Pubdate: Sat, 7 May 2011
Source: Los Angeles Daily News (CA)
Copyright: 2011 Los Angeles Newspaper Group
Contact: http://www.dailynews.com/writealetter
Website: http://www.dailynews.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/246
Author: Julia Negron
Note: Julia Negron of North Hills is director of the Los Angeles 
regional chapter of A New PATH (Parents for Addiction Treatment and 
Healing) and a co-founder of Moms United to end the War on Drugs.
Cited: Moms United http://www.momsunited.net
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/War+on+Drugs

TIME TO SAY NO TO WAR ON DRUGS

IMAGINE a world without the scourge of our current punitive drug 
policies. Imagine a world where we mothers no longer wait teary eyed 
in prison visiting lines, where our daughters live to gift us with 
happy grandchildren.

Imagine our sons getting in trouble with drugs and getting saved 
because they are worth saving. Imagine borders where tourists bask in 
the sun without fear, and drug cartels' gunshots are replaced with 
lilting music. Imagine passionately wanting a better future for our 
children and grandchildren so that all humanity is treated with 
dignity and kindness. Imagine that billions in funding is funneled 
into education. Imagine that we stop fighting a war with ourselves.

It may seem odd for a mother to make a case for decriminalizing 
illegal drugs. But I can give you a grandmother's/drug 
counselor's/prison visiting mom's take on how we have turned on our 
own - how the "War on Drugs" has generated more victims than successes.

We turned on our own when we stopped helping people who need help; 
when we attacked the most marginalized of us; when we lost our 
compassion for the suffering; and when we handed over the treatment 
of our sick kids to men with badges, not stethoscopes.

It happened when we stood silently while criminalizing a whole class 
of people. When we made smuggling and killing profitable. And, we pay 
for this by cutting education and programs that lift people out of 
poverty and vulnerability, guaranteeing that nothing changes.

In real -time there is little available to help the afflicted, so we 
lock them up out of sight and out of mind. In my world that means 
"prison churning." My own son developed drug dependence early-on and 
has now given years to a corrections system that can not "correct" him.

His chances to make a better life for his children dim with each 
prison term. My life is better than my mother's, but my 
grandkid'sgrandkids' lives will not be better than mine. The cost of 
the failed War on Drugs is more than just the $40 billion we waste each year.

Think of the families torn apart by harsh prison sentences. How could 
we let this hopelessness happen to half a million children with a 
parent in prison!

As a nation we've spent billions year after year for 40 years trying 
to incarcerate our way out of a health issue. Gun boats and border 
patrols have been unsuccessful in keeping drugs out of this country, 
with the result that it just made them more costly. Harsh prison 
terms have handed us back a hollow-eyed generation of anti-social 
unemployable felons.

We've been encouraged to let our kids "hit bottom," and we've 
dutifully kicked our kids to the curb. Consequently we've buried a 
generation of overdosed kids who could not get it right, could not 
get past the stigma, could not find help, feared jail and found no 
rational agent of change. We tried to "just say no to drugs" yet 
today things are worse than ever.

Imagine that there are no more excuses and that there are solutions.

I am no different than you. Our tax dollars paid more than $250,000 
to incarcerate my non-violent drug offender son in California prisons so far.

This waste must change. We can do this together. We have a way; we 
can start by reclassifying personal possession of small amounts of 
illegal drugs as misdemeanors. We can give our kids a chance to not 
be labeled a felon for life.

The group Moms United to End the War on Drugs has a simple mission: 
end the waste of the War on Drugs; end the failed policies; end the 
mass incarceration, the overdose deaths, and the border violence. 
Start by getting into action and join us in our solutions. Join us in 
protest on the 40 th anniversary of this most damaging war - June 17 
- - and "just say NO" to the War on Drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake