Category Archives: War On Drugs

Carlyn Zwarenstein (Melissa Caparelli)

In the final chapter of On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance, journalist Carlyn Zwarenstein quotes Antonin Artaud: We know the souls dosages, its sensibilities, its marrows, its thoughts. Leave us in peace. We ask only for a respite from suffering.

The words are from a 1925 polemic against the criminalization of drug use. Artauds acerbic argument offers a cogent distillation of Zwarensteins central assertion: that the use of narcotics is not a problem but a solution, and that the legacy of the U.S.s misguided war on drugs has been to increase suffering and create a class of criminals, mostly among impoverished, racialized, mentally ill, or otherwise marginalized individuals.

Like the notorious French playwright, Zwarenstein derives authority from lived experience. She uses an opioid medication called tramadol to counter chronic pain from ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative spinal condition. Zwarenstein previously wrote about her experience in her short 2016 book, Opium Eater: The New Confessions, a revised version of which forms the opening section of this new work. Zwarenstein broadens her focus here to address how misguided policy from the legal, medical, and pharmaceutical establishments has forced large swaths of people to look for pain relief on the black market and led inexorably to the current crisis in overdose deaths.

Many of Zwarensteins contentions are invigorating. She takes issue with the American economists who popularized the glib shorthand deaths of despair to describe the fate of working-class people driven by circumstance to suicide or overdose. She introduces us to drug users who have experienced varying levels of housing insecurity, domestic violence, poverty, and illness (both mental and physical) only to be dismissed by an establishment that punishes them for trying to alleviate their pain.

Zwarenstein posits a distinction between physical dependence on drugs and addiction, though she never illustrates this clearly. She does, however, deconstruct the idea of the stereotypical junkie and replace it with individuated portraits of articulate, sensible users whose risk of death is exacerbated in direct proportion to the prohibitions placed on drugs. As an argument for following Portugals lead in decriminalizing all drugs, On Opium is undeniably reasonable.

Despite a tendency toward repetition in its latter pages, Zwarensteins volume is a valuable tool for the promotion of harm reduction. When so much conservative rhetoric is based on an ideology of stoicism, its bracing to learn that Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius was also an opium user. Chronic pain is always endurable, Aurelius wrote in Meditations. [T]he intelligence maintains serenity by cutting itself off from the body. Easily said, for an emperor. Then again, as Zwarenstein writes, When they teach stoicism to pain patients, they always forget to mention the opium.

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On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance - Quill & Quire

Earlier today, public health legislation to decriminalize syringe possession (A-5854) and modernize New Jerseys restrictive syringe access law (A-4847) advanced through the Assembly Judiciary and Health Committees, respectively.

A-5458 would decriminalize possession of syringes, for which New Jersey made over 55,000 arrests since 2012, These arrests run in direct contradiction to the public health best practice of ensuring widely available syringe access to prevent overdose deaths, HIV, and Hepatitis C.

A-4847 would remove the restrictive municipal ordinance requirement that requires local authorization before a syringe access program can be established. This requirement is the biggest barrier to expanding harm reduction services in New Jersey.

These bills are part of a harm reduction bill package championed by Senator Joseph Vitale and Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle. An additional bill in the package that expanded widespread access to naloxone (the medicine that reverses an opioid overdose) was signed into law in July 2020.

Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle:

The truth is that harm reduction services save countless lives every single year here in New Jersey said Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle. Harm reduction is about leading with empathy and working to find resources, not penalties. We must do everything we can to support and expand these services to reach all of our communities.

Caitlin ONeill, Director of Harm Reduction Services at New Jersey Harm Reduction Coalition:

We are in the midst of an unprecedented overdose crisis, and the evidence shows that we cannot arrest our way out of this crisis. Expanding harm reduction services in New Jersey is urgent. Our loved ones are dying all around us without a chance at making positive changes or connecting to care. Decriminalization of syringes and expanded access would mean that its safe to ask a doctor about safer injecting practice to avoid life threatening skin infections and endocarditis, safe to even say out loud that you need help to stop injecting, safe to ask for care, safe to have publicly accessible syringe disposal bins in all municipalities, and safe for someone to tell a law enforcement officer or EMS provider that they have a syringe on them, drastically lowering the risk of needle stick injury among first responders.

Dr. Jenn Oliva, Professor of Law, Associate Dean, and Director of Center for Health and Pharmaceutical Law at Seton Hall University School of Law:

Research proves that permitting individuals to use sterile syringes by decriminalizing their possession and expanding their availability improves health outcomes and saves lives. When combined with other harm reduction interventions, the decriminalization of syringe possession and provision of sterile syringe services is associated with a 50 percent reduction in the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C. The state of New Jersey faces an important choice: ignore the evidence, keep the current criminal law in place, and risk exacerbating considerable public health harms OR follow the science, enact harm reduction legislation that will decriminalize syringe possession and fix the discriminatory and restrictive syringe access law, and, in so doing, save lives and taxpayer dollars.

Dr. Sandy Gibson, Professor and Clinical Coordinator in the Department of Counselor Education at The College of New Jersey

Syringe access programs are so much more than the simple the exchange of syringes. They are where people come to engage in services, services such as Narcan, fentanyl testing strips, and HIV and Hepatitis C testing. They are places to develop relationships with people who care about your wellb-eing, and often the first step in starting to consider engaging in treatment services.

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New Jersey Harm Reduction Coalition promotes harm reduction by distributing naloxone, fentanyl test steps, and other harm reduction supplies through peer-led programs; advocates for syringe access expansion and equitable drug policy reform; and organizes to build power among people directly harmed by overdose and the War on Drugs.

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NJHRC: Lawmakers and Public Health Experts Applaud Passage of Two Landmark Harm Reduction Bills Through Committee - InsiderNJ

To be clear, the First Step Act is a win for criminal justice reform. But the Republicans who wrote the law never meant for it to reduce the sentences of hundreds of prisoners. They never intended for it to address the racist war on drugs, said Michael Harriot in a piece for The Root. (Photo: iStockphoto / NNPA) The Honorable Bobby Scott, U.S. Representative (D-VA), has sponsored legislation to end the racial disparities in crack and powder cocaine sentencing.

By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent@StacyBrownMedia

Many have identified New York City in the 1980s as the epicenter of the War on Drugs.

With the February 1988 assassination of NYPD Officer Edward Byrne in Queens, federal officials and law enforcement agencies around the country descended upon the Big Apple.

Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. earned the moniker the nations murder capital because it held the dubious distinction of the city with the highest homicide rate.

This is the capital of the United States of America. We have to have standards here that are reflective of the country as a whole, that this is not some third-world country, Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas said during a hearing in 1989.

President George H.W. Bush soon followed Gramms dissertation by proclaiming a war on drugs though that war dated to the early 1970s when President Richard Nixon made a similar declaration.

With all of that as the backdrop, Congress on Tuesday, September 28, prepares to vote on the Eliminating a Quantifiably Unjust Application of Law (EQUAL) Act, which would eliminate the disparity in authorized sentencing offenses involving crack versus powder cocaine.

The bipartisan EQUAL Act would eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. It also would allow those currently serving time for crack offenses to motion for reduced sentences.

Under current federal laws, individuals caught with 28 grams of crack receive the same sentence as someone caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine, despite the American Medical Associations findings that there is no chemical difference between the two substances.

Starting with the 1980s version of the War on Drugs, those caught with small amounts of crack primary people of color received decades longer prison sentences than those with powder cocaine overwhelmingly white individuals.

According to Human Rights Watch, African Americans comprise 62.7 percent and white people 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison.

That despite federal surveys and other data show clear that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending.

There are, for example, five times more white drug users than Black, Human Rights Watch officials wrote in a recent report.

Relative to population, Black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, Black people are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites, officials at the nonprofit continued.

One in every 20 Black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.

The eye-opening report concluded that:

Shocking as such national statistics are, they mask even worse racial disparities in individual states. For example, in seven states, Black individuals constitute between 80 and 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, Black men are admitted to prison on drug charges at rates from 20 to 57 times greater than white men.

These racial disparities in drug offenders admitted to prison skew the racial balance of state prison populations. In two states, one in every 13 Black men is in prison. In seven states, Black people are incarcerated at more than 13 times the rate of whites.

The authors concluded that the imprisonment of African Americans for drug offenses is part of a more significant over-incarceration crisis in the United States.

Although prison should be used as a last resort to protect society from violent or dangerous individuals, more people are sent to prison in the United States for nonviolent drug offenses than for crimes of violence, the authors determined.

The EQUAL Act also removes conspiracy charges that have contributed to numerous years of sentencing for drug offenses, particularly when it involves African Americans.

Congressman Bobby Scott (D-Va.), the co-sponsor of the legislation, said in a recent interview that individualized review in sentencing allows judges to resolve issues more effectively like the girlfriend problem, in which a drug dealers girlfriend may have driven him to a deal or passed along a message but still received an exorbitant sentence based on the mandatory minimum law.

(Retroactivity) could have a profound effect on people who have been given sentences, particularly on conspiracy, Congressman Scott told VOX.

Because on conspiracy, youre addled with the whole weight of the operation, even if part of it was negligible, Scott remarked.

Still, in an Op-Ed, officials at the American Bar Association cautioned that optimism over the progress on the EQUAL Act must be balanced against Congresss continued willingness to place rhetoric over science when it comes to drugs.

For example, the 117th Congress recently voted to renew a policy that will continue to subject more people to mandatory minimum sentences for offenses involving synthetic opioids, editors at the nonprofit wrote.

Even though such war on drugs strategies have not historically reduced the flow of drugs into the country or overdose deaths, legislators continue to back a harsh opioid policy that has and will continue to produce similar racial disparities as did the original sentencing scheme for crack cocaine.

Hopefully, after 35 years of enforcing a law that has failed to produce desired results, the time for passage of the remedial EQUAL Act has come.

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Congress Poised/Racist War on Drugs - The Westside Gazette

The War on Drugs latest album opens with somewhat of a feint. Littered with sparse piano and soft guitar, Living Proof is among the quietest songs in the Philadelphia bands expansive catalog. 2014s Lost in the Dream opened with the resplendent Under the Pressure, and 2017s A Deeper Understanding had the immediacy of Up All Night. The heartland rockers fifth record, however, introduces itself gently, opting for restraint rather than full-blown grandeur. Toward its end, Living Proof recedes into itself, like a gravitational pull into the distant horizon. Then, the locomotive pace of Harmonias Dream kicks in. This is all an exercise in tension and release, and the rest of that record is the release that Living Proof leaves you yearning for.

Produced by frontman Adam Granduciel and Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Perfume Genius), I Dont Live Here Anymore is The War on Drugs poppiest, most bombastic work yet. Its laden with enormous synth hooks and bona fide stadium rockers that evoke Bruce Springsteens Born in the U.S.A. era. It stands in stark contrast to the bands earlier work, such as Wagonwheel Blues and Slave Ambient. For the most part, its a continuation of the path they paved on their last LP, A Deeper Understanding. But the songs aim for higher heights that directly invite you into their orbit. I Dont Live Here Anymore captures The War on Drugs thrilling camaraderie at its apogee.

Granduciels lyricism is more pointed this time around, and his major motifs often revolve around defying insurmountable odds and forging meaningful companionships. Ive been running from the white light / Just trying to get to you / Tell me everything that you need, he sings on Change, holding out the final syllable to reflect his strife. On the title track, he nearly chants alongside Lucius backing vocals, I wanna find out everything I need to know / Im gonna say everything I need to say. Dr. Dogs Eric Slick provides a triumphant, percussive backbone with the bands own Charlie Hall, and Robbie Bennetts synth and guitar performances complement Granduciels arena-sized hook. It makes for one of the bands best songs to date.

In the same song, Granduciel draws an allusion to Bob Dylans Desolation Row, a shrewd acknowledgment of how The War on Drugs draws from the rock canon while firmly cementing themselves within it. He contributed to The Rolling Stones Goats Head Soup reissue, and he even named his son Bruce after you-know-who. Though Granduciel seldom references his own fatherhood, he occasionally ruminates on his childhood and his father. Working my whole life to follow my fathers dream, he mutters on Old Skin. Rings around my fathers eyes / Light above the morning sea / Fill the crater of the sun / Feel the wings across your arms, Granduciel sings on the acoustic ballad Rings Around My Fathers Eyes.

Though this band generally refines upon the sound theyve already built, they sometimes delve into untrodden territory. Victim is built almost entirely on synthesizers and drum machines, an unusual endeavor for a band so heavily associated with ripping guitar solos. Still, it works on all levels; its a track that gradually adds layer upon layer until it overwhelms itself, dissolving into the cosmos.

Another shift that longtime fans may notice is the pure absence of interludes. Lost in the Dream sprinkled them throughout the tracklist, and A Deeper Understanding often incorporated them into the songs themselves. I Dont Live Here Anymore, on the other hand, dispenses with them completely. Its a welcome change that makes the record more succinct. Although it was enjoyable to hear The War on Drugs meander into a sonic rabbit hole every now and then, the songs on I Dont Live Here Anymore never feel superfluous; its a record that very much serves the songs at hand, and they benefit from this increased focus.

Throughout I Dont Live Here Anymore, Granduciel utters the phrase, I dont wanna change. Its a recurring leitmotif that underlies the album, and though the heartland rocker is so apprehensive of becoming someone hes not, The War on Drugs proves that theyre the band theyve always been. But, this time around, they distill these songs down to their purest essence, and its the perfect showcase for why people have been enamored with this band since Wagonwheel Blues. As Granduciel says himself on Harmonias Dream, sometimes forwards is the only way back.

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The War on Drugs, 'I Don't Live Here Anymore': Review

Nothing about us without us, opponents of the measure said, demanding a role in decision-making to make sure that any solution accounted for both Black peoples complex and troubling relationship with the police as well as the disproportionate damage crime and violence do to our communities.

Black voters were especially wary because the City Council members who pushed the measure had done little to rein in the Minneapolis Police Department over the years. The pledge that nine of them made to dismantle the department shortly after Mr. Floyd was killed was more about looking progressive to national and international audiences than about transforming policing in ways that most Black residents wanted.

The months of protests around the country and around the world motivated by George Floyds killing were intense and electrifying. But the aftermath of those protests help tell the real story. Far too many progressives took the route of proposing quick fixes, like simply cutting police funding, to address complex, longstanding challenges to policing. As election results in Minneapolis, New York City and elsewhere have shown, thats not what the majority of Black people want.

What many Black people are demanding is a system that is effective, cost-efficient, nonmilitarized and transparent. We want officials to be accountable for who is hired, how they are disciplined and how they treat us. We want police leaders to admit that racism, white supremacy and misogyny are endemic in many police forces and we want them to commit to radically shift police culture.

For that to happen, there must be a re-examination of the purposes, practices, expenditures and almost unfettered power and discretion of the police. To responsibly reduce spending, elected officials must conduct a real cost/benefit analysis of hiring numerous officers to focus on low-level crime, traffic stops (as in the cases of Daunte Wright and Philando Castile), and small quantities of cannabis, to name a few. This would ultimately mean eliminating or reducing low-level traffic stops, repealing criminal laws and ordinances that do not improve public safety, and making a commitment to end the war on drugs.

Police departments must establish an early-warning system to flag problem officers and a robust disciplinary system when officers violate the law and peoples rights. Instead of continuing to allow police departments to investigate themselves when officers kill people, states should establish a special prosecutors office to investigate claims and bring charges when appropriate.

Police departments should analyze data to decide where officers are needed most and even where other resources, like mental health professionals, should be assigned. Receiving input and oversight from the public are important components to shifting police culture, as well as listening to Black people and taking our concerns seriously.

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Opinion | Black Voters in Minneapolis Wanted Better Policing, Not Posturing by Progressives - The New York Times

The War on Drugs is a well-known campaign initiated by the United States government. It aimed to fight illegal drug use by drastically increasing the penalties, enforcement, and imprisonment for illicit activities revolving around drug distribution and consumption.

Though the basic idea behind the War on Drugs is easy to understand and agree with, the implementation of the process is a highly controversial subject because of the effects it had on the U.S. prison system, as well as minority groups.

To help you better understand the history of the War on Drugs, including the difference between the Reagan or Nixon War on Drugs, as well as its overall impact on society, let's answer some of the most important questions below.

The War on Drugs refers to drug enforcement measures that were put in place by President Richard Nixon in the 70s. These were taken to combat and "destroy the drug menace in America" before it destroyed the country.

Nixon significantly increased federal funding for drug control agencies and also added a range of strict penalties for the possession and distribution of drugs. Some of those measures included mandatory prison sentences for drug offenses, as well as an overall broader scope of laws regulating drug sales and use.

At the same time, President Nixon also founded the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): a special police force that focused exclusively on drug use and drug smuggling in the United States.

The drug war escalated over the next couple of decades, with the Ronald Reagan War on Drugs campaign clamping down on drug smuggling from Central and South America, both outside of the country and within the United States.

Now that we've figured out what the drug war is, let's look at who started the War on Drugs, and when.

The official start of the War on Drugs can be traced back to June of 1971, when Richard Nixon made a now-famous speech declaring drugs as the primary issue plaguing the country and announced a set of strict measures to combat it.

Over the next few years, Nixon enacted a few key legislatures, as well as started the aforementioned Drug Enforcement Agency, in an effort to curb drug use and distribution across the country.

However, while the ambitions were high from the start, the biggest push in the efforts to reduce drug use came in the War on Drugs under Reagan. Ronald Reagan made the War on Drugs a top priority for various government agencies and allocated far greater resources than before to make it work.

Although there have been significant dates in the American history of dealing with drugs, such as the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 or Eisenhower's New War, the first reference to the War on Drugs came in 1971, in the Nixon era.

By 1973, the DEA was established. This allowed for better coordinated efforts between multiple agencies in the fight against drugs.

In 1976, former Governor Jimmy Carter based his presidential campaign on the decriminalization of marijuana and ending federal penalties for possession of less than one ounce.

By that time, a large part of the population was becoming unsettled by the number of people that were being convicted for relatively minor drug offensesa problem that is still a hot-button-topic to this day.

In 1984, the Reagan War on Drugs gained momentum, as the first lady Nancy Reagan launched the famous "Just Say No" campaign, encouraging young people to resist the temptation of taking drugs.

In 1986, Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which allocated $1.7 billion towards the War on Drugs and also set minimum penalties for a range of drug offenses. It was later criticized for disproportionally imprisoning offenders from minority and lower-income groups.

As mentioned before, the topic of whether America's War on Drugs was a success or not is still hotly debated today. But there is actually hard data and studies that can show how it impacted the drug situation in the country.

On one hand, some data has shown that drugs are slowly becoming cheaper as the years go by. However, many people knowledgeable on the subject believe that without some of the measures taken as part of the drug war, the situation could be even worse.

Some reports show that the median bulk price of heroin has dropped by more than 90 percent since 1981, with the cost of cocaine also reducing by more than half, but that in itself doesn't prove that all of the policies of the War on Drugs were not effective.

Recent years have seen a slight shift in U.S. drug policies, although the changing administrations over the last 20 years have had wildly contrasting views on the subject.

Even though the policies were already under scrutiny by the early 2000s, George W. Bush pushed more money than ever into the efforts and launched a nationwide campaign of student drug testing.

Meanwhile, President Obama implemented a few useful changes that resulted in better access to clean syringes. He loosened restrictions on state marijuana laws, and reduced the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity.

The current administration under Donald Trump is once again taking a hard-line stance in favor of War on Drugs policies, suggesting harsher punishments, as well as strict border control to reduce the flow of illegal substances into the country.

The War on Drugs Today

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The War on Drugs: What It Is & Why It Started

The US has been fighting a global war on drugs for decades. But as prison populations and financial costs increase and drug-related violence around the world continues, lawmakers and experts are reconsidering if the drug war's potential benefits are really worth its many drawbacks.

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon formally launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the US. "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."

Over the next couple decades, particularly under the Reagan administration, what followed was the escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. But in that process, the drug war led to unintended consequences that have proliferated violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration in the US, even if it has made drugs less accessible and reduced potential levels of drug abuse.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Nixon inaugurated the war on drugs at a time when America was in hysterics over widespread drug use. Drug use had become more public and prevalent during the 1960s due in part to the counterculture movement, and many Americans felt that drug use had become a serious threat to the country and its moral standing.

Over the past four decades, the US has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs. But the crackdown has in some ways failed to produce the desired results: Drug use remains a very serious problem in the US, even though the drug war has made these substances less accessible. The drug war also led to several some unintended negative consequences, including a big strain on America's criminal justice system and the proliferation of drug-related violence around the world.

While Nixon began the modern war on drugs, America has a long history of trying to control the use of certain drugs. Laws passed in the early 20th century attempted to restrict drug production and sales. Some of this history is racially tinged, and, perhaps as a result, the war on drugs has long hit minority communities the hardest.

In response to the failures and unintended consequences, many drug policy experts and historians have called for reforms: a larger focus on rehabilitation, the decriminalization of currently illicit substances, and even the legalization of all drugs.

The question with these policies, as with the drug war more broadly, is whether the risks and costs are worth the benefits. Drug policy is often described as choosing between a bunch of bad or mediocre options, rather than finding the perfect solution. In the case of the war on drugs, the question is whether the very real drawbacks of prohibition more racially skewed arrests, drug-related violence around the world, and financial costs are worth the potential gains from outlawing and hopefully depressing drug abuse in the US.

The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific aim is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade making drugs scarcer and costlier, and therefore making drug habits in the US unaffordable. And although some of the data shows drugs getting cheaper, drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making the substances less accessible.

The prices of most drugs, as tracked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Between 1986 and 2007, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 54 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.

Much of this is explained by what's known as the balloon effect: Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn't necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs. Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

The balloon effect has been documented in multiple instances, including Peru and Bolivia to Colombia in the 1990s, the Netherlands Antilles to West Africa in the early 2000s, and Colombia and Mexico to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the 2000s and 2010s.

Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan. The US spent $7.6 billion between 2002 and 2014 to crack down on opium in Afghanistan, where a bulk of the world's supply for heroin comes from. Despite the efforts, Afghanistan's opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013.

On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. The Monitoring the Future survey, which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In 1975, four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, 30.7 percent of high school seniors reportedly used drugs in the previous month. In 1992, the rate was 14.4 percent. In 2013, it was back up to 25.5 percent.

Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal. A 2014 study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.

But there's also evidence that the drug war is too punitive: A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there's no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.

Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.

The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferation of violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it's not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.

The US uses what's called the drug scheduling system. Under the Controlled Substances Act, there are five categories of controlled substances known as schedules, which weigh a drug's medical value and abuse potential.

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Medical value is typically evaluated through scientific research, particularly large-scale clinical trials similar to those used by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceuticals. Potential for abuse isn't clearly defined by the Controlled Substances Act, but for the federal government, abuse is when individuals take a substance on their own initiative, leading to personal health hazards or dangers to society as a whole.

Under this system, Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 drugs have high potential for abuse but some medical value. As the rank goes down to Schedule 5, a drug's potential for abuse generally decreases.

It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical group is the Schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and high potential for abuse. The medical group is the Schedule 2 to 5 drugs, which have some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential (from high to low).

Marijuana and heroin are Schedule 1 drugs, so the federal government says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Cocaine, meth, and opioid painkillers are Schedule 2 drugs, so they're considered to have some medical value and high potential for abuse. Steroids and testosterone products are Schedule 3, Xanax and Valium are Schedule 4, and cough preparations with limited amounts of codeine are Schedule 5. Congress specifically exempted alcohol and tobacco from the schedules in 1970.

Although these schedules help shape criminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, they're not always the final word. Congress, for instance, massively increased penalties against crack cocaine in 1986 in response to concerns about a crack epidemic and its potential link to crime. And state governments can set up their own criminal penalties and schedules for drugs as well.

Other countries, like the UK and Australia, use similar systems to the US, although their specific rankings for some drugs differ.

The US fights the war on drugs both domestically and overseas.

David McNew/Getty Images

On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs. Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug dealing organizations.

"[Federal] assistance helped us take out major drug organizations, and we took out a number of them in Baltimore," said Neill Franklin, a retired police major and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs. "But to do that, we took out the low-hanging fruit to work up the chain to find who was at the top of the pyramid. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins."

Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.

Although the focus is on criminal groups, casual users still get caught in the criminal justice system. Between 1999 and 2007, Human Rights Watch found at least 80 percent of drug-related arrests were for possession, not sales.

It seems, however, that arrests for possession don't typically turn into convictions and prison time. According to federal statistics, only 5.3 percent of drug offenders in federal prisons and 27.9 percent of drug offenders in state prisons in 2004 were in for drug possession. The overwhelming majority were in for trafficking, and a small few were in for an unspecified "other" category.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mexican officials incinerate 130 tons of seized marijuana.

Internationally, the US regularly aids other countries in their efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the 2000s provided military aid and training to Colombia in what's known as Plan Colombia to help the Latin American country go after criminal organizations and paramilitaries funded through drug trafficking.

Federal officials argue that helping countries like Colombia attacks the source of illicit drugs, since such substances are often produced in Latin America and shipped north to the US. But the international efforts have consistently displaced, not eliminated, drug trafficking and the violence that comes with it to other countries.

Given the struggles of the war on drugs to meet its goals, federal and state officials have begun moving away from harsh enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime stances. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy now advocates for a bigger focus on rehabilitation and less on law enforcement. Even some conservatives, like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, have embraced drug courts, which place drug offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of jail or prison.

The idea behind these reforms is to find a better balance between locking up more people for drug trafficking while moving genuinely problematic drug users to rehabilitation and treatment services that could help them. "We can't arrest our way out of the problem," Michael Botticelli, US drug czar, said, "and we really need to focus our attention on proven public health strategies to make a significant difference as it relates to drug use and consequences to that in the United States."

The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.

After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the 1970s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into the world's leader in incarceration. (But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population were violent offenders in 2012, and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.)

Sentencing Project

Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons to the point that some states, such as California, have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.

In terms of police powers, civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' assets cash in particular and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them.

But there have been many documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected but couldn't prove that there was some sort of illegal activity going on. In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Similarly, the federal government helped militarize local and state police departments in an attempt to better equip them in the fight against drugs. The Pentagon's 1033 program, which gives surplus military-grade equipment to police, was created in the 1990s as part of President George HW Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The deployment of SWAT teams, as reported by the ACLU, also increased during the past few decades, and 62 percent of SWAT raids in 2011 and 2012 were for drug searches.

Various groups have complained that these increases in police power are often abused and misused. The ACLU, for instance, argues that civil asset forfeitures threaten Americans' civil liberties and property rights, because police can often seize assets without even filing charges. Such seizures also might encourage police to focus on drug crimes, since a raid can result in actual cash that goes back to the police department, while a violent crime conviction likely would not. The libertarian Cato Institute has also criticized the war on drugs for decades, because anti-drug efforts gave cover to a huge expansion of law enforcement's surveillance capabilities, including wiretaps and US mail searches.

The militarization of police became a particular sticking point during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown. After heavily armed police responded to largely peaceful protesters with armored vehicle that resemble tanks, tear gas, and sound cannons, law enforcement experts and journalists criticized the tactics.

Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug war struggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies which many describe as draconian have been called into question. If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US.

The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities. This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions.

In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels. As many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case.

Pedro Ugarte/AFP via Getty Images

But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale. Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

In 2014, for instance, the drug war significantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.

The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America explained. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police."

As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands in a major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.

Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened in Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.

The Wall Street Journal explained:

Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.

But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.

As a 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime explained, "one countrys success became the problem of others."

This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it.

Enforcing the war on drugs costs the US more than $51 billion each year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. As of 2012, the US had spent $1 trillion on anti-drug efforts.

AFP via Getty Images

The spending estimates don't account for the loss of potential taxes on currently illegal substances. According to a 2010 paper from the libertarian Cato Institute, taxing and regulating illicit drugs similarly to tobacco and alcohol could raise $46.7 billion in tax revenue each year.

These annual costs the spending, the lost potential taxes add up to nearly 2 percent of state and federal budgets, which totaled an estimated $6.1 trillion in 2013. That's not a huge amount of money, but it may not be worth the cost if the war on drugs is leading to drug-related violence around the world and isn't significantly reducing drug abuse.

In the US, the war on drugs mostly impacts minority, particularly black, communities. This disproportionate effect is why critics often call the war on drugs racist.

Although black communities aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they are much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses.

When black defendants are convicted for drug crimes, they face longer prison sentences as well. Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

The Sentencing Project explained the differences in a February 2015 report: "Myriad criminal justice policies that appear to be race-neutral collide with broader socioeconomic patterns to create a disparate racial impact Socioeconomic inequality does lead people of color to disproportionately use and sell drugs outdoors, where they are more readily apprehended by police."

One example: Trafficking crack cocaine, one of the few illicit drugs that's more popular among black Americans, carries the harshest punishment. The threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence of crack is 28 grams. In comparison, the threshold for powder cocaine, which is more popular among white than black Americans but pharmacoligically similar to crack, is 500 grams.

New York Daily News via Getty Images

As for the broader racial disparities, federal programs that encourage local and state police departments to crack down on drugs may create perverse incentives to go after minority communities. Some federal grants, for instance, previously required police to make more drug arrests in order to obtain more funding for anti-drug efforts. Neill Franklin, a retired police major from Maryland and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, said minority communities are "the low-hanging fruit" for police departments because they tend to sell in open-air markets, such as public street corners, and have less political and financial power than white Americans.

In Chicago, for instance, an analysis by Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, found enforcement of anti-drug laws is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which tend to have more crime but are predominantly black:

Project Know

"Doing these evening and afternoon sweeps meant 20 to 30 arrests, and now you have some great numbers for your grant application," Franklin said. "In that process, we also ended up seizing a lot of money and a lot of property. That's another cash cow."

The disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates have clearly detrimental effects on minority communities. A 2014 study published in the journal Sociological Science found boys with imprisoned fathers are much less likely to possess the behavioral skills needed to succeed in school by the age of 5, starting them on a vicious path known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

As the drug war continues, these racial disparities have become one of the major points of criticism against it. It's not just whether the war on drugs has led to the widespread, costly incarceration of millions of Americans, but whether incarceration has created "the new Jim Crow" a reference to policies, such as segregation and voting restrictions, that subjugated black communities in America.

Beyond the goal of curtailing drug use, the motivations behind the US war on drugs have been rooted in historical fears of immigrants and minority groups.

The US began regulating and restricting drugs during the first half of the 20th century, particularly through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. During this period, racial and ethnic tensions were particularly high across the country not just toward African Americans, but toward Mexican and Chinese immigrants as well.

As the New York Times explained, the federal prohibition of marijuana came during a period of national hysteria about the effect of the drug on Mexican immigrants and black communities. Concerns about a new, exotic drug, coupled with feelings of xenophobia and racism that were all too common in the 1930s, drove law enforcement, the broader public, and eventually legislators to demand the drug's prohibition. "Police in Texas border towns demonized the plant in racial terms as the drug of 'immoral' populations who were promptly labeled 'fiends,'" wrote the Times's Brent Staples.

These beliefs extended to practically all forms of drug prohibition. According to historian Peter Knight, opium largely came over to America with Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. Americans, already skeptical of the drug, quickly latched on to xenophobic beliefs that opium somehow made Chinese immigrants dangerous. "Stories of Chinese immigrants who lured white females into prostitution, along with the media depictions of the Chinese as depraved and unclean, bolstered the enactment of anti-opium laws in eleven states between 1877 and 1900," Knight wrote.

Cocaine was similarly attached in fear to black communities, neuroscientist Carl Hart wrote for the Nation. The belief was so widespread that the New York Times even felt comfortable writing headlines in 1914 that claimed "Negro cocaine 'fiends' are a new southern menace." The author of the Times piece a physician wrote, "[The cocaine user] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims." He later added, "Many of the wholesale killings in the South may be cited as indicating that accuracy in shooting is not interfered with is, indeed, probably improved by cocaine. I believe the record of the 'cocaine n----r' near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing."

The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Most recently, these fears of drugs and the connection to minorities came up during what law enforcement officials characterized as a crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and '90s. Lawmakers, judges, and police in particular linked crack to violence in minority communities. The connection was part of the rationale for making it 100 times easier to get a mandatory minimum sentence for crack cocaine over powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are pharmacologically identical. As a result, minority groups have received considerably harsher prison sentences for illegal drugs. (In 2010, the ratio between crack's sentence and cocaine's was reduced from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1.)

Hart explained, after noting the New York Times's coverage in particular: "Over the [late 1980s], a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. Entire specialty police units were deployed to 'troubled neighborhoods,' making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems; resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods real needs, such as job creation."

None of this means the war on drugs is solely driven by fears of immigrants and minorities, and many people are genuinely concerned about drugs' effects on individuals and society. But when it comes to the war on drugs, the historical accounts suggest the harshest crackdowns often follow hysteria linked to minority drug use making the racial disparities in the drug war seem like a natural consequence of anti-drug efforts' roots.

They're pretty great, though they don't have much to do with the actual war on drugs.

But since you mentioned them, take a break and listen to a couple songs from their latest album, Lost in the Dream.

The rest is here:

The war on drugs, explained - Vox

As Analyn* was preparing a bottle of milk for her infant child, she heard a knock at the door. One of her husbands friends answered it. She heard him say, Sir, please dont. Theres nothing here, and then a gunshot. The police stormed the house, shooting and killing 4 more men, including her husband.

Police officers forced Analyn to leave her house and then searched it. When she returned hours later, her home was wrecked, with blood still soaking the bed where her husband was sleeping. She works in sales, struggling to subsist on her meager income, and she told us the police had stolen her goods, money she was to remit to her boss, and money she had set aside to pay the electric bill. They also took new shoes she had bought for one of her 3 children.

Family members we interviewed repeatedly described the war on drugs as a war against the poor

Her story was one we heard repeatedly when it came to President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs. Across Metro Manila, Cebu Province, and Mindanao, we documented 33 incidents in which 59 people were killed. Suspiciously similar police reports describe alleged drug offenders violently resisting arrest, causing the police to open fire. Consistent witness accounts show instead that the police are often killing people in cold blood, as theyre begging for their lives.

The more than 7,000 killings to date have overwhelmingly hit the urban poor. And the police and paid killers have built an economy off extrajudicial executions. Witnesses and family members repeatedly told us how the police stole money and other valuables from their homes, and wedding rings off the fingers of the deceased.

In a floating slum in Cebu Province, the police, perhaps having failed to find anything of monetary value, stole a Virgin Mary statue from a familys altar after gunning down an unarmed man during a police operation.

Worse, a police officer in an anti-illegal drugs unit in Metro Manila told us that they are paid under the table for killing alleged drug offenders, with payments ranging from P8,000 to P15,000 depending on the target. They receive nothing for an arrest, creating an incentive to kill. The officer also said that certain funeral homes pay them for each body they bring further impoverishing already poor families who must borrow money to get their loved ones remains.

Our investigation also shows that many of the killings by unknown shooters are, in fact, carried out with direct involvement of the police. At times, the police disguise themselves as vigilantes to avoid public suspicion about a particular killing; the police officer told us they would be inclined to kill women, in particular, disguised as vigilantes, rather than during formal police operations.

An industry of murder is thriving, at the expense of the urban poor

Two paid killers told us their boss is an active-duty police officer, and that they receive P5,000 for killing a person allegedly using drugs, and between P10,000 and P15,000 for killing a drug pusher. Before Duterte, they said they had one or two jobs a month; now, they have 3-4 every week.

President Duterte was elected on promises to be a champion of the poor and to reduce the persistent inequality that has marked the Philippines. Instead, an industry of murder is thriving, at the expense of the urban poor. Family members we interviewed repeatedly described the war on drugs as a war against the poor.

Analyn said her husband was not involved in drugs, but that he had friends who were, which she thinks may have brought on the police operation. In her area, she said, many others had been killed, contrasting their experience with the big fish who receive quite different treatment: Those who are rich are jailed and turned into witnesses. How come the poor are being killed? In our neighborhoodthey usually kill those of us who have families people who sell to have a little money. If people had other opportunities, they wouldnt [sell drugs].

On January 30, Philippine National Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa announced that the anti-illegal drug units would be disbanded, following the fallout from the killing of a Korean businessman. His statement came after a press conference in which Duterte said the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) would take over the lead for operations, promising to continue his anti-drug campaign through the end of his term after having initially indicated it was a 6-month campaign.

This change in responsibility for anti-drug operations must be coupled with a fundamental change in strategy from one based on punishment and violence to one based on the protection of health and respect for human rights, including standards on the lawful use of force.

Many countries, including neighbors of the Philippines, have tried a heavy-handed approach to drugs. Again and again, such tactics have proven unsuccessful, devastating lives while failing to tackle the root causes of drug use and sale. Poverty and its various manifestations are a problem you treat, not shoot at.

There must also be justice and accountability for those like Analyn who have watched as their loved ones were killed, and as the police planted evidence and stole from their homes. The impunity of the police force, encouraged by President Dutertes statements, has fueled mass killing. The Department of Justice should urgently establish a special task force within the National Bureau of Investigation to conduct independent and efficient investigations of extrajudicial executions, leading to the prosecution of all those responsible, irrespective of rank or status.

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Philippines: Duterte's 'war on drugs' is a war on the poor ...

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Page L. Forth: The war on drugs has it all wrong (Opinion) - Charleston Gazette-Mail

An astronomical rise in the US prison population began in the 1970s during the Nixon presidency. The rate escalated even more during the tenure of Ronald Reagan. All of this was the result of a carefully orchestrated all-out assault by the US government (i.e., the war on drugs).[1] What is too often overlooked, however, is thatthis war intentionally targeted communities of color.

No other nation incarcerates people at the rate of the US.[2] And when it comes to industrialized countries, no other country incarcerates its citizens at a rate even close to the US.[3] Russia incarcerates 341/100,000. China stands at 121/100,000. The rates in France (87/100,000) and Germany (69/100,000) are incomparable.

In total, the US houses 25% of the worlds prison population. That is right: one out of every four persons in prison in the world is imprisoned in the US.

The effects of mass incarceration on a society are astounding. They include, overcrowded prisons, which increase health risks and decreased psychological well-being. Additionally, the increasing number of prisoners is putting a significant strain on state budgets. Prisons must control and administer all aspects of life for inmates, which lengthy and costly list of necessities. Prison costs include adequate security, food, recreational and education opportunities, infrastructure maintenance, utility costs for the facilities, and healthcare for the prisoners. State prison spending varies greatly and can be as high as $69,355 per inmate.[4]

This doesnt even begin to consider the effects on the individual and their community. Imprisoning young men often means that a young woman may now have to raise a young child or two as a single parent. This often means that the child will not have the influence of a father for many years of his/her developmental stages. The child is more likely to live in low-income neighborhoods where access to quality education is lacking. The data shows that the children of parents who are incarcerated have greater difficulty in schooling, are more prone to drugs, to crime, and to violent behavior. This means that the child is more likely to be incarcerated. The cycle continues for the next generation.

We also need to understand that when persons of color are convicted of felonies they have much more difficulty making their way in the world upon release. In much of the US, felons are not allowed to benefit from many of the public services that are available for the poor. The fact that they have a felony on their record makes it harder to find work. Those who do are often employed in low-paying jobs. They are not able to access low-income housing or food stamps.

As Michelle Alexander notes, Once youre labeled a felon, the old forms of discriminationemployment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury serviceare suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a Black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.As Michelle

The statistics show that White persons use drugs and commit crimes at the same rates as persons of color. Nonetheless, persons of color are arrested, convicted, sentenced, and serve longer terms than Whites.[5]

One of the reasons why people of color have been routinely targeted by law enforcement is because it is easier to get an arrest and a conviction out of those who are poor.

Wealthier persons are more likely to have better lawyers with more connections making it harder for District Attorneys to use taxpayer resources fighting crimes in richer communities.

Do the kids at Harvard use drugs at the same rate as the kids at institutions of color? The research says, yes. Yet, they are arrested and charged with drug crimes at far lower rates than persons of color.

Poverty and crime

Poverty is shown to be a significant factor in crime rates.[6] The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD121-180) once said, poverty is the mother of crime.

Poverty and crime, however, do not know color. The statistics show that poor Whites and poor people of color commit crimes at similar rates.[7]

Yet, as noted above, people of color are consistently arrested at far higher rates than Whites. And when convicted for similar crimes, people of color are consistently given longer sentences than White people.

This is systemic racism. It is a system that perpetuates injustice. The system contributes to people failing. This, by no means, intends to justify or excuse criminal behavior. But we cannot deny the fact that the system is partially to blame. And the system is prejudiced against people of color.

Is there a problem in the Black community?

There is no question that Black communities are rife with problems. Race is not the only issue. The point at hand, however, is that systemic racism contributes to the degradation of communities of color.

Some may wish to divert our attention to the issues of Black-on-Black crimes.[8]Those who make this argument are often unaware that it is a racist assertionafter all, one seldom, if ever, hears the need to address White-on-White crimes. The argument is also guilty of placing the blame on the victims.

There is no question that Black-on-Black crimes, just like White-on-White crimes, are problematic for a community.

I can, however, testify firsthand that many within communities of color are working to address crimes within their own communities.

The charge, however, does not address the fact that there is a system in place that fosters and perpetuates more crime in communities of color.

Others respond that the problem within the Black community is the absence of fathers from their homes. This is indeed a great issue. And it is also one that African American communities are addressing.

But what is left out of these discussions is why are so many communities of color missing young fathers from their homes?

It is not because they commit more crimes than Whites.

It is time that we recognize that the racial oppression of African Americans in American history, which is unfortunately still alive and well today, has oppressed persons of color to the point that it is much harder and sometimes nearly impossible to succeed?

Those relegated to life in the inner cities must overcome impoverished circumstances and high crime. They have little to no access to quality education. The financial strains, along with poorer educational opportunities, make it harder to attend better universities. This hinders them from obtaining better and higher-paying jobs. And the cycle continues.

Certainly, there have been exceptions. But exceptions only prove the rule. When a person of any background is able to overcome significant hurdles and achieve success, it is a testament to their character. This does not mean that the system is fair. It only means that they succeeded despite the odds.

If life is a game, the ones who are making the rules are still not playing fair.

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[1] https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/economics-of-crime/0/steps/20279 . Last accessed 9-22-20. https://www.history.com/topics/crime/the-war-on-drugs. last accessed 9-25-20.

[2] The US is first with a rate of 639/100,000. Second on the list is El Salvador with a rate of 566/100,000. This is followed by Turkmenistan, Thailand, Palau, Rwanda, Cuba, Maldives, Bahamas, and Grenada (with 429/100,000). https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country last accessed 11-6-21.

[3] Germany incarcerates 87/100,000; France 67/100,000; Russia 341/100,000 and China is at 121/100,000.

[4] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country last accessed 11-6-21.

[5] See: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. The New Press.

[6] See: Is Poverty the Mother of Crime. Published online 2020 May 18:10.1371/journal.pone.0233034; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/. Last accessed 9-22-20.

[7] See: https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=242128 last accessed 9-22-20.

[8] It is quite common for someone to respond on my Facebook feed when I raise the issue of injustice after another shooting of a person of color, with the quip that we need to address Black-on-Black crime.

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The war on Drugs, Mass Incarceration, and Black-on-Black Crime: The Bible, injustice, and race#15; Justice#39 - Patheos