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How do you know if you’re winning a war?

That’s easy. The enemy is on the run, taking heavy casualties, consistently losing ground.

The harder questions are about losing.

How do you know when to quit fighting? Or should you simply fight harder, throwing more guns, more money, more personnel onto the battlefield ? At what point do you face the terrible possibility that your war was wrong all along?

Once we asked ourselves these hard questions about Vietnam. Now people across the political spectrum are asking them about the 30-year war we’re waging against our own population: the war on drugs.

Who’s winning and who’s losing in this strange, sad war where the enemy is us?

Among the winners, as in all wars, are those who profit financially: the traffickers involved in the $450 billion per year drug trade; the corporations and financial institutions laundering the estimated $250 billion in drug money that flows through the US economy each year; the prison industry, which now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company except General Motors and generates an estimated $40 billion per year; the corporations that rely on cheap prison labor for both manufacturing and billing operations. And so on.

Among the losers, certainly, are our inner-city African-American and Hispanic communities, along with the police, drug dealers, and innocent bystanders killed in action. Certainly the 400,000 prisoners of the drug war sitting in jail or in prison or awaiting trial, more than 100,000 of them for mere possession. Certainly the individuals and their families whose lives were ruined by drugs. The tax payers, too, of course.

And when the smoke clears, how fares our declared enemy, drugs? The enemy is thriving.

Deaths from drugs have never been higher. In 1996, they numbered 14,843, more than double the drug-related deaths reported in 1979, the year considered the height of the current drug epidemic. In a survey conducted annually for 25 years, teenagers reported that heroin, marijuana, and crack cocaine were easier to get in 1998 than at any time in the past decade.

Mike Ruppert, a narcotics-investigator-turned-anti-drug-war activist, agrees:“There are more, better, cheaper drugs on the street today than in 1972.” Ruppert, who received 13 citations and four commendations during his years of active service with the Los Angeles Police Department, says it doesn’t surprise him that our war hasn’t made a dent in the drug trade. “There is no war on drugs and there never will be,” he says, because the so-called war on drugs is not about drugs. It’s about money.

It’s also about power. And it’s about race.

Maximum toughness, minimum justice

In the scramble for political power, being “tough on drugs” is a free ticket to the winner’s circle. Small wonder, then, that in almost every election cycle since 1984, crime and drug legislation has been enacted in the month before the election, each bill tougher than the last. 

 

The showpiece of the toughness legislation is mandatory minimum sentencing and its variants: harsh penalties for selling drugs near a school or public housing, and three-strikes-you’re-out laws. These sentencing innovations remove discretionary power from the judge and hand it over to the prosecutor. These are designed to increase the likelihood of offenders going to prison and staying there for a long, long time. And they all hit hardest in low-income and minority communities.

Mandatory minimums are set by statute. The length of the sentence is determined solely by the amount and type of drug involved in the offense and the number of prior convictions, and it must be served in its entirety. The only way a defendant can get a sentence reduced is to help the prosecutor convict someone else. It is the prosecutor who decides if the assistance rendered is “substantial” enough to warrant a shorter sentence and what charge to file.

In theory, mandatory minimums are simply tough and equitable. In reality, as one federal judge pointed out, they “make a judge a computer, automatically imposing sentences without regard to what is right and just.”

They also fail to distinguish between major and minor players. The worst offenders — those deeply involved in the drug business — have information to trade and, as a result, are in the best position to bargain down their sentences. The users and small-time dealers, their girlfriends and family have little information to offer and commonly end up going to jail for longer terms than the “kingpin.”

Critics of mandatory minimums point to serious injustices. Federal District Judge Stanley Marshall remarked, “I’ve always been considered a fairly harsh sentencer, but it’s killing me that I’m sending so many low-level offenders away for all this time.”

Marshall is not alone. More than 100 senior federal judges now refuse to hear drug cases; the American Bar Association also opposes mandatory sentences. Religious groups, too, have begun to see the drug war as an immoral crusade, and more than 500 Jewish and Christian clergy have joined a group called Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy. Cops, front-line soldiers of the drug war, are also voicing their opposition. Of the police chiefs from major and middle-sized cities attending a 1999 conference on drug policy reform, 90 percent repudiated the federal war on drugs.

Even the US Sentencing Commission, adviser to Congress, opposes mandatory minimums. But Congress has ignored its recommendations and repeatedly voted, instead, for harsher minimums.

The result? More people are sent to prison in the US for nonviolent drug offenses than for crimes of violence, and penalties for drugs now sometimes exceed those for violent crimes like rape and murder.

The prison-industrial complex

What drives the incarceration boom? The US has developed “a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment regardless of the actual need,” writes Eric Schlosser in the Atlantic Monthly. It’s not a secret conspiracy, but a “confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum.”

Everybody’s got a finger in the pie. Some companies exploit prison labor. Others build prisons. Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, and a few smaller companies build and run private prisons for profit, an enterprise one booster called “a hotel with a guaranteed occupancy.” Some phone companies charge up to six times the normal long distance rate to the captive inmate market. Even the CIA is involved, according to investigative journalist Gary Webb.

In 1996 Webb blew the lid off the CIA drug connection with his investigative series “Dark Alliance,” in the San Jose Mercury. It described a connection between the CIA, the Contras, and the crack epidemic, especially in black Los Angeles, alleging CIA knowledge and protection of the traffickers.

Black communities were understandably outraged, but internal government investigations denied the allegations, and the New York Times called Gary Webb a “randy conspiracy theorist.”

Others, including a couple of L.A. attorneys and Congresswoman Maxine Waters found Webb’s argument convincing. Waters conducted her own investigation and reached an “undeniable” conclusion: “The CIA, DEA, DIA, and FBI knew about drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. They were either part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it, in an effort to fund the Contra war.”

Last year Los Angeles attorneys Katya Komisaruk and Bill Simpich filed a class action lawsuit against the CIA, the Department of Justice, and others on behalf of two African-American communities, South Central Los Angeles and Oakland. Since the original filing, a Florida community has also joined the suit.

It charges that in violation of Executive Orders and US law, the CIA “turned its back while shipment after shipment of this new, intensely addictive form of cocaine [crack] was delivered … and put up for sale throughout South Central Los Angeles and Compton.” The amount of cocaine involved was enough to put 3 million doses of crack on L.A.’s streets every seven days, the suit alleges, resulting in “the death of men, women and children, the collapse of businesses, and the destruction of whole neighborhoods.”

Burning the inner cities to save them

In all major Western European nations, incarceration rates are at or below 100 per 100,000. In the US in 1995, the incarceration rate for African American men was 6,926 per 100,000. The primary cause is an 8-fold rise in drug arrests.

According to a report recently released by Human Rights Watch, black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men. In some states the ratio is even more skewed, with black men admitted to prison on drug charges at rates that range from 20 to 57 times greater than those of white men.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that drug laws are the ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the last third of the twentieth century,” says Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. “Because of drug prohibition and drug enforcement, people of color are hounded by the police, their neighborhoods are destroyed by drug violence, their families are broken up, they are put at greater risk of disease, they are displaced from their homes, and their opportunities for education and employment are ruined.”

What causes the disparity? Certainly not higher rates of drug use among African Americans. Only 11 percent of the nation’s drug users are black, but blacks constitute 37 percent of those arrested for drug violations, 42 percent of those in federal prisons for drug violations, and 60 percent of those in state prisons for drug felonies.

Overt racism is the easiest explanation but only part of the answer. According to the Sentencing Project, the inequity is a result of three overlapping policy decisions: the concentration of drug law enforcement in inner-city areas; the drug war’s emphasis on law enforcement at the expense of prevention and treatment; and harsher sentencing policies, particularly for crack cocaine.” (Penalties for possession or sale of crack cocaine are much harsher than for powder, but because crack is marketed in less expensive quantities, it is more often used in low-income and minority communities.)

Whether the racism is overt or inadvertent, the result is devastating. With so many black men in prison, there is now a substantial imbalance of females to males in African-American communities; intervention of federal and outside law enforcement has undermined informal community mechanisms of crime control; and a generation of children is growing up with incarcerated parents. Furthermore, at a time when serious attacks have been mounted against affirmative action, welfare, and other gains of the Civil Rights era, 1.4 million black males — 13 percent — can no longer vote as a result of felony disenfranchisement laws.

After 30 years of war, the reconnaissance report is bleak: casualties are enormous, costs are astronomical, yet the drug trade prospers.

Where did we go wrong?

War is a ham-fisted, wrong-headed solution for a medical and social problem. “When you’re telling cops that they’re soldiers in a Drug War, you’re destroying the whole concept of the citizen peace officer, a peace officer whose fundamental duty is to protect life and be a community servant,” says Joseph McNamara, former chief of police in San Jose and Kansas City. A soldier’s job is to kill the enemy, so when cops start thinking of themselves as soldiers, “anything goes.”

So what now?

For starters, we could quit ignoring what we know: treatment works ten times better than interdiction. Repeatedly, treatment has been shown to decrease drug-selling, shoplifting, assaults, arrests for any crime, and welfare use, and at the same time, to increase employment. Better yet, it costs only one fifteenth as much as the law-enforcement approach to achieve the same reduction in societal costs, according to a recent Rand Corporation study.

Then we could look closely at a few of the many successful programs that view drug use not as a crime but as a medical and social problem. The results are hard to ignore. A few examples:

During the first year Arizona law mandated drug treatment instead of prison for nonviolent offenders, Arizona taxpayers saved $2.6 million, and 77 percent of drug possession probationers tested negative for drug use after the program.

In Switzerland, a heroin maintenance program, which provided controlled amounts of heroin to addicts, reported that the health of participants improved, their housing situations stabilized (there were no longer any homeless participants), and the number of unemployed fell by half.

In New Haven Connecticut, police chief Nick Pastore achieved a 22 percent drop in crime rates by training his officers in sensitivity and understanding of special populations, from addicts to homeless people. “Every drug user should have some place to go and be embraced when there,” Pastore says. “We should police to be engineers of social change and improvement.”

So the choice is not between a drug war and sitting on our hands. We have many options. But strong communities are fundamental to the best of them. We must restore our communities’ ability to heal themselves, to police themselves, and to care for their members. This is the strategy of wholeness, the strategy that deserves our time, our personnel, our money, and our creativity. After all, most of these people in trouble with drugs are not the enemy. They’re our sons and daughters, our neighbors, the kids down the block. They are us.