Pubdate: Sun, 31 May 2015
Source: Tampa Bay Times (FL)
Copyright: 2015 St. Petersburg Times
Contact: http://www.sptimes.com/letters/
Website: http://www.tampabay.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Author: Danielle Allen

LEGALIZE DRUGS, END THE CYCLE

The new visibility of police violence toward African-Americans has
stoked public debate about policing: What about body cameras? Should
we reform training? Perhaps we should go slow on all that military
gear?

I find it almost impossible to sit through any of this while the
underlying issue goes unaddressed: It's the drug economy, stupid.

It's well past time to legalize marijuana. But it's also time to
consider decriminalizing nonviolent crimes involving other drugs, or
at least to reclassify lower-level, nonviolent offenses as
misdemeanors. We should also expunge felony convictions for many
classes of nonviolent drug offenses a=C2=80" those involving marijuana bu
t
for other drugs, too a=C2=80" to re-enfranchise, economically and
politically, those who have staffed the drug trade.

Before I make my case, let me pause to say that I write this as the
last living American, or so it sometimes feels, never to have smoked
pot or used any other banned substance. My motivation is not my own
recreational freedom but justice.

What's the picture of use these days? According to the 2014 National
Drug Control Strategy Data Supplement, as of 2009, more than 41
percent of Americans ages 12 to 64 had used marijuana sometime in
their lifetime. The United States consumed an estimated 3,000 metric
tons of pot, in 2010 we inhaled or otherwise ingested 5,700 metric
tons. And from 2011 to 2014, according to the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, half of high school students reported using illicit drugs
by 12th grade. This number is headed up.

Participation is pretty equal opportunity. According to the 2013
National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in that year the rate of
substance dependence or abuse was 8.4 percent for whites and 7.4
percent for blacks. Yet, as is widely recognized, African-Americans
are incarcerated for both the use and sale of drugs at far higher
rates than whites. In 2011, African-Americans were arrested for
possession at three times the rate as whites nationally and, for drug
sales and manufacturing, at nearly four times the rate of whites. In
Chicago, the black-white arrest ratio for marijuana is 15 to 1.

These enforcement disparities mean that the U.S. drug economy rests on
a highly exploitative labor regime. If pot were an iPhone and the
supply chain based in China, investigative journalists would be
blasting the labor practices that delivered it.

According to researchers, marijuana constitutes about 80 percent of
illicit drug usage. At the retail level, most drug users buy from
people who look like them. This lets some white users turn a blind eye
to the supply chain. But a major portion of the pot inhaled by a white
smoker has also passed through the hands of black or brown laborers in
the drug economy.

In 1984, the Drug Enforcement Administration initiated Operation
Pipeline to interdict drug trafficking on the nation's highways
through the use of traffic stops; this operation launched and provided
national training for police in what we have come to know as racial
profiling. Thanks to the racially disparate enforcement that was then
set in motion, much drug economy labor is, for all intents and
purposes, not free. This is especially true for the couriers, brokers
and lower-tier wholesalers. Young people are recruited to handle
low-level tasks, setting them up to be booked on a felony as an adult
not long after they turn 18. Once that happens, they find themselves
broadly unemployable a=C2=80" with one major exception: by the drug
industry. How voluntary can we consider repeat participation in the
supply chain, then, when a criminal record precludes other
opportunities?

The libertarian vibe in the world of pot smokers and other drug users
makes these issues all the more stark. Freedom for those who want a
hit has been wrung from the exploitation of others. We have numbers
for the price of that freedom: 1.5 million African-American men
missing from U.S. cities.

In the mid-1970s, the DEA conducted an anti-heroin campaign in Mexico
called Operation Trizo. The DEA website reports, with no apparent
sense of irony, that the campaign was called off at the request of the
Mexican government because "The large numbers of arrests that resulted
from Operation Trizo caused an economic crisis."

Through decades of the war on drugs, we have indeed bought ourselves
our own economic crisis with the drug economy's impacts on poverty and
education. But we've also delivered a human catastrophe, on par with
the worst of our bad American habits. One of the hardest challenges of
school reform in the context of low-income communities of color is to
protect students from exposure to violence, even on their daily walks
to school. The precise pathway to a legalized, decriminalized and
nonviolent drug economy and to the reintegration of those formerly
barred from participation will take much collective discussion to
discern. But the general direction to pursue is clear.

Emancipation of our brothers and sisters requires both economic and
political re-enfranchisement. These forms of re-enfranchisement
require not only legalizing marijuana but also decriminalizing as many
nonviolent drug offenses as possible and expunging those convictions.
Call it Operation Equal Justice.

Allen is a political theorist at the Institute of Advanced Study
and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.
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MAP posted-by: Matt