Pubdate: Tue, 13 Aug 2002
Source: Centre Daily Times (PA)
Copyright: 2002 Nittany Printing and Publishing Co., Inc.
Contact:  http://www.centredaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/74
Author: Stanley Crouch
Note: Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News

LEGALIZING DRUGS JUST ONE SOLUTION TO BLACK POVERTY

During a recent visit to New Orleans, where I represented the Louis 
Armstrong Educational Foundation and gave the keynote address at the 
Satchmo Festival, I began testing a theory I have about what has to be done 
to get black people down at the bottom up from the impoverished, 
crime-ridden and poorly educated extension of slavery into our moment.

I laid it out for Bob Hubbard, who was one of the central figures in the 
civil rights movement in New Orleans and who was also in Mississippi during 
that tragic Freedom Summer of 1964, when James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and 
Andrew Goodman were murdered by local bigots. Hubbard had driven the car 
from New York that the three had been in the night they disappeared.

Hubbard is now a businessman interested in real estate and providing 
bed-and-breakfast lodging for visitors and tourists. I had stayed at his 
Hubbard Mansion on St. Charles Street the last time I was New Orleans and 
had gotten a much deeper sense of recent Crescent City history and what it 
had taken to break down segregation.

I told Hubbard that the things I considered essential to black uplift were 
basic. They were high-quality public education, which meant rebuilding the 
public schools; removing the burden of heavy crime from communities 
dominated by it; and legalizing drugs.

At this point, I explained, there needs to be a thorough national 
rebuilding of public schools so black kids at the bottom will not be left 
out of the Internet age. Poorly educated, they are destined to become 
burdens on our society, one way or another.

For people at the bottom to live in civilized neighborhoods, the anarchic 
criminals who dominate the streets have got to go, either behind bars or in 
honest directions. The civil rights establishment and local leadership need 
to work on developing an alliance between the community and the police. 
Such an alliance could result in hotlines that residents can use to report 
criminals, cops on foot patrols and support of strong policing by community 
people - support that is central to success.

Hubbard agreed with those ideas but questioned the idea of legalizing 
drugs. He had remembered when public education was of far higher quality 
and what that had meant to the black people of his generation in New 
Orleans and wherever else he had traveled. He also knew how oppressed the 
poor were by the threat and the fact of violent crime.

But he did not believe that legalizing drugs would lead to anything other 
than more chaos unless all drug addicts were registered and supplied with 
their drugs through programs provided by the state.

Simply, we cannot fight a crime business that brings in so many billions of 
dollars and is responsible for so much of the violent death in the streets 
as well as the presence of so many young black men in penal institutions. 
Legalized and taken over by our pharmaceutical industry, those illegal 
plants and substances would bring mountains of tax dollars into the 
national coffers, allowing for the setting up of treatment programs as well 
as whatever else the nation needs.

It would not be without costs. There would be those lost to drugs, just as 
there are those lost to alcohol. But we were able to handle the 
legalization of alcohol following Prohibition, and we could handle the 
legalization of drugs.
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