Pubdate: Sun, 13 Aug 2000
Source: Contra Costa Times (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Contra Costa Newspapers Inc.
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Author: Arianna Huffington, TIME TO BRING LOST DRUG WAR TO AN END

HOW LONG DO you keep the lie going? This is the unstated question in the
blossoming drug-war debate. Speaking 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 Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.),
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 the 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 trademarked 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-San
Jose), now running for the Senate, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). In one
of the unexpected alliances produced by the fight against the drug war, they
have joined forces in favor of Prop. 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. 

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 this week
Al Gore will be equally silent on the subject.
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