Pubdate: Sun, 30 Dec 2007
Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL)
Copyright: 2007 Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Contact:  http://www.heraldtribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/398
Author: Cynthia Tucker
Note: Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor of the Atlanta 
Journal-Constitution.

ILL-CONCEIVED 'WAR ON DRUGS' STILL FAILS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

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. Some 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" in order 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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