Pubdate: Thu, 15 Aug 2002
Source: Eau Claire Leader-Telegram (WI)
Copyright: 2002 Eau Claire Press
Contact:  http://www.leadertelegram.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/236
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

LEGALIZING DRUGS MAY ACTUALLY HELP BLACKS

Knight Ridder News Service

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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MAP posted-by: Josh