Pubdate: Thu, 30 Jan 2014
Source: Los Angeles Wave (CA)
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/NLw6QSOb
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Wave
Website: http://wavenewspapers.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5491
Note: Seven editions, spread over LA.
Author: Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Note: Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.. He 
is an associate editor of New America Media and the weekly co-host of 
the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host 
of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and 
KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

OBAMA CASTS GLARE ON RACE-TAINTED DRUG WAR

President Barack Obama again cast an ugly glare on the race-tainted 
drug laws in a recent interview and in reports from the White House. 
He specifically finger pointed marijuana.

Virtually all medical professionals have repeatedly said that 
marijuana use is no more damaging than alcohol, and so did Obama. If 
anything, judging from the thousands of family break-ups, the 
mountainous carnage from alcohol-related accidents and physical 
deaths from liquor addiction, marijuana use is far safer than alcohol.

But marijuana, as with the wildly disparate racially hammering of 
minorities with cocaine drug busts, has also been yet another weapon 
in the ruthless, relentless and naked drug war on minorities, 
especially African-Americans.

The difference is that the gaping racial disparities in crack cocaine 
prosecutions and sentencing have gotten massive public attention, 
White House and legislative action to close the legal gap. Marijuana, 
by contrast, has flown far under the public and lawmakers' radarscope.

But the racial war that has been blatantly evident in the drug war is 
just as, if not more blatant, in who's arrested, tried, convicted and 
sentenced for marijuana use and sale. Take two states, Minnesota and 
Iowa. Minorities and especially Blacks make up a relatively tiny 
overall percentage of residents of those two states. Yet blacks were 
eight times more likely to be arrested than whites.

An ACLU study released last June found that in nearly every county in 
the nation the arrest rate for marijuana possession among Blacks was 
at least four times higher than that for whites. Even worse, the big 
gaping disparities in arrest numbers for Blacks and whites comes at a 
time when public attitudes have radically softened on both personal 
and medicinal marijuana use.

Many states and locales have drastically decriminalized marijuana 
possession, and two states have legalized its use, and other states 
are poised to vote on legalization. Even worse, the huge race-tinged 
arrest numbers come at a time when the incidences of nearly every 
other type of crime has plummeted.

The reasons aren't hard to find. The near institution of open and 
covert stop-and-frisk laws that target minorities, incentives to pad 
arrest numbers to ensure greater federal funding and to bolster the 
perceived crime-fighting stature of police agencies, and the ease and 
cheapness of focusing on low-level crimes are major reasons for the 
continued war on minorities for marijuana use.

Then there are the public attitudes toward Black and white drug 
offenders. The top-heavy drug use by young whites has never stirred 
any public outcry for mass arrests, prosecutions and tough prison 
sentences for them, many of whom deal drugs that are directly linked 
to serious crime and violence. Whites unlucky enough to get popped 
for drug possession are treated with compassion, prayer sessions, 
expensive psychiatric counselling, treatment and rehab programs, and 
drug diversion programs. And they should be. But so should those 
Blacks and other non-whites victimized by discriminatory drug laws.

A frank admission that the laws are biased and unfair, and have not 
done much to combat the drug plague, would be an admission of 
failure. It could ignite a real soul searching over whether all the 
billions of dollars that have been squandered in the failed and 
flawed drug war - the lives ruined by it, and the families torn apart 
by the rigid and unequal enforcement of the laws - has not really 
accomplished anything.

This might call into question why people use and abuse drugs in the 
first place - and if it is really the government's business to turn 
the legal screws on some drug users while turning a blind eye to others?

The greatest fallout from the nation's failed drug policy and that 
certainly includes racially skewed marijuana arrests is that it is a 
double-edged sword. On the one hand, it further embeds the widespread 
notion that the drug problem is exclusively a Black problem. This 
makes it easy for on-the-make politicians to grab votes, garner press 
attention and balloon state prison budgets to jail more Black 
offenders, while continuing to feed the illusion that we are winning 
the drug war.

On the other, the easing up of marijuana arrests and prosecutions of 
whites permits much of the public and lawmakers to delude themselves 
that the nation has become much more prudent and enlightened in how 
it views the drug fight.

In his interview, Obama was blunt. "We should not be locking up kids 
or individuals for long stretches of jail time when those writing the 
laws have probably done the same thing," he said.

Obama certainly could testify to that since he has frankly admitted 
his use of drugs in his youthful days. This frank admission and the 
realization that more prisons, the hiring and maintaining of waves of 
corrections officers, and the bloating state budgets in the process, 
not to mention political pandering is a lose-lose proposition for the 
nation. The biggest losers of all with the nation's disastrously 
failed and flawed drug war are minorities, and especially Blacks. 
Marijuana is no different.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom