BUSH TARS DRUG TAKERS WITH AIDING TERRORISTS

Mandatory Jail Makes A Drugs Gulag

The US government is stepping up its attempt to link the war on drugs and
the war on terrorism.

Its office of national drug control policy is running advertisements which
tell Americans that by buying drugs they may be financing terrorists -
"whether you're shooting heroin, snorting cocaine, taking Ecstasy or
sharing a joint in your friend's back yard". President Bush has declared:
"If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America."
Campaigners for changes in the drug laws fear that it is the latest attempt
to gather support for an increasingly unpopular war on drugs.

The ad campaign has highlighted the extraordinary number in jail for
non-violent drug offences.

The number in jail for drug offences - about 500,000 - is greater than the
entire jail population of western Europe. Of these, 320,000 are serving
more than a year.

Just under 20% of those jailed for federal drug offences are serving time
for marijuana offences.

Even minor marijuana offences carrying mandatory minimum sentences which
some judges have apologised for having to apply.

Most are blacks or Latinos, and their imprisonment disenfranchises hundreds
of thousands of voters whose absence from the polls was seen as one of the
factors responsible for George Bush's election in 2000.

"We have denounced China as a Gulag state, but we have incarcerated many
more," said Sanho Tree, director of the drug policy project at the
Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

"They want to hitch an increasingly unpopular drug war to a very popular
war on terror." It would be just as accurate, he said, to blame "soccer
moms who drive SUVs" - four wheel drive "sports utility vehicles" - for
supporting al-Qaida because of the extra petrol they use.

Many middle-class voters believe that the drug laws have eased when the
reverse is true.

There were 734,498 marijuana-related arrests in 2000, 646,042 of them for
simple possession, and 1,579,566 drugs arrests of all kind, the highest
ever recorded by the FBI. Last year the US spent $40bn fighting drugs, a
40-fold increase since 1980.

The effect on drug use and public opinion is minimal: 35% of Americans over
the age of 11 have tried marijuana, and an estimated 11m say that they are
current users.

Not all the voices raised against the drug laws are from expected quarters.
Gary Johnson, the Republican governor of New Mexico, has been an outspoken
advocate of legalising drugs. Last week on an ABC television documentary
the Detroit chief of police, Jerry Oliver, described the war as "insanity".

Linking drugs and terrorism shows that President Bush is still committed to
a high level of imprisonment. His first budget measure on taking office
last year was to give federal prisons $1bn more. While states' spending on
prisons has rised by 30% in the past 10 years, spending on higher education
has fallen 18%.

Civil rights activists are concerned about the disparity in sentencing.
Government figures show that black people make up 14% of the drug-taking
population but 58% of those convicted of drug offences. Ninety-six percent
of those prosecuted for possessing crack are black or Latino.

Drug offences are felonies and in many states disqualify voters from voting
for the rest of their lives: 1.4 million African-American men are currently
disqualified by felony convictions, including one in three of those in
Florida and Alabama.

Nora Callahan, who co-founded the November Coalition in Seattle with
another woman who, like her, had had a brother jailed for a long time on a
drug offence, said: "This is a horrible inhumane war. Things are terrible
and desperate for the prisoner in America... Millions of people have been
stigmatised." Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced in the late 80s.
Monica Pratt of Families Against Mandatory Minimums said: "There is a
demonisation of drug offenders in the US, but it's not the kingpins doing
the hard time, it's these low-level offences." Julie Stewart, its
president, said: "These are ordinary people given extraordinary sentences,"
she said. "I was naive enough to think that once legislators knew what was
happening they would undo the laws. That didn't happen, but the tide is
beginning to turn in Congress." Mr Bush's drugs tsar, John Walters, said
the widely held view that the criminal justice system was unjustly
punishing young black men was among "the great urban myths of our time".

But a new poll commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union shows
that the drug policies no longer enjoy popular support, despite the heavy
lobbying by the prison industry and the prison guards' union to maintain
the sentences.

It shows that 61% of Americans oppose mandatory minimum sentences for
non-violent drug offences.