Pubdate: Thu, 20 Jul 2000
Source: MSNBC.com (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 MSNBC.com
Contact:  http://bbs.msnbc.com/bbs/msnbc-oped/
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Author: Eric Alterman
Note: Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor 
to MSNBC.

THE MISGUIDED WAR ON DRUGS

At home and abroad, flawed vision and dangerous tactics Anti-narcotic
police use guns and fungicide to limit the cultivation of coca in
Colombia, thanks to new anti-drug funding from the United States.

July 8 --  The drug war is spinning out of control. At home, the
office of the White House anti-drug czar was caught expanding its
wire-tapping powers, tracing our Web site visitations, rewarding
magazine editors and televisions producers for ideologically
acceptable content. Inequities in our legal system result in vast
numbers of young black men being given longer jail terms than white
offenders. And in Colombia, as we once did in Vietnam, we're using
armaments and chemicals to take aim at an elusive enemy.

The Clinton drug war -- at home and abroad -- is based on untested
theories that are hardly any sturdier than those that led us down the
garden path in Indochina.

WE'RE UPPPING the ante of our involvement in Colombia's narco-
terrorism war with more than $1 billion in military aid, training and
weapons. And now Colombian citizens will suffer not only the violence
of being caught between right and left-wing guerrillas,
narco-traffickers, and brutal right-wing military, but also unsafe
chemical sprays funded by the U.S. government.

Two reports have been issued in recent weeks, one by the monitoring
group, Human Rights Watch, and one by a Citizens' Commission organized
by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) that together
demonstrate just how costly the drug war has become to the fabric of
our nation.

HOW BIG IS THE PROBLEM?

One of the most surprising aspects of the IPS report is the case it
makes for how minor America's drug problem is, independent of the
scare tactics of the drug warriors and the disastrous effects of their
counterproductive strategy. Based on expert medical and criminal law
testimony, they estimate that marijuana is used by roughly 10.5
million people, and drugs like cocaine or heroin, just 2 million to 3
million. The marijuana users are nobody's problem, save those
teenagers who abuse it the way they abuse far more common and legal
drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Cocaine and heroin users are obviously
taking a much larger risk with their lives, but in the main, harm
themselves more than they do others. To the degree that drugs beget
violence in society, it is generally a product of the fact that we
turn drug users -- or at least users of drugs of which we do not
approve -- into criminals. And criminals often use violent tactics to
protect their profits and intimidate their enemies.

Yet our strategies for dealing with drugs -- scare tactics for
teenagers, jail for dealers and users, and weapons and military
training for poor societies from which the drugs are grown and
transported -- continue to make the problem worse. The fact is drug
scares have been a part of our culture since the passage of the San
Francisco Anti-Opium Den Law of 1875, followed by the federal Harrison
Act of 1914 that made drug use a crime. Yet in 1997, a U.N. study
estimated that worldwide trade in illicit drugs amounted to $400
billion per year, or 8 percent of the global economy. This is not a
problem that can be scared away.

Yet we keep throwing money at it anyway. To fight this scourge, we
have increased the budget of the National Drug Control Policy office
to $17.1 billion, up from a mere billion in 1981. State spending
constitutes another $5 billion. Add to this the figure of roughly $8.6
billion we devote each year to imprison drug users.

Unfortunately, owing to the way drugs are marketed and distributed in
this country, we have set up a dual system of justice whose harsh
penalties seem to fall almost exclusively on people of color.

DISPARATE JUSTICE We have met the enemy. And this time the enemy is
us.

The prosecution of drugs has always been associated with forms of
racist hysteria. Back in 1875, Opium was referred to as the
"Mongolian vice." Today it is young, poor, and most often black
Americans who pay the price for our blindness and ignorance. The
statistics are chilling. According to Human Rights Watch, African
Americans accounted for 62 percent of the drug offenders sent to state
prisons nationwide in 1996, the most recent year for which statistics
are available, although they constitute just 12 percent of the U.S.
population. The chances, according to the National Council on Crime
and Delinquency in Oakland, that a drug offense by a black American
juvenile with no prior jail time resulting in imprisonment is 48 times
higher than it is for a white juvenile with no record. Overall, black
men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of
white men. This is true even though Department of Health and Human
Services figures demonstrate that in 1991, 1992 and 1993, about five
times as many whites had used cocaine than blacks.

RACE MATTERS One study estimates that worldwide trade in illicit drugs
amounts to $400 billion per year, or 8 percent of the global economy.

The reasons for this are complex and intertwined. The buying and
selling of drugs by poor people is easier for police to target because
they more often occur in public than do drug transactions among
whites. Police racism is also a continuing issue. Under New Jersey's
Operation Pipeline drug interdiction program, for instance, 80 percent
of the motorists were black, just 13 percent were white. Then there
are the sentencing laws, which fall unfairly on blacks relative to
whites. Getting caught with 400 grams of cocaine requires no mandatory
prison term, but 400 grams of crack and you can spend the rest of your
life in prison.

It would be one thing to argue that yes, the racist results of the
drug war are unfortunate, but necessary if we are ever to conquer the
scourge of our society. But remember this is a failed policy. The
United States, with fewer than five percent of the world's population
has 25 percent of its prisoners. Again, this takes the form of a
racist war on our own people. In California, five blacks are in prison
for every one in a state university. Could there be a more telling
indictment?

Now add to this the costs, financial and otherwise, of the Pentagon's
burgeoning Colombian drug war in Colombia, which from a distance, has
many of the markings of another quagmire of political quicksand and
strategic quackery. ("If we lose in Colombia, then we lose
everywhere," said Sen. Paul Coverdell of Georgia, introducing a new
version of the Domino Theory.)

Imprisoned in a labyrinth of machismo myth-making, Lyndon Johnson
never had the courage to question the fundamental assumptions that led
him into Vietnam. To defend our "honor" as a nation, Richard Nixon
and Henry Kissinger took even further in before finally getting us
out. The Clinton drug war -- at home and abroad -- is based on
untested theories that are hardly any sturdier than those that led us
down the garden path in Indochina. And this time the enemy is us.
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