Pubdate: Fri, 05 Jun 2015
Source: Tampa Bay Times (FL)
Copyright: 2015 St. Petersburg Times
Contact: http://www.sptimes.com/letters/
Website: http://www.tampabay.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Author: Danielle Allen
Webpage: n/a
Page: A11

IT'S NOT SO MUCH POLICE AS DRUG LAWS

The new visibility of police violence toward African-Americans has
stoked public debate about policing: What about body cameras? Should
we reform police training? Perhaps we should go slow on all that
military gear?

I find it difficult to sit through any of this while the underlying
issue goes unaddressed: It's the drug economy, stupid.

It's well past time to legalize marijuana. But it's also time to
consider decriminalizing nonviolent crimes involving other drugs, or
at least to reclassify lower-level, nonviolent offenses as
misdemeanors. We should also expunge felony convictions for many
classes of nonviolent drug offenses to re-enfranchise, economically
and politically, those who have staffed the drug trade.

According to the 2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in that
year the rate of substance dependence or abuse was 8.4 percent for
whites and 7.4 percent for blacks. Yet, as is widely recognized,
African-Americans are incarcerated for both the use and sale of drugs
at far higher rates than whites. In 2011, African-Americans were
arrested for possession at three times the rate as whites nationally
and, for drug sales and manufacturing, at nearly four times the rate
of whites.

These enforcement disparities mean that the U.S. drug economy rests on
a highly exploitative labor regime. If pot were an iPhone and the
supply chain based in China, investigative journalists would be
blasting the labor practices that delivered it. This is a point we
have not yet focused on.

Marijuana constitutes about 80 percent of illicit drug usage, and an
estimated 40 to 67 percent of that pot came from Mexico in 2008; most
cocaine and heroin also passes through Mexico. Wholesale distributors
in the United States include Mexican criminal organizations, Latino
and African-American street gangs and domestic producers of marijuana.
It's a commercial zone that looks pretty multicultural based on the
limited information available.

At the retail level, however, most drug users buy from people who look
like them. But this lets some white users turn a blind eye to the
supply chain. A major portion of the pot inhaled by a white smoker has
also passed through the hands of black or brown laborers in the drug
economy.

In 1984, the Drug Enforcement Administration initiated Operation
Pipeline to interdict drug trafficking on the nation's highways; this
operation launched what we have come to know as racial profiling.

Thanks to the racially disparate enforcement that was then set in
motion, much drug economy labor is, for all intents and purposes, not
free. Young people are recruited to handle lowlevel tasks, setting
them up to be booked on a felony as an adult not long after they turn
18. Once that happens, they find themselves broadly unemployable -
with one exception: by the drug industry. How voluntary can we
consider repeat participation in the supply chain when a criminal
record precludes other opportunities?

The pathway to a legalized, decriminalized and nonviolent drug economy
and to the reintegration of those formerly barred from participation
will take much collective discussion to discern. Re-enfranchisement
will require not only legalizing marijuana but also decriminalizing as
many nonviolent drug offenses as possible and expunging those
convictions. Call it Operation Equal Justice.

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at the Institute of Advanced
Study and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post.
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MAP posted-by: Matt