A quick look at how I came to work with folks who once ruined people's lives and destroyed vulnerable communities and how I came to see that the War on Drugs has little to do with drugs. You can also read it all below the fold.
The War on Drugs was a full frontal attack on the turbulent 60’s, when police were commanded to adopt a hair trigger, us-them mentality about drug users, especially if they were activists who looked like I did back then.
Drugs were vilified or deified. Some thought that if anyone used them, the world would come to an end. Some thought that if everyone used them, the world would live as one. I came to resent it when political or cultural protests were reduced to drug use—when drugs were fetishized.
Being stoned didn’t make our generation any hipper or more progressive than our parents were when they were high on gin. It wasn’t about the drugs, which some could handle and some couldn’t.
Sadly, that balanced perspective didn’t prevent me, when I worked for a public housing tenant association, from sponsoring a DARE officer whose threatening, zero-tolerance approach inspired these signs:(don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, taking one step closer to death by taking drugs”) and made for a feel good photo-op that I proudly put up on our website.
Well, I worked there long enough to see some of those kids join 900,000 of their peers, working the illegal drug mar-ket, forced to snitch on friends and family, victims of a life-threatening cat and mouse game, while police cars rolled through the project—everyone a suspect, a community reduced to a crime scene.
But it wasn’t until I joined these unlikely allies that I connected the dots between so many of the problems I saw at that project and the policy of prohibition, a policy that poisons everything it touches, and touches nearly every-thing.
LEAP’s fundamental message is that drug policy may be fueled by self-interest and hysteria, but it’s not about the drugs, which are seductive chemicals that may reveal or hide character, provide quick relief, help you see things you didn’t see or blind you to things you should see.
Look, the same amphetamine the military gives our soldiers to heighten combat readiness rots minds and bodies of others. The same heroin consumed sadly but safely in other countries in a supportive regulated setting is blamed for the deaths of thousands of Americans; the same cocaine that fuels the hard working financial and entertainment indus-tries can fatally overtax the brain and heart. The same marijuana that helps high achievers with creativity, vision and productivity, is a dead end cloud of false wisdom for others.
And the same alcohol that may soothe and cure, can seduce and destroy.
In fact, when LEAP speakers ask drug warriors if they sup-port the prohibition of this particular drug, they just change the subject.
We’ve survived and now mock such absurdity, including the 20th century prohibition on yet another activity said to addict our children and sap their initiative. Yes, pinball was prohibited in our largest cities.
Nobody takes these laws seriously…except those whose lives are ruined by them.
But the tide has turned, and its no longer a third rail is-sue for politicians, so how will the modern prohibitionist squeeze every last arrest and federal dollar out of yesterday’s folly?
Two strategies slow reform, both of which echo the fetishizing of drugs that shaped the 60s.
THE BIG SCARE
Pinball prohibition may be laughable, but give a moment to the parents’ real concern about their kids—some of whom probably were losing themselves in this seductive activity. Parental concern is fertile ground for exploitation, wit-ness media coverage which labels every increases in drug abuse an epidemic, and witness professional drug warriors who point at the disease-spreading drug scene, exploding meth cookeries that send burned children to emergency rooms, and at drug dealers turning neighborhoods into kill-ing fields. They manipulate the legitimate fears of parents who have lost children to drugs and the crimes committed to support their habit, by asking: “Isn’t this what legalization brings?
And so, after a deep breath, our unapologetic response is, no, this is what legalization prevents. Which starts the day we remove the criminal noose from those struggling with addiction.
It’s 1933 and a prohibitionist points to an illicit gin mill that has produced a contaminated product that literally blinded the person who drank it and then exploded, leaving a badly burned baby. He turns to you and asks, “Isn’t this what legalization brings?
Same question, same answer.
It’s the policy, not the drugs. Even the hardest drugs.
The second strategy parades as moderation, but in fact, it’s just…
THE BIG STALL
Today’s smart prohibitionist easily admits that addiction is a public health issue and that too many are jailed for possession (as though they always thought that). But they insist we must crack down on the traffickers.
It's called decriminalization, and it's as seductive as a drug. In fact, as LEAP points out, this describes alcohol prohibition. It wasn’t illegal to possess or drink; just to manufacture, transport and sell. Except, medical alcohol. Sound familiar? Same approach, same outcome: Beer makes the trip across the border from Mexico without violence. Marijuana makes the same trip, and blood flows.
New York decriminalized marijuana in the 1970s (the same decade they re-legalized pinball machines) yet continues every year including this one, to slam tens of thousands of mostly low-income people of color into the criminal justice system simply for having that very drug.
We can do better than decriminalization. And we can do better than just focusing on marijuana. If any popular drug is legal to use but illegal to manufacture, transport and sell, (decriminalized) will the violence stop?
Lower-income communities have been torn apart, children forcibly removed from their families, sent to foster homes and often lost to the sex trade or prison for violating nothing more than these puritanical laws. We need to connect the dots from those problems to drug prohibition, and nobody can do this with more intensity and credibility than a LEAP speaker. They have been on the front lines of this war for decades.
My generation perfected impatience. We believed in instant coffee and instant justice. Today's political activists make us look like turtles. They have seen workable alternatives, the foundations of a prohibition-free future that is this close; just as when we drive by a prison, we are this close to people locked inside for something we or our friends or our children or our parents have done with a wink and a nod and impunity. Every non-violent inmate who broke only these laws is a victim in need of restoration. They wait on us, minute, by minute, by minute.
Ending the drug war’s prohibition of consensual behavior, with its inevitable abuse of the most vulnerable among us, is how today’s generation will honor and carry on the human rights movements that flowered during my youth. There are winnable initiatives nearly everywhere, waiting on your energy and power. Like others before it, this movement needs a voice and a vehicle. And surprisingly, amazingly, really, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’s former hair trigger us-them drug warriors are the broad shoulder we can ride.