{news} What Will the Candidates Do to End the Unwinnable War on Drugs?

Mon Aug 11 12:03:37 EDT 2008

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What
<http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-will-candidates-do-to-end.html<http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-will-candidates-do-to-end.html>>
Will the Candidates Do to End the Unwinnable War on Drugs? 

<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HyyDHyAwI6k/SJ94J44NWoI/AAAAAAAACMg/rONPhZflvWQ/s<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HyyDHyAwI6k/SJ94J44NWoI/AAAAAAAACMg/rONPhZflvWQ/s>
1600-h/prohibition.jpg> 
'The prohibition of drugs is perhaps the most disastrous policy currently
pursued by the US government'

By Johann Hari / August 10, 2008

On January 20th 2009, either the president of the United States will be a
man who used to smoke crack, or the First Lady will be a former drug addict
who stole from charity to get her next fix. In this presidential campaign,
there are dozens of issues that have failed to flicker into the debate, but
the most striking is the failing, flailing 'War on Drugs.' Isn't it a sign
of how unwinnable this 'war' is that, if it was actually enforced evenly,
either Barack Obama or Cindy McCain would have to skip the inauguration --
because they'd be in jail?

At least their time in the slammer would feature some familiar faces: they
could share a cell with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and some 46 percent of
the US population.

The prohibition of drugs is perhaps the most disastrous policy currently
pursued by the US government. It hands a vast industry to armed criminal
gangs, who proceed to kill at least excess 10,000 citizens a year to protect
their patches. It exports this programme of mass slaughter to Mexico,
Colombia and beyond. It has been a key factor in reviving the Taliban in
Afghanistan. It squanders tens of billions of dollars on prisons at home,
ensuring that one in 31 adults in the US now in prison or on supervised
release at any one time. And it has destroyed an entire generation of black
men, who are now more likely to go to prison for drug offences than to go to
university.

And for what? Prohibition doesn't stop people using drugs. Between 1972 and
1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. So did hundreds
of thousands of people rush out to smoke the now-legal weed? The National
Research Council found that it had no effect on the number of dope-smokers.
None. The people who had always liked it carried on; the people who didn't
felt no sudden urge to start.

So where's the debate? The candidates have spent more time discussing froth
and fancies -- how much air is in your tyres? -- than this $40bn-a-year
'war."

They should be forced to listen to Michael Levine, who had a thirty year
career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents. In
his time, he infiltrated some of the biggest drugs cartels in the world --
and he now explains, in sad tones, that he wasted his time. In the early
1990s, he was assigned to eradicate drug-dealing from one New York street
corner -- an easy enough task, surely? But he quickly learned that even this
was physically impossible, given the huge demand for drugs. He calculated
that he would need one thousand officers to be working on that corner for
six months to make an impact -- and there were only 250 drugs agents in the
whole city. One of the residents asked him, "If all these cops and agents
couldn't get this one corner clean, what's the point of this whole damned
drug war?"

When Levine penetrated to the very top of la Mafia Cruenza, one of the
biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world, he learned, as he puts it, "that
not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it...
On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge
Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it 'a sham put on
the American tax-payer' that was 'actually good for business'." He was right
-- prohibition is the dealer's friend. They depend on it. They thrive on it,
just as Al Capone thrived on alcohol prohibition. When Levine recounted
these comments to his boss -- the officer in command of the paramilitary
operation attacking South America -- he replied, "Yeah, we know [the police
and military battles against drug gangs] don't work, but we sold the plan up
and down the Potomac."

Yet virtually no politicians are exposing this scandal. A rare and heroic
exception is Jim Webb, Senator for Virginia. In his brilliant new book Born
Fighting, he says "the hugely expensive antidrug campaigns we are waging
around the world are basically futile." He even goes further, and exposes
how this intersects with racism to create a monstrous injustice. The ACLU
found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black
Americans -- who comprise 12 percent of the population -- make up 74 percent
of all drug offenders sentenced to prison.

Webb shows the human cost: "Even as I write these words, it is virtually
certain that somewhere on the streets of Washington D.C. an eighteen
year-old white kid from the Maryland or North Virginia suburbs is buying a
stash of drugs from an eighteen year-old black kid. The white kid is going
to take that stash back to the suburbs and make some quick money by selling
it to other kids." He will grow up and grow out of it, and one day -- as a
wealthy professional -- he will "look back on his drug use just as
recreational and joke about it... just one more little rebellion on the way
to adulthood."

But the black kid "will enter a hell from which he may never recover." He is
likely to be arrested, and to go to prison. "Prison life will change the
black kid, harden him, mess up his mind, and redefine his self-image. And
after he is released from prison, the black kid will be dragging an
invisible ball and chain behind him for the rest of his life... By the time
the white kid reaches fifty years of age, he may well be a judge. By the
time the black kid reaches fifty, he will likely be permanently
unemployable, will be ineligible for many government assistance programmes,
and will not even be able to vote." Barack Obama only narrowly missed this
fate. He would not be the Great Black Hope he deserves to be; he wouldn't
even be allowed to cast a ballot in 2008.

Of course, ending drug prohibition may seem impossible now. But in 1924,
even as vociferous a wet as Clarence Darrow was in despair, writing that it
would require "a political revolution" to legalise alcohol in the US. Within
a decade, it was done.

Before this campaign is out, Obama needs to be asked: do you really think
you should be in jail? McCain needs to be asked: do you really think your
wife should be in jail? Both need to be asked: do you really think 46
percent of Americans should be criminalized? And if not, what are you going
to do to begin ending this mad, unwinnable 'war on drugs'? 

Johann Hari has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central
African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has
appeared in publications all over the world. The youngest person to be
nominated for the Orwell Prize for political writing, in 2003 he won the
Press Gazette Young Journalist of the Year Award and in 2007 Amnesty
International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. He is a
contributing editor of Attitude magazine and published his first book, God
Save the Queen?, in 2003.

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/what-will-the-candidates_b_118045<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/what-will-the-candidates_b_118045>
.html> Source / The Huffington Post

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"THE DRUG WAR IS MEANT TO BE WAGED NOT WON"

Working to end race and class drug war injustice, Efficacy is a non profit
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