PLAYING THE RACE CARD AGAINST DRUG ENFORCEMENT

The opponents of drug enforcement like to compare the failure of prohibition to the War on Drugs. That is not a valid argument! Prohibition was passed when the vast majority of Americans had long been drinking alcoholic beverages.
　
When the laws against marijuana, heroin, cocaine and other drugs were passed, relatively few Americans were using drugs. At the time, some Mexicans were using marijuana and heroin, some blacks were using heroin, and some Hollywood celebrities were using pot and cocaine.
　
As for whites, there was some use of marijuana and some were using downers such as Seconal (Reds), Nembutal (Yellow Jackets) and Amytal (Blues). That was before the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s lead to an explosion in the use of drugs attendant to the counterculture of the Viet Nam War protesters.
　
So the comparison of Prohibition to the War on Drugs just doesn’t hold any water. But if the prohibition spiel doesn’t work, then there’s always the race card.

Leonard Pitts is a very good columnist who writes through the eyes of a black man. Sometimes I agree with his views, sometimes I don’t. I certainly do not share his views about the War on Drugs. And I think it will be a terrible mistake for the voters of Kookfornia to legalize marijuana in this coming November’s referendum.
　
Excerpts from Pitt’s column follow. I’m taking the liberty of inserting my comments where appropriate.
　
LET’S ADMIT WAR ON DRUGS A FAILURE
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
　
Miami Herald
July 19, 2010
　
[Alice] Huffman, president of the California Conference of the NAACP, recently declared support for an initiative that, if passed by voters in November, will decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana. Huffman sees it as a civil rights issue.
　
… Huffman is standing firm, both in resisting calls for her head and in framing this as an issue of racial justice. There is, she notes, a pronounced racial disparity in the enforcement of marijuana laws.
　
[EDITOR: Huffamn, and Pitts are playing the race card against drug enforcement.]

She's right, of course. For that matter, there is a disparity in the enforcement of drug laws, period.
　
… though there are more than "four times" as many white drug users as black ones, blacks represent better than half those in state prison on drug charges, according to The Sentencing Project. The same source says that though two-thirds of regular crack users are white or Latino, 82 percent of those sentenced in federal court for crack crimes are black. In some states, black men are jailed on drug charges at a rate 50 times higher than whites.
　
[EDITOR: Some of these statistics are questionable. Even if 100 percent of the crack users were white or Latino, the fact is that blacks have cornered the market for the sale of crack. That’s whey they are imprisoned in disproportionate numbers.]
　
[Bishop Ron Allen, founder of a religious social activism group called the International Faith-Based Coalition] worries about a baby being born addicted to pot, but the likelier scenario is that she will be born to a father unable to secure a job so he can support her, an apartment for her to live in or an education so he can better himself for her — all because he got caught with a joint 10 years ago.
　
[EDITOR: ‘All because he got caught with a joint 10 years ago.’ What an absurd statement! No one went to prison 10 years ago for getting caught with a joint. He was probably caught selling hundreds, if not thousands of joints and the charges was plea bargained down form a sales to a possession case.]
　
It is a cruel and ludicrous predicament. And apparently Huffman, like a growing number of cops, judges, DEA agents, pundits and even conservative icons like the late William F. Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman, has decided to call the War on Drugs what it is: a failure. It is time to find a better way, preferably one that emphasizes treatment over incarceration.
　
[EDITOR: I don’t consider the War on Drugs a failure. There would be 10 times as many or more users of debilitating drugs were in not for our drug enforcement efforts.]
　
You'd think that would be a no-brainer. We have spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions of lives and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world to fight drug use. Yet, we saw casual drug use "rise" by 2,300 percent between 1970 and 2003, according to an advocacy group called LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). And as drug use skyrocketed, we find that we have moved the needle on "addiction" not even an inch, up or down. All we have managed, and at a ruinous cost, is to relearn the lesson of 1933 when alcohol prohibition collapsed: You cannot jail or punish people out of wanting what they want.
　
[EDOTOR: OK, we’ve spent billions of dollars in the War on Drugs. Let’s say that we stop this war now. How many more billions of dollars would the increase in crime by drug users – regardless of whether drug use is legalized or not – cost us? How many more lives would be ruined? How many more innocent lives would be lost because so many more people are driving their cars under the influence of drugs?

‘We have ruined untold millions of lives.’ We haven’t done any such thing. We didn’t force anyone to use pot, coke, heroin, meth or any other illicit drugs. The dopers, knowing full-well that it was illegal, ruined themselves.
　
‘You cannot jail or punish people out of wanting what they want.’ Another absurd statement! People commit thefts, forgeries, burglaries, armed robberies, fraud, etc, because ‘what they want’ is money. According to Pitts’ way of thinking, doesn’t it stand to reason that we should stop jailing and punishing all those money-wanting thieves and swindlers?
　
Oh yes Ms. Huffman and Mr. Pitts, who do you think is behind that Kookfornia referendum to legalize marijuana? I’ve got news for you - it’s not the put users! It’s the medial marijuana dealers who are looking to make loads and loads of more money.]