Pubdate: Fri, 05 Jun 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 Webpage: n/a Page: A11 IT'S NOT SO MUCH POLICE AS DRUG LAWS The new visibility of police violence toward African-Americans has stoked public debate about policing: What about body cameras? Should we reform police training? Perhaps we should go slow on all that military gear? I find it difficult 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 to re-enfranchise, economically and politically, those who have staffed the drug trade. 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. 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. This is a point we have not yet focused on. Marijuana constitutes about 80 percent of illicit drug usage, and an estimated 40 to 67 percent of that pot came from Mexico in 2008; most cocaine and heroin also passes through Mexico. Wholesale distributors in the United States include Mexican criminal organizations, Latino and African-American street gangs and domestic producers of marijuana. It's a commercial zone that looks pretty multicultural based on the limited information available. At the retail level, however, most drug users buy from people who look like them. But this lets some white users turn a blind eye to the supply chain. 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; this operation launched 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. Young people are recruited to handle lowlevel 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 - with one exception: by the drug industry. How voluntary can we consider repeat participation in the supply chain when a criminal record precludes other opportunities? The 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. Re-enfranchisement will require not only legalizing marijuana but also decriminalizing as many nonviolent drug offenses as possible and expunging those convictions. Call it Operation Equal Justice. Danielle Allen is a political theorist at the Institute of Advanced Study and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt