{news} Cliff Thornton in New Britain Herald

[David Bedell]

http://www.newbritainherald.com/articles/2009/10/20/news/doc4ade76e5dee3f433452646.txt


Speaker calls for end to country’s drug war at CCSU

Tuesday, October 20, 2009 10:57 PM EDT
By JENNIFER ABEL
Staff writer

NEW BRITAIN — “The drug war has nothing to do with drugs. It’s about power, 
it’s about control, it’s about coercion, it’s about money.” So said Clifford 
Thornton, a 2006 Connecticut gubernatorial candidate and 1995 founder of 
Efficacy, a nonprofit organization devoted to drug policy reform.

He offered a talk, “Justice, Race, Politics and the Drug War,” during an appearance 
Tuesday afternoon at Central Connecticut State University’s Torp 
Theatre.

Thornton originally planned to show the audience videos of 
police and clergy speaking out against the drug war, and an expose of the 
notorious incident in Tulia, Texas, where 10 percent of the entire black 
population was imprisoned on cocaine charges based the word of a single corrupt 
drug cop who was later convicted of perjury.

However, Thornton’s video plan fell through when the university projector stubbornly refused to work, so he instead gave a brief, informal talk followed by a long question-and-answer period.

 
Thornton started by challenging the audience: “Raise your hand if you think 
the drug war is working.” Not one hand went up. “Raise your hand if you think 
people will stop using drugs.” Still no hands.

Much of Thornton’s talk focused on Connecticut-centric facts: The state’s annual prison expenditures are $600 million with 70 percent of the state’s prison population of 17,000 imprisoned on drug-related charges. If drugs were legalized, he said, the money spent on prosecuting and incarcerating drug users “could buy every man, woman 
and child in Connecticut a $1 million health policy” and still have money left 
over.

Thornton often repeated the words “legalize, medicalize, 
decriminalize.” He calls for the outright legalization of marijuana and the 
medicalization of other currently illegal drugs.

Although the majority of American drug users are white, Thornton said, the majority of drug convicts are black or Latino. “Blacks and Latinos are 6 percent of [Connecticut’s] population, yet make up 70 percent of its prison population.” Thornton said this is due, in part, to the fact that it’s easier for police to make arrests in the open-air drug markets found mostly in inner cities, whereas the more intense 
levels of suburban drug use tend to take place behind closed doors.

One person in the audience asked if ending the drug war eliminate police and prison 
guards jobs. “We’d need to make a switch from a drug-war economy to a peace 
economy,” Thornton said.

Again he recited some statistics: In Connecticut alone, legalized (and taxed) marijuana would result in $9 million to $12 million dollars a year in additional tax revenue, and the legalized growing of hemp — basically marijuana without the mind-altering THC – would create new jobs in the paper, garment and food industries.

However, Thornton said, such ideas would find heavy resistance from “the multimillion-dollar bureaucracy fighting the drug war.” One such example he mentioned is Carlton Turner, former “drug czar” under President Reagan, who made billions of dollars off his personal urine-testing company after using his authority to make such tests federal policy.

Thornton also criticized the two-tiered system of justice caused 
by the drug war — the “well-connected” generally are not penalized for drug 
crimes, only the poor.

“If whites were arrested and incarcerated for 
illegal drug use we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because there would 
literally be armed insurrection in the street. The white middle class is not 
going to stand for their children going to jail for bulls---. And that’s what 
it’s all about: bulls---.”

Thornton mentioned a few well-connected Connecticut residents who avoided prison for drug crimes that would’ve sent poorer people to prison, including the sons of former Gov. (John) Rowland and former Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy. Another audience member asked Thornton how he came by his interest in the drug war. “About 40-some years ago, two weeks before I was to graduate high school, the family and I were sitting down having breakfast. There was a knock at the door, my grandmother instructed me to 
accompany this gentleman. He was a police officer. And he took me to a field of 
abandoned cars, and under one of these cars was the body of a naked woman. She 
was my mother, who had died from an apparent heroin overdose. Now, there are no 
words to describe how I felt, but one thought resonated as I came to my senses 
and that was, all illegal drugs should be eradicated from the face of the earth. 
But as I watched my native Hartford, Conn., go downhill, decade after decade, 
and seeing that they’re putting more money into fighting drugs, and more and 
more people were going to jail, mostly black and brown, I began to take on this 
issue. Twelve years ago I retired early from Southern Connecticut Telephone to 
do this work.”

Clifford Thornton’s nonprofit organization, Efficacy, can 
be found on the Web at Efficacy-online.org
 

 		 	   		  
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