Pubdate: Sat, 11 Jun 2011
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2011 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/topic/Global+Commission+on+Drug+Policy
Cited: http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/

DRUG BUST

Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most 
expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American 
history: The war on drugs.

On the morning of June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, speaking 
from the Briefing Room of the White House, declared: "America's 
public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to 
fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out 
offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative 
authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will 
be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of 
supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever 
they are in the world."

So began a war that has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted, 
until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice 
and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human 
capital, ruined lives and decimated communities.

(Since 1971, more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for 
drug-related offenses.)

And no group has been more targeted and suffered more damage than the 
black community. As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, "The racial 
disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in 
drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, 
African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that 
is 10 times greater than that of whites."

An effort meant to save us from a form of moral decay became its own 
insidious brand of moral perversion - turning people who should have 
been patients into prisoners, criminalizing victimless behavior, 
targeting those whose first offense was entering the world wrapped in 
the wrong skin. It feeds our achingly contradictory tendency toward 
prudery and our overwhelming thirst for punishment.

Last week, the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a 
19-member commission that included Kofi Annan, a former U.N. 
secretary general; George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan's secretary 
of state; and Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, 
declared that: "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating 
consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty 
years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic 
Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S. 
government's war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global 
drug control policies are urgently needed."

The White House immediately shot back: no dice. The Obama 
administration presented a collection of statistics that compared 
current drug use and demand with the peak of the late 1970s, although 
a direct correlation between those declines and the drug war are 
highly debatable. In doing so, it completely sidestepped the human, 
economic and societal toll of the mass incarceration of millions of 
Americans, many for simple possession.

No need to put a human face on 40 years of folly when you can swaddle 
its inefficacy in a patchwork quilt of self-serving statistics.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom