DC demonstration included families of drug war
prisoners from Oregon, West Virginia, Washington State, North Carolina
and Washington, DC. All urged the President to give clemency to their
family members as well as urging new laws to reduce the mass
incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. Family members were
joined by leaders of national drug policy reform organizations who
urged an end to mass incarceration of drug offenders.

The demonstrators chanted: "What do we do when communities fail? Build
schools, not jails!" and "1-2-3-4 we don't want your racist war!"

The Journey for Justice is a four-year project the November Coalition
designed to build a broader, more vocal and more effective grass roots
movement to end the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders.* The
Four Year Journey began on October 14 with a series of events in Ann
Arbor and Detroit. At each stop along the way they participate in
community forums at universities, churches and community centers; hold
prison camp meetings outside of prisons with families and organize
demonstrations at courthouses, police stations and prisons.

The Journey comes at an increasing time of frustration for family
members of people ensnared in the US's Drug Gulag. The Republican
President and his Attorney General have given little hope of
sentencing reform. At the grass roots level the frustration is
beginning to boil.

At the Journey for Justice in New York City - Randy Credico of the
William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice - noted that over 80
percent of the public in New York agrees that the Rockefeller drug
laws need to be reformed, every candidate for governor supports reform
or repeal of the Rockefeller drug laws and candidate Tom Golisano made
the laws a centerpiece of his campaign with a massive advertising
blitz - yet there is no legislative movement for ending drug war
injustice in NY. Credico announced that they were going to start a new
campaign to encourage jury nullification - urging jurors to refuse to
convict in drug cases despite evidence of guilt because of the
injustice of the Rockefeller drug laws. In my comments I noted that a
similar effort was being considered in California in reaction to
medical marijuana prosecutions.

Credico's call for jury nullification contrasted at the Fordham Forum
with the views of a drug court judge who proclaimed it is not his job
to change the law - just to enforce it. The audience winced at this
statement and questioners noted that his "just enforcing the law"
approach reminded them of those in other eras of oppression who
claimed they were "just following orders."

Reform activists are getting more aggressive in response to drug war
injustice. At a meeting of over 100 people in Connecticut - primarily
African Americans all who had been directly or indirectly scarred by
the drug war - a young black girl about 15 years old stood up and
said, "My brother is in prison for drugs; I was isolated and ashamed,
but neither anymore." Another African American man asked: "What
exactly should we do?"

Chuck Armsbury, Nora Callahan's partner on the Journey and in life,
explained the importance of the people in the room getting together
regularly to plan activities and reach out to other community members.
He urged - "make it real, educate, activate and change your community."

The politics of the drug war is dominated not be the views of the
people - but rather by those who profit from the war on drugs -
private prisons who reap financial gain from warehousing people,
profit-centered coercive treatment programs that rely on courts to
send them clients, helicopter and arms manufactures selling their
wares to the Colombian drug war - the Journey for Justice is an effort
to activate enough people to make sure that the concerns of citizens
directly effected by the drug war are heard.

In Connecticut the marchers, some seventy strong, were a mix of young,
old, students, teachers, preachers, and politicians. In Philadelphia,
after a forum at the Temple Law School two groups of students forming
reform organizations joined together to form a strong chapter of
Students for Sensible Drug Policy. At every stop along the Journey
activists are building their schools and becoming more effective
activists. By building the Journey for four years - the impact of a
new grass roots base will become more and more noticeable.

At the start of the Journey, Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat
on the Judiciary Committee, proclaimed: "If the victims of the drug
war stand united they will form a political constituency that could
end the drug war." The Journey for Justice is working to ensure that
the people stand united - put aside race and class issues that divide
them and work together for an end to the injustice of the war on drugs.

* If you would like to get involved in the Journey for Justice visit
http://www.journeyforjustice.org/ They are currently planning a
southeastern-Florida-Texas journey for the beginning of next year and
will be coming to your part of the country in the future.