Pubdate: Wed, 09 Aug 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Arianna Huffington,  http://www.ariannaonline.com/

WAR ON DRUGS REACHES A CRUCIAL TURNING POINT: ADMISSION OF FAILURE

A Turning Point In The War On Drugs

How long do you keep the lie going? This is the unstated question in the 
blossoming drug-war debate. Speaking last week at the Shadow Convention in 
Philadelphia, the Rev. Edwin Sanders of Nashville's Metropolitan Church was 
unequivocal in his answer: "This needs to be the time when we collectively 
raise our voices and say that this is the end."

Sanders' speech was part of a breakthrough day in the drug-policy-reform 
movement. Speakers as varied as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the biggest 
cheerleaders for the drug war in the 1980s, and Republican Gov. Gary 
Johnson of New Mexico, the highest-ranking elected official ever to 
challenge our national drug policy, took to the stage to echo Sanders' 
sentiment that the time has come to declare an end to a war that has 
destroyed far too many lives.

In the audience, hundreds of parents, children and spouses of those 
incarcerated on nonviolent drug charges held placards with the pictures and 
stories of their loved ones. They had arrived on buses from around the 
country, representing millions of Americans whose world has been torn apart 
by this disastrous war.

People like 21-year-old Julie Colon, whose mother is serving a sentence of 
15 years to life for a first-time drug offense. "The last time I lived with 
my mother," said Colon, "I was 9 years old." Or 74-year-old Eileen 
Flournoy, whose daughter Veronica was arrested on drug charges while she 
was pregnant with her second child and fell under the mandatory sentencing 
laws. "At my age, I sure didn't expect to be raising my 4-and 5-year-old 
granddaughters," she told me.

"We have absolutely become numb to what's going on in this country," Gov. 
Johnson, a triathlete and teetotaler, told the Shadow Convention crowd. 
"The bottom line is, we need a new drug strategy. Why don't we see if we 
can have fewer nonviolent drug offenders in jail? The message that needs to 
resonate to kids and adults is 'Just Say Know to Drugs. K-N-O-W.' "

Because the fact is we do know. We know what works -- treatment. And we 
know what doesn't work -- incarceration. About the only thing we don't know 
is how to convince our politicians of the truth of what almost everybody 
else now seems to know.

But we're getting closer.

Jesse Jackson knows. He railed against our "failed drug policy whose 
friendly fire is killing Americans rather than helping Americans -- a 
policy whose unintended consequence is to build an ugly, shameful jail 
industrial complex, a policy driven by fear, race and greed."

Pointing to the 75 percent recidivism rate of drug offenders, Jackson 
brought the crowd to its feet with his trademark cadenced delivery: "They 
go into jail sicker and come out slicker and return quicker and around and 
around and around they go . . . Because if you are young, poor, brown or 
black or don't have a lawyer there is no category called youthful 
indiscretion."

Drug-policy reform is moving from the fringes to the mainstream. And for 
every public figure who speaks out, dozens more are waiting in the wings 
until they consider it safe enough to say openly what they now dare say 
only privately. Two elected officials speaking out are Rep. Tom Campbell, 
R-Stanford, now running for the Senate, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los 
Angeles. In one of the unexpected alliances produced by the fight against 
the drug war, they have joined forces in favor of Proposition 36 -- a major 
policy shift from incarceration to treatment.

Campbell offered the Shadow Convention crowd a stinging bit of history from 
the drug war: "The street price of heroin and cocaine is less than 
one-fourth of what it was in 1981. The purity of heroin available on the 
street has increased more than fourfold since 1981. Incarceration for drug 
arrests has risen tenfold since 1981. The number of drug-overdose deaths 
has increased more than fivefold since 1981. The proportion of high school 
seniors reporting that drugs are readily available has doubled since 1981. 
This is not victory. This is failure."

But the greatest indicator that we are, as Ethan Nadelmann, director of the 
Lindesmith Center, put it, "at the beginning of a new anti-war movement, a 
new movement for political and social justice," came not at the shadow 
gathering but at the Republican convention. Colin Powell, in the one bit of 
truth shining through the phony multicultural fog, made it clear that it 
was time to rethink America's drug-war policy, which has led to more than 2 
million Americans behind bars: "If you want to solve our drug problem, you 
won't do it by trying to cut off supply and arresting pushers on the street 
corners alone . . . It's time to stop building jails in America and get 
back to the task of building our children."

It's a conclusion shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans: more 
than 70 percent are now in favor of treatment over incarceration for those 
convicted of nonviolent drug charges. And the media -- in a growing number 
of editorials, columns and news stories -- have begun to actually shine a 
light on the drug war's casualties and call for new policies.

Yet George W. Bush did not have one compassionate word to say on the 
subject beyond grandiloquently promising to "tear down that wall" that 
traps our citizens in "prison, addiction and despair."

And you can bet that, come next week, Al Gore will be equally silent on the 
subject.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D