Pubdate: 20 Sep 1999 Source: Nation, The (US) Copyright: 1999, The Nation Company Contact: http://www.thenation.com/ Author: Joe Davidson Note: An updated list of the articles, ads, and DPR groups mentioned in this special issue of The Nation is at: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n963.a03.html THE DRUG WAR'S COLOR LINE Black Leaders Shift Stances On Sentencing While on the Washington, DC, Superior Court in the eighties, Judge Reggie Walton was known for imposing long sentences on the young black offenders who came before him and for lecturing them about how they had let down their community. As associate director of the drug czar's office under William Bennett from 1989 to 1991, he rejected the pleas of state and local authorities and anti-drug abuse activists to shift funds into comprehensive prevention and treatment instead of policing and prisons. Back on the federal bench after his White House sojourn, however, Walton saw low-level couriers, known as mules, getting longer sentences than the drug kingpins, and his views began to change. "It has to make you take a second look," he says. Increasingly interested in sending low-level drug offenders to treatment instead of prison, he became appalled at how few treatment slots were available. Today, Walton says, his "thinking in reference to long prison sentences has been tempered" because of the strong reaction from those the law supposedly protects. "If the community feels laws are unfair - as many in the black community feel about mandatory-minimum sentences - - then policy-makers should reconsider the laws," he says. "The community must respect laws. Otherwise, the laws will be self-defeating." Walton's shift reflects a larger change in views among African-Americans on how best to deal with the drug problem. Seeing the devastation that crack, heroin and other drugs brought, many in the black community once favored harsh penalties for possession and dealing; some members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance, were strong supporters of the 1986 anti - drug abuse act that mandated disproportionately long sentences for crack relative to powder cocaine. But the impact of those policies, compounded by unfair enforcement practices, has since caused many to change their minds. While there is no one school of thought about drugs in the black community (and while some black Americans still take a hard line on drug penalties), a new consensus seems to be emerging. Ending drug abuse is still a priority, but African-American leaders have placed reform of racist policing and sentencing practices at the forefront of their agenda, citing statistic after statistic on the damaging effects of discriminatory law enforcement and disproportionate penalties for crack offenses. Obviously, plenty of whites use crack, but according to the 1996 "Keeping Score" report by Drug Strategies, a Washington, DC - based research organization, "No white person has ever been convicted of a crack offense in the federal courts of Boston, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas or Miami," Because of racial profiling, unwarranted traffic stops lead to more searches and arrests of African-Americans. Police sweeps (sometimes with the support of community residents) round up open-air drug merchants in black neighborhoods, while many whites deal drugs indoors and are comparatively unhampered. Moreover, prosecutors have great sway over punishment because they can decide whether, where (state or federal court) and for what (misdemeanor or felony, possession or dealing) the suspects are charged. The enforcement disparity is so great that even Clinton Administration drug czar Barry McCaffrey has spoken out against it. Last year, in the NAACP's The Crisis, McCaffrey wrote, "Fifteen percent of the nation's reported cocaine users are African-American, but they comprise about 40 percent of the people charged with powder cocaine violations and nearly 90 percent of those convicted on crack cocaine charges." A sense of outrage at this situation has been building among black leaders as well as ordinary black people. Congressional Black Caucus members are now spearheading the drive to reform the 1986 legislation mandating the sentencing disparities. Harlem Democrat Charles Rangel, among the law's original backers, is leading efforts to eliminate the mandatory five-year penalty for first-time possession of crack cocaine and the 100 - to -1 sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine. Long a leader on drug issues on Capitol Hill, Rangel explains that he voted for severe crack penalties well before the racist nature of the law's implementation was apparent. "It's abundantly clear," Rangel said in an interview, "that it's time to equalize [the penalties]. It's also clear that the harshness of the sentences and their mandatory nature just don't work." Black leaders have been slower to shift their stance on needle exchange, even as AIDS has devastated parts of the black community. Currently, although black people make up just 12 percent of the population, the number of new HIV infections among African-Americans is greater than the number of new cases among whites. In addition, almost 75 percent of AIDS cases in which HIV infection comes through intravenous drug use or sex with an IV drug user are among minorities, according to figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Still, some significant voices once hostile to needle exchange have recently thrown their support behind these programs. Like many others in law enforcement, Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to improve policing through research and technical assistance, once believed needle exchange encouraged IV drug use. But as he saw dirty needles contribute to the spread of AIDS, Williams came to believe that clean needles would save lives. "Our failure to adopt programs that work, such as needle exchanges, has added to the epidemic of AIDS in this country," he says. Likewise, Dr. Beny Primm, executive director of the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation in New York City, says he was "unalterably opposed to [exchanging] needles ten years ago." About four years ago, he explains, he became supportive of needle and syringe programs "if - that's if - they are properly administered." Last year the Clinton Administration seemed poised to endorse needle exchange. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala announced, "A meticulous scientific review has now proven that needle-exchange programs can reduce the transmission of HIV and save lives without losing ground in the battle against illegal drugs." The review also found that needle exchanges met the two conditions required for a ban on federal funding to be lifted: The programs help reduce the spread of HIV and do not encourage drug use. Yet the White House refused to permit federal spending on the programs, a position blasted by the Congressional Black Caucus. Representative Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat who then chaired the caucus, issued a statement calling on Clinton "to reverse this wrongheaded decision." The caucus complained that the Administration chose "to put politics ahead of science and sound public policy." A letter to Clinton signed by most black House members argued that "African-American and other minorities will suffer most from this decision," because "minorities are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS." As the Police Foundation's Williams points out, however, not everyone in the black community has enthusiastically embraced needle exchange. "I think that we still have a divided house. Some feel it encourages drugs," says Williams. James Shephard, for instance, a former crack and PCP user who now runs a drug rehab program in the shadow of elevated commuter rail tracks in Washington, DC, says, "I am totally against needle exchange, because it gives them the OK to use. We deal with total abstinence here. Abstinence is the key." And in a New York Times Op-Ed piece in April of last year, James Curtis, a Columbia University and Harlem Hospital psychiatrist, argued that needle-exchange policies hurt individual addicts and minority communities. "The indisputable fact is that needle exchanges merely help addicts continue to use drugs," he wrote. "It's not unlike giving an alcoholic a clean Scotch tumbler to prevent meningitis." Rangel once had a similar view, but he now takes a qualified position. Before, he put clean needles in the same category with clean drugs - clean or dirty, they were bad. Today he says he hates to see needles exchanged without drug education. "But the danger of death, to me," he says, "has been far more serious than the question of having needle exchange associated with a substantive program." After weighing the dangers of AIDS versus needle programs, he says "there's now enough evidence to convince me that needle exchange reduces the loss of life." Learning from family, friends and neighbors, African-Americans have rethought their opposition to needle exchange, says Rangel. "You don't have to be a historian to know that AIDS had been considered for so long a homosexual problem and not a regular problem," he recalls. "Our churches in Harlem and Harlems around the country said that AIDS was the devil's way of punishing evil people." But as people realized how widely the disease had spread and how infectious needles were "partially responsible for the many funerals and the many illnesses that we had in the community...of course there were changes" in attitude. Those changes are based on bottom-line effectiveness, not ideology or partisan politics. According to John Wabash, a research associate at Drug Strategies, studies show that, black or white, "people look for something that works. They feel besieged.... People want to do what is going to work now." With mounting evidence that innovative programs such as needle exchange do work, and a strong belief that the disparity in cocaine sentencing practices is based on race, many in the black community are ready to force drug policy issues before political candidates. In its next rating of members of Congress, for instance, the NAACP will include how they voted on Rangel-sponsored legislation that would eliminate the cocaine sentencing disparity. Simplistic stances against crime and drugs may no longer be enough to sway voters whose communities have been ravaged by drug pushers and held back by shortsighted policies. ~~~~~ Joe Davidson formerly covered criminal justice issues for the Wall Street Journal and is now a media fellow with the Center on Crime, Culture and Communities. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake