by John W. Whitehead

Recently
by John W. Whitehead: 2011:
A Civil Liberties Year in Review

“The
drug war is not to protect the children, save the babies, shield
the neighborhoods, or preserve the rain forests. The drug war is
a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black
family, among many others.”

~ Wilton D.
Alston, “How
Can Anyone Not Realize the War on (Some) Drugs Is Racist?”
LewRockwell.com (June 24, 2011)

After more
than 40 years and at least $1 trillion, America’s so-called “war
on drugs” ranks as the longest-running, most expensive and
least effective war effort by the American government. Four decades
after Richard Nixon declared that “America’s public enemy No.
1 in the United States is drug abuse,” drug use continues unabated,
the prison population has increased six fold to over two million
inmates (half a million of whom are there for nonviolent drug offenses),
SWAT team raids for minor drug offenses have become more common,
and in the process, billions of tax dollars have been squandered.

Just consider
– every 19 seconds, someone in the U.S. is arrested for violating
a drug law. Every 30 seconds, someone in the U.S. is arrested for
violating a marijuana law, making it the fourth most common cause
of arrest in the United States. Approximately 1,313,673 individuals
were arrested for drug-related offenses in 2011. Police arrested
an estimated 858,408 persons for marijuana violations in 2009. Of
those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent
were charged with possession only. Since 1971, more than 40 million
individuals have been arrested due to drug-related offenses. Moreover,
since December 31, 1995, the U.S. prison population has grown an
average of 43,266 inmates per year, with about 25 percent sentenced
for drug law violations.

The foot soldiers
in the government’s increasingly fanatical war on drugs, particularly
marijuana, are state and local police officers dressed in SWAT gear
and armed to the hilt. These SWAT teams carry out roughly 50,000
no-knock raids every year in search of illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia.
As author and journalist Radley Balko reports, “The vast majority
of these raids are to serve routine drug warrants, many times for
crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana… Police have
broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people
at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana
plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry
bushes. (It’s happened with all five.)”

No wonder America’s
war on drugs has increasingly become an issue of concern on and
off the campaign trail. Back in 1976, Jimmy Carter campaigned for
president on a platform that included decriminalizing marijuana
and ending federal criminal penalties for possession of up to one
ounce of the drug. Thirty-six years later, the topic is once again
up for debate, especially among Republican presidential contenders
whose stances vary widely, from Ron Paul who has called for an end
to the drug war, to Govs. Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman who have said
that states should be allowed to legalize medical marijuana without
federal interference, to Rick Santorum who has admitted to using
marijuana while in college but remains adamantly opposed to its
legalization.

Americans are
showing themselves to be increasingly receptive to a change in the
nation’s drug policy, with a Gallup poll showing a record-high 50%
of Americans favoring legalizing marijuana use, nearly half of all
Americans favor legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana
for personal use, 70% favoring legalizing it for medical purposes,
and a 2008 Zogby poll which found that three in four Americans believe
the war on drugs to be a failure. “As an active duty jail superintendent,
I’ve seen how the drug war doesn’t do anything to reduce drug abuse
but does cause a host of other problems, from prison overcrowding
to a violent black market controlled by gangs and cartels,”
said Richard Van Wickler, the serving corrections superintendent
in Cheshire County, N.H. “For a long time this issue has been
treated like a third rail by politicians, but polls now show that
voters overwhelmingly agree that the drug war is a failure and that
a new direction is sorely needed.”

A growing number
of law enforcement officials and national organizations are also
calling for an end to the drug wars, including the US Conference
of Mayors, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes
former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US Secretary of State
George Schultz, and former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil,
and the NAACP. In fact, at their national convention in July 2011,
the NAACP voiced their concern over the striking disparity in incarceration
between whites and blacks, particularly when it comes to drug-related
offenses.

In terms of
its racial impact, the U.S. government’s war on drugs also constitutes
one of the most racially discriminatory policies being pushed by
the government in recent decades, with African-Americans constituting
its greatest casualties. As the ACLU has reported, “Despite
the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than
African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses
at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.” Indeed,
blacks – who make up 13% of the population – account for 40% of
federal prisoners and 45% of state prisoners convicted of drug offenses.

Moreover, a
November 2011 study by researchers at Duke University found that
young blacks are arrested for drug crimes ten times more
often than whites. Likewise, a 2008 study by the ACLU concluded
that blacks in New York City were five times more likely to be arrested
than their white counterparts for simple marijuana possession. Latinos
were three times more likely to be arrested. The Drug Policy Alliance
and California NAACP released a report claiming that between 2006
and 2008 “police in 25 of California’s major cities arrested
blacks at four, five, six, seven, and even 12 times the rate of
whites.”

This disproportionate
approach to prosecuting those found in possession of marijuana is
particularly evident in California, where black marijuana offenders
were imprisoned 13 times as much as non-blacks in 2011. In fact,
between 1990 and 2010, there was a 300% surge in arrests for marijuana
possession for nonwhites. As the Center on Juvenile and Criminal
Justice concluded, “California’s criminal justice system can
be divided into two categories with respect to marijuana: one system
for African-Americans, another for all other races.”

Thus, while
the government’s war on drugs itself may not be an explicit attempt
to subjugate minority groups, the policy has a racist effect in
that it disproportionately impacts minority communities. Moreover,
the origins of drug prohibition have explicitly racial justifications.
In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries,
prohibitionists clamoring to make drugs illegal tapped into common
racial prejudices to convince others of the benefits of drug prohibition.
For example, opium imports to America peaked in the 1840s, with
70,000 pounds imported annually, but Chinese immigrants did not
arrive in large numbers until after the 1850s. Thus, Americans were
using opium in copious amounts before Chinese immigrants arrived.
Once they arrived however, they became convenient scapegoats for
those interested in making opium illegal. Prohibitionists portrayed
opium smoking as a habit below the respectability of “white”
men. In a similar manner, marijuana was later associated with blacks,
Latinos, and jazz culture, making marijuana an easy target for prohibition.

Yet despite
40 years of military funding to eradicate foreign drug supplies,
increased incarceration rates, and more aggressive narcotics policing,
the war on drugs has done nothing to resolve the issue of drug addiction.
Consumption of cocaine and marijuana has been relatively stable
over the past four decades, with a spike in use during the 1970s
and 80s. And a European Union Commission study determined that “global
drug production and use remained largely unchanged from 1998 through
2007.” In fact, the only things that have changed are that
drugs are cheaper and more potent, there are more people in prison,
and the government is spending more taxpayer money.

So what’s the
solution?

As Professor
John McWhorter contends, problems of addiction should be treated
like the medical problems they are – in other words, drug addiction
is a health problem, not a police problem. At the very least, marijuana,
which has been widely recognized as medically beneficial, should
be legalized. As a society, we would be far better off investing
the copious amounts of money currently spent on law enforcement
in prevention and treatment programs. Of course, the pharmaceutical
industry doesn’t want marijuana legalized, fearing it might cut
into its profit margins. However, as California has shown, it could
be a boon for struggling state economies. Marijuana is California’s
biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales.
Were California to legalize the drug (it legalized medical
marijuana in 1996) and allow the state to regulate and tax its sale,
tax collectors estimate it could bring in $1.3 billion in revenue.
Prior to the Obama administration’s crackdown on the state’s medical
marijuana dispensaries, which has cost the state thousands of jobs,
lost income and lost tax revenue, California had been raking in
$100 million in taxes from the dispensaries alone.

As Neill Franklin,
the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who
worked on narcotics policing for the Maryland State Police and Baltimore
Police Department for over 30 years, remarked in the New York
Times:

In an earlier
era it may have been a smart move for politicians to act “tough
on drugs” and stay far away from legalization. But today,
many voters recognize that our prohibition laws don’t do anything
to reduce drug use but do create a black market where cartels
and gangs use violence to protect their profits.

While some
fear that legalization would lead to increased use, those who
want to use marijuana are probably already doing so under our
ineffective prohibition laws. And when we stop wasting so many
resources on locking people up, perhaps we can fund real public
education and health efforts of the sort that have led to dramatic
reductions in tobacco use over the last few decades – all without
having to put handcuffs on anyone.

I have spent
my entire adult life fighting the war on drugs as a police officer
on the front lines. I have experienced the loss of friends and
comrades who fought this war alongside me, and every year tens
of thousands of other people are murdered by gangs battling over
drug turf in American cities, Canada and Mexico. It is time to
reduce violence by taking away a vital funding source from organized
crime just as we did by ending alcohol prohibition almost 80 years
ago.

The goals
of reducing crime, disease, death and addiction have not been
met by the “drug war” that was declared by President
Nixon 40 years ago and ramped up by each president since.

The public
has waked up to the fact that we need to change our marijuana
laws. Savvy politicians would do well to catch up.

January
11, 2012

Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send
him mail] is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. He is the author of The
Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).

Copyright
© 2012 The Rutherford Institute

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