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The
world conference on racism
should
decide to end the
"war
on drugs"
By JONATHAN
POWER
August 29, 2001
LONDON - It should come as no surprise to the organizers
of the World Conference Against Racism that many American
activists want to hijack this conference that begins in
Durban on Friday to force a debate about how it is that
America's "war on drugs" has turned into an
apartheid-like device that imprisons black men at
thirteen times the rate of white men.
I wish them luck- any effort to lift the drugs debate
out of the intellectual doldrums where policy makers
insist on sleeping on the facts is to be welcomed. For a
society that prides itself on its innovative
technological life and its rigorous political debates its
attitudes to drug use are nothing less that
extraordinary. Solid facts are dismissed and old
prejudices are fanned into flames. America is paying a
terrible price for burying its head in the sand- and in
the process, because of its tremendous influence as the
world's largest drug consuming society, criminalizing and
thence corrupting drug producing societies, besides
making it difficult for other western drug consuming
countries to reform their antiquated laws too, lest they
merely import other countries' problems.
The first question to ask- long before one gets into
the more supercharged debate on whether prohibition is
counterproductive- is how racially discriminatory
application of drug laws can be justified? Unless a
society is publicly committed to an apartheid society-
which America manifestly is not- how can it be that
American penal justice delivers an outcome whereby blacks
are only 13% of drug users but receive 74% of prison
sentences for drug abuse? American prisons are now
swollen with vast numbers of young non-violent black
males, many of them teenagers who, if they had been
white, would not have ended up there. Under a law passed
during the 1986 hysteria about the spread of crack
cocaine (an adulterated form of cocaine popular among
poorer people), it takes only one hundredth the amount of
crack to trigger the same mandatory sentence as powder
cocaine, the drug of choice of white professionals.
Yet real drug abuse in America is not rising. The
American heroin epidemic peaked as long ago as 1973 and
the number of youngsters experimenting with cocaine or
heroin has remained fairly steady, despite the dramatic
fall in prices over the years, a consequence of an
enforcement program that for all its harsh rhetoric is an
abysmal failure where it counts- on the supply front.
Any disinterested and intellectually fair appraisal of
the western drug scene would have to accept that tobacco
kills proportionately more smokers than heroin kills its
users and alcohol kills more drinkers than cocaine kills
its takers. Of all the drugs tobacco is the most
addictive and even a majority of heroin takers- the
second most addictive drug-do not become addicted and can
live normal lives (as long as they don't drive under the
influence) if they limit it to the occasional
recreational use.
There is a shibboleth that those who begin with
marijuana are on a slippery slope to imbibing harder
drugs. But the vast majority are not, anymore than wine
drinkers end up on half a bottle of whisky a day. What is
true is that as beer and wine drinkers get older they
tend to gravitate to spirits, whereas the evidence shows
that marijuana and cocaine users as they age tend to cut
down on the habit. In fact most, by the time they start
to raise a family, have more or less given it up.
Would-be reformers feel that they are beating their
heads against a wall: political opinion across the
spectrum seems united against them. Yet chinks of light
regularly appear. In Britain, for example, which has been
as conservative about the issue as its American cousin
the doctors' journal, The Lancet, has voiced its opinion
that marijuana smoking in reasonable amounts is not
dangerous to health, various senior policemen have gone
on the record against making smoking marijuana a criminal
offence and, most recently, Michael Portillo, a serious
candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party
has called for a relaxation of the law. Even Britain's
conservative dominated press has begun to allow a more
open debate, led by the highbrow Economist magazine,
which would like to see all drugs decriminalised. A swing
in opinion could perhaps happen in America too. At the
time of America's 1928 election no one hardly dared say a
word against prohibition. Four years later the mood had
totally changed.
What turned the American electorate then was the
alarming rate of growth of gangland violence. Perhaps the
same process of revulsion could be under way today. As
America gets more drawn into the drug wars of Colombia,
the world's largest producer of cocaine, it will realize
it is beating a path to a dead- and deadly- end. Two
decades ago it was the rise of the Colombian mafia that
undermined and corrupted both governments and the
agencies of law enforcement right across the Americas.
Today it is the rise of the drug-fuelled armies that is
turning Colombia into a battleground that step-by-step is
drawing America into another unwinnable war.
Legalising will not be easy- too much water has gone
under the bridge for the transition to be a smooth one.
But it has to be done and rather quickly too. The drug
mafia have to have the carpet pulled from under them; the
young blacks have to be sprung from America's jails; and
the vast budget spent mainly on the enforcement of
fruitless anti-drug laws needs to be diverted to
treatment centres and the education of society of the
uselessness of all excess, whether it be tobacco, alcohol
or drugs.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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