LEGALIZE DRUGS TO ERADICATE POVERTY

During a recent visit to New Orleans, where I represented the Louis
Armstrong Educational Foundation and gave the keynote address at the
Satchmo Festival, I began testing a theory I have about what has to be done
to get black people down at the bottom up from the impoverished,
crime-ridden and poorly educated extension of slavery into our moment.

I laid it out for Bob Hubbard, who was one of the central figures in the
civil rights movement in New Orleans and who was also in Mississippi during
that tragic Freedom Summer of 1964, when James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and
Andrew Goodman were murdered by local bigots. Hubbard had driven the car
from New York that the three had been in the night they disappeared.

Hubbard is now a businessman interested in real estate and providing
bed-and-breakfast lodging for tourists. I had stayed at his Hubbard Mansion
on St. Charles Street the last time I was in New Orleans and had gotten a
much deeper sense of recent Crescent City history and what it had taken to
break down segregation.

I told Hubbard that the things I considered essential to black uplift were
basic. They were high-quality public education; removing the burden of
heavy crime from communities dominated by it; and legalizing drugs.

At this point, I explained, there needs to be a thorough national
rebuilding of public schools so black kids at the bottom will not be left
out of the Internet age. Poorly educated, they are destined to become
burdens on our society, one way or another.

For people at the bottom to live in civilized neighborhoods, the anarchic
criminals who dominate the streets have got to go, either behind bars or in
honest directions. The civil rights establishment and local leadership need
to work on developing an alliance between the community and the police.

Hubbard agreed with those ideas but questioned the idea of legalizing drugs.

He did not believe that legalizing drugs would lead to anything other than
more chaos unless all drug addicts were registered and supplied with their
drugs through programs provided by the state.

Simply, we cannot fight a crime business that brings in so many billions of
dollars and is responsible for so much of the violent death in the streets
as well as the presence of so many young black men in penal institutions.
Legalized and taken over by our pharmaceutical industry, those illegal
plants and substances would bring mountains of tax dollars into the
national coffers.

It would not be without costs. There would be those lost to drugs, just as
there are those lost to alcohol. But we handled the legalization of alcohol
after Prohibition, and we could handle the legalization of drugs.