Pubdate: Sat, 29 Dec 2007
Source: Times Union (Albany, NY)
Copyright: 2007 Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation
Contact: http://www.timesunion.com/forms/emaileditor.asp
Website: http://www.timesunion.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/452
Author: Cynthia Tucker

BLACKS THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN DRUG WAR

You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs"  these days. 
It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer, a  holdover from bygone days. 
Its glitz has been stolen by  the "war on terror," which gets the 
news media hype and  campaign trail rhetoric. Railing against 
recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be locked away is  so '90s.

But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news  cameras and 
photo-ops, still chewing up federal and  state resources and casting 
criminal sanctions over  entire neighborhoods. Four or so decades 
into an  intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug 
use,  billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of  criminals, 
many of them foreigners, have been enriched;  and hundreds of 
thousands of Americans have been  imprisoned. And the use of illegal 
substances continues  unabated.

With the nation poised on the brink of a new political  era, isn't it 
time to abandon the wrongheaded war on  drugs? Isn't it time to admit 
that this second  Prohibition has been as big a failure as the last 
- -- the one aimed at alcohol?

Every war has its collateral damage, and the war on  drugs is no 
different. As it happens, its unintended  victims have been 
disproportionately black. The  stunning rise in incarceration rates 
for black men  began after the nation became serious about stamping 
out recreational drug use.

In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the  nation's 
prison population, according to Marc Mauer,  assistant director of 
The Sentencing Project, a  Washington, D.C.-based group that 
advocates alternative  sentencing. Fifty years later, he wrote, 
blacks account for almost half of all prison admissions. Much of 
that  increase has come from arrests for drug crimes.

Very few of those black men are wildly successful drug  lords like 
the Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, portrayed by  Denzel Washington in 
the film "American Gangster."  Instead, they are usually penny-ante 
dealers addicted  to their product.

As violent crime dropped in the '90s, some  law-and-order types 
argued that the harsh penalties  meted out under punitive drug laws 
were responsible for  safer streets. But that argument is seriously 
undermined by a resurgence in violent crime, even as  drug arrests 
continue. While violent offenders such as  Frank Lucas deserve hefty 
prison sentences, there is no  justification for lengthy sentences 
for nonviolent drug  offenders.

Recently, criminal justice officials have begun to  tacitly 
acknowledge the racism embedded in the drug  war. Earlier this month, 
the U.S. Sentencing  Commission, which sets federal sentencing 
guidelines,  retroactively reduced the penalties for some crimes 
related to crack cocaine, reducing the stark disparity  between 
sentences for crack cocaine, used more  frequently by black 
Americans, and powder cocaine, more  often used by whites. A day 
earlier, the U.S. Supreme  Court had ruled that judges could deviate 
from harsh guidelines in sentencing drug offenders.

But the ravages of the drug war are too many to be  eased by those 
narrow changes in policy. They won't  help victims such as Kathryn 
Johnston, an elderly  Atlanta woman killed by local police in a hail 
of  gunfire a year ago. Under pressure to make drug  arrests, they 
said, members of an Atlanta narcotics  squad lied to a judge to 
obtain a "no knock" warrant  for Johnston's house, where they 
believed they would  find illegal substances. But the elderly woman, 
who  lived behind barred windows, thought she was the victim  of a 
robbery and fired on the officers. They returned  fire. No drugs were 
found on her premises.

The nation's so-called war on drugs recalls that old  Vietnam War 
phrase about "burning the village" to save  it. It also brings to 
mind Albert Einstein's famous  definition of insanity: Doing the same 
thing over and  over and expecting a different result.

Our war on drugs really is a war on people. That's true insanity.

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Cynthia Tucker writes for The Atlanta  Journal-Constitution.
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