Bob di Vleeptron rants about the War On Drugs -- War Without End, Amen -- America's premier public-health disaster and human rights shame

What the War On Drugs is all about: 2,300,000 children, women, men locked away in the Land of the Free, the majority of them behind bars for non-violent consentual drug crimes.

I disapprove of Single-Issue websites and blogs. When my website, "Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep," was in bloom, some guy e-mailed me:

Why isn't your website entirely devoted to East Timor?

There's nothing wrong with a blog that, day after day, year after year, fights America's loopy, lie-based, foot-shooting, racist War On Drugs. In fact, there's a lot that's right about such blogs. I admire the guys and gals who burn up Cyberspace with their passion to try to end the War On Drugs.

But if you date the War On Drugs (I prefer to call it "Jim Crow Nouveau") to Nixon, the WoD is 35 years old.

And I refuse to take a lifetime vow to devote 100 percent of my brain and my heart to something so sucky.

Vleeptron is about all the cool, bright, shiny, fun objects (tangible and Platonic) I stumble across in the whole Universe, and about all the strange, goofy things human beings do, or have done, or will do, all over Planet Earth, from the North Pole (which I'm trying to get to) to the South Pole (which my goddam nephew Ice Cube goes to year after year).

And when that's not enough for me, Vleeptron just makes up a bunch of imaginary crap.

But the War On Drugs really sucks. It's America's Shame. Because it started long before the War in Iraq, and shows every sign of lasting long after the War in Iraq finally, mercifully ends, the War On Drugs is America's premier shame. It's a human-rights disaster fully comparable to the Nazi genocide and South Africa's Apartheid.

And if you live somewhere other than America, make no mistake: US government drug policy is global, and sticks its nose -- often its lock-and-load full-tilt attack helicopter military nose -- in your national business, too. If you're not kissing our Drug Prohibition Ass, we'll send the CIA and the DEA to interfere with your politics, topple your government, and spray your crops with poisonous, cancer-causing herbicides which were banned in the USA decades ago.

No one on Earth is safe from America's War Without End, Amen, the war whose enemies are our neighbors, our parents, our sisters, brothers, our sons and daughters.

Oh, if you want to wallow in the ghastly, icky details and catastrophic details of America's Failed War On Drugs, make a bookmark for The Media Awareness Project, which runs a world-wide newspaper clipping service about everything that happens all over the planet every day that involves drugs and drug policy. Step 2. is to use MAP as a resource to write Letters to the Editor of newspapers all over the world to try to convince readers to reform whack, out-of-control, toxic drug policy. If you type in my name on MAP, you can read my LTEs that go back nearly a decade. I love MAP. Send them some money, too! They run off a shoestring. Nominate MAP for the Nobel Peace Prize!

So if I ran a Single-Issue blog, this would be the Single Issue.

But tomorrow we'll get back to Paris Hilton and the Ring of Brodgar! And maybe my new Borg implant! I'm part machine now!

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e-mail to columnist Jerry Large:
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Jerry Large
Columnist
Seattle Times

Dear Jerry Large,

Hi, thoughtful columns.

The Land of the Free currently has about 2,300,000 children, women (the fastest-growing segment) and men behind bars. By raw numbers and by percentage of population, we have more prisoners than Russia. We have more prisoners than China.

America -- We're Number One!

When I was a kid, knowing someone who'd ever been in jail or prison was like knowing a UFO alien.

Now every family -- white, black, Hispanic -- has had a kid or a parent or a first cousin in drug trouble, with an incarceration experience, or -- if the family took a second mortgage to hire a good lawyer -- a guilty plea to lesser drug charges on his or her Permanent Record, which annihilate all dreams of law school, med school, the top professions, truck driving, bus driving, serving in the military.

100,000 college-age kids, all of whom settled up with the criminal-justice system, have been denied federal college financial aid because of "Souder's Law." A released rapist or murderer is eligible for a federal college loan. But a 16-year-old who got popped with a joint isn't.

The War on Drugs is indeed the biggest engine driving America's incarceration explosion. Last I heard, about 53 percent of those behind bars are there for non-violent drug offenses. Nearly all the criminal acts were between consenting adults -- the seller wanted money, the buyer wanted drugs, neither complained to the authorities.

And yes, Clinton's drug czar Barry McCaffrey was quite blunt: Most American drug activity is by whites. If your kid is offered drugs in school, the odds are the drug dealer will be white.

But in shamefully disproportionate numbers, most of those in shackles on the bus from the courthouse to prison are African-American and Hispanic.

This is the mother of all Bathtub Elephants. Most Americans don't know, and aggressively don't want to know, how racist the War on Drugs is, and how many of our neighbors are now Prisoners of the Drug War.

While in prison or jail, every prisoner runs a risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS or hepatitis that's ten times the risk of someone not behind bars. So our prisons are the nation's AIDS and hepatitis public pressure cookers.

These viruses don't care about Personal Responsibility, or Morality, or Right and Wrong. Like the boll weevil, they're just a-lookin' for a home.

Most prisoners will eventually return to the community. And have unprotected sex, and share and discard infected needles.

Children on playgrounds, emergency workers, teenage girls in love, get the Death Penalty for Just Saying No.

By a conservative date to the Nixon administration, the War On Drugs is about 35 years old.

You tell me:

Are there less drugs? Is it harder for kids to find drugs? Are the drugs less toxic and addictive, or are they nastier, cheaper, more abundant, more addictive than they were in 1974?

When I was in high school in a big Eastern city before the War on Drugs began, I never saw or smelled marijuana, never encountered heroin or cocaine.

Now those substances -- and methamphetamines and ecstacy -- are no more than a phone call and a few hours away, and at very reasonable prices.

The heroin is now so concentrated that high school kids -- scared of needles -- can snort it. Heroin's also become popular because it disappears from blood and urine within two or three days. Marijuana traces linger for about a month. So in schools and workplaces with suspicionless random drug testing, people are shifting to heroin and other opiates on the weekend.

Condemn me to Hell all you want, but this never-ending attack on America's public health is beyond Good and Evil, it's beyond Right and Wrong, and government policies based on Morality and Personal Responsibility play a worse and worse role in sickening every community.

From 1919 to 1933, we had an explosion of violent gang crime and police corruption to prove that if Americans want something and are willing to pay for it, violent gangs will sell them any substance the government forbids. During Prohibition, about 15 percent of all law-enforcement was on the take of bootleggers and smugglers. In your region, the police often were the rumrunners bringing it in from Canada.

I wonder how many law enforcement officers are working for drug gangs today? Google "police drugs corruption" and stand back.

It's been ten years since the RAND Corporation, the nation's oldest and most prestigious Think Tank, determined that $1 spent on medical resources is as effective in reducing community drug activity as $7 spent on prisons, police, courts and prosecutors.

But we don't care. Our politicians (both parties) are Tough On Drugs, and fling savage vote candy by ceaselessly voting for the $7 plan that's proven to make everything worse.

There are other approaches, with proven results, that authentically lessen drug use and community damage.

They just don't happen to be legal in the United States of America. We're in a War Without End, Amen.

Bob Merkin
Northampton Massachusetts

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The Seattle Times (Seattle, Washington state USA)
Thursday 17 May 2007

Rescuing drug war's prisoners

by Jerry Large
Seattle Times staff columnist

Our response to drug abuse is a bad trip that makes a nasty problem worse and spreads the damage all over.

The crack we're addicted to is an over-reliance on police and prisons, which, among other things, perpetuates America's racial divide. Black Americans are disproportionately caught up in the drug war.

That helps keep alive negative stereotypes of black people and it nourishes a lack of faith in American justice on the part of black people.

Neither condition is good for a healthy democracy.

Stanford professor Lawrence Bobo, who has made the issue central to his academic work, spoke at the University of Washington on Tuesday.

His lecture title was "Of punitiveness and prejudice: Racial attitudes and the popular demand for harsh crime policies." I spoke with him about that.

"In the best data on drug consumption, there is no difference between blacks and whites," he said. But blacks are more likely to be arrested, and if arrested, far more likely to do serious time. Black people make up 3.5 percent of Washington's population, but constitute 19.6 percent of the state-prison population.

"Some scholars go so far as to argue that what I call racialized mass incarceration is the new fourth stage of racial oppression," Bobo said.

We've had slavery, Jim Crow, the isolation of urban ghettos and now mass imprisonment. Black men come out of jail and can't get hired; they aren't good marriage prospects. The entire community suffers.

We create a permanently stigmatized and disenfranchised population, a situation that's likely to increase crime. In surveys, most black people say the justice system isn't fair. But most white people say it is.
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"I'm not optimistic about profound changes in what we've been doing," Bobo said.

Politicians and civil-rights organizations know there's a problem, he said, but most steer clear for fear of being accused of coddling criminals.

"I'm not advocating for drug dealers," Bobo said. "I'm advocating for creating law-and-order policies that don't result in the disproportionate and essentially unfair incarceration of poor black men."

His solution would be heavy on education and training as prevention and, for those who do stumble, rehabilitation.

He thinks there is hope in the burden imprisonment costs put on state budgets.

The country spends $60 billion a year on corrections without correcting much.

Washington is taking a step toward closing the revolving prison door, creating a task force to review its community-corrections program.

The Times ran a story about that Wednesday in which Gov. Christine Gregoire said, "We cannot continue to build more prisons. We must address the causes of crime and give former offenders the skills and treatment they need to stay out of prison."

So maybe we're coming out of our drug stupor a little bit.

Norm Stamper, the former Seattle police chief, has called the drug war the most dysfunctional policy since slavery.

We know what doesn't work. It's time to kick the habit.

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Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at jlarge@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

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The Seattle Times (Seattle, Washington state USA)
Monday 21 May 2007

Drug crisis defies easy solutions

by Jerry Large
Seattle Times staff columnist

One reader invited me to Hempfest; another called me a moron.

In Thursday's column, I wrote about a conversation I had with Larry Bobo, a leading expert on race and crime.

He's on a crusade to get people to rethink the war on drugs, which has driven the prison population to senseless levels and filled cells with black men in highly disproportionate numbers. Men come out of prison unrehabilitated and stigmatized. They can't get work, and most wind up back in custody.

"One could always not use the drugs," one reader wrote sarcastically. But most people raised sincere questions.

Personal responsibility is a good idea, but as public policy it takes some work.

More than one reader blamed our current situation on Nancy Reagan for telling her husband the answer is to "Just Say No."

The Reagan administration and the country adopted no-tolerance as national policy. In 1980, there were fewer then 300,000 people in prison in the U.S. Today, 2 million people are in prisons and jails.

The drug war drives that level of imprisonment.

The drug war began at a time when many of our cities were in economic distress. Jobs that people in those areas depended on were beginning to disappear. And the government was cutting back on programs that helped cities and poor people, including job-training programs.

Some readers cited that confluence of events as contributing to the racial imbalance in prisons. Blacks are imprisoned at a rate seven times that of white people.

Of course, there is one easy conclusion, which a number of people mentioned. Maybe black people just commit more crime.

The UW did a study of drug arrests in Seattle a few years ago that focused on heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. By far most of the users and sellers in the city were white, but black people were being arrested in numbers out of proportion to their participation in the drug market.

Race is an issue, but a number of readers said class ought not to be ignored.

That's true. Money makes a difference. But, of course, there is a racial disparity in that area, too.

Nothing about the problem is simple. The answer to it can't be simple either.

People who have something to lose would be more likely to listen to all the messages out there about the dangers of drug use.

That's where we should start.

One reader wanted me to remind people that America's drug problem doesn't just hurt us.

Mexican gangs supplying drugs are so powerful that people there say the police are no match for them. This year, drug-related violence has already taken 1,000 lives.

Americans in law enforcement and the courts are looking for better solutions.

Politicians are beginning to realize something's broken, too.

Voters need to support them. Let them know we no longer think looking beyond easy answers is being soft on crime.

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Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company