The U.S. government is spending an enormous amount
of money to wage this war — a figure that has exploded in the
last two decades. In 1981, the federal drug control budget stood
at $1.5 billion. By 1991, it was $11 billion. today it is $17 billion.
And the lion’s share of that cost goes not to drug prevention
and treatment but to imprisonment.
More than any other single element, it is the
war on drugs that is fueling our prison-industrial complex. 63 percent
of federal prisoners and 21 percent of state prisoners are drug
offenders. All told, in 1997, there were 271,000 people in state
or federal prisons strictly for drug offenses, according to the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, ten times the number in 1981. More
than 100,000 of those were there for mere possession.
As a nation, we are not solving the problem of
drug abuse. We are warehousing it. We are not treating the patient,
we are throwing the book at him.
People who are convicted of drug crimes are receiving
penalties that are grossly inappropriate. "The laws of at least
fifteen states now require life sentences for certain nonviolent
marijuana offenses," The Atlantic Monthly reported in
April 1997. "In Montana, a life sentence can be imposed for
growing a single marijuana plant or selling a single joint."
The article, by Eric Schlosser, noted that "in 1992 the average
punishment for a violent offender in the United States was forty-three
months in prison. The average punishment, under federal law, for
a marijuana offender that same year was about fifty months in prison."
And the situation has gotten worse since then, as more states have
passed laws imposing mandatory sentences and longer terms for drug
offenses.
The war on drugs is a war on minorities. While
illegal drug use does not vary much by race, incarceration for illegal
drug use sure does. In 1997, more than five times as many blacks
as whites were in state prisons and jails for drug offenses, according
to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And since whites outnumber
blacks in the general population by 6 to 1, blacks are imprisoned
for drug offenses at thirty times the per capita rate of whites.
The figures for Hispanics are not as lopsided but are still disturbing.
Hispanics outnumber whites in state prisons and jails on drug charges
by 51,200 to 43,200 even though whites outnumber Hispanics in the
general population by more than 6 to 1.
This crackdown on minority drug users explains
much of the growth in the prison population. "From 1990 to
1994, incarceration for drug offenses accounted for 60 percent of
the increase in the black population in state prisons and 91 percent
of the increase in federal prisons," according to an article
in the January/February issue of Public Health Reports.
Why this racial discrepancy? "Law enforcement
pays more attention to blacks than whites," says Vincent Schiraldi,
director of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "Blacks
can’t get cabs but they get police cars. Our juvenile jails
are a sea of black and latino faces. Minorities are being put behind
bars for things that would be unthinkable if there were white, middle-class
kids. But because it’s a black or latino face, the script is
prison. For the exact same offense, a black or latino kid gets jail
time, and a white, middle class kid gets off. Imagine how that would
make you feel about your citizenship if you were a black or latino
parent and saw your kid treated significantly worse than white kids."
As the war on drugs has deepened the racial divide
in our country, it has also corroded our freedoms. "The Fourth
Amendment has been weakened time after time, but at least it had
some threads left," says journalist and constitutional scholar
Nat Hentoff. "But because of the war on drugs, the Fourth Amendment
has been practically vitiated."
"The war on drugs has put political pressure
on judges, which has led them to consistently overlook constitutional
violations by the police where drugs are involved and to bend and
stretch the law to afford the police greater ability to search without
probably cause," says David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown
University and author of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in
the American Criminal Justice System (The New Press, 1999).
"In that respect, the war on drugs has diminished the liberties
of us all. But more specifically, the judicial diminution of rights
in the criminal context has had a particular impact on minorities.
They are the ones who tend to be approached in train stations ,
airports, on buses, and on the highways for drug searches and drug
sweeps."
Ira Glasser, executive director of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calls the war on drugs "a civil
liberties and constitutional disaster in every way." But he
points, in particular, to its discriminatory effect. "The tremendous
racial disparities make the violation of rights even worse than
if they were randomly distributed," he says. "And one
of the consequences of the war on drugs, since all but four states
permanently disenfranchise felons, is that 14 percent of African
American males are disenfranchised and up to 30 percent in some
Southern states. We are disenfranchising the victims of the war
on drugs."
The war on drugs has had a similarly malignant
effect on Latin America. By using its leverage to force countries
to enlist in the war on drugs, "the United States has fueled
the corruption of the military in many countries in Latin America
and has brought greater involvement of the military into traditional
civil functions in places like Mexico," says Eric Olson of
the Washington Office on Latin America. "The war on drugs has
also had a negative impact on human rights, as it has led to attacks
on civilians in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico."
In addition, the eviction of peasants from their
lands and the spraying of toxic chemicals that are prohibited in
the United States have served to exacerbate social and environmental
problems in several Latin American countries, says Larry Birns,
the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
Perhaps the most pernicious of all, the war on
drugs is preying on the addicted. "For those who are drug-dependant
or addicted and cannot gain access to effective treatment, these
laws dictate a life of crime and of degradation, deceit, and (for
the poor) prostitution and drug trafficking to obtain the money
needed to shop in a violent and expensive marketplace," writes
Ernest Drucker in Public Health Reports. Drucker, who is
a professor of epidemiology and social medicine at the Montefiore
Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adds that even
though overall drug use has been declining, drug-related admissions
to emergency rooms are on the rise, as are drug-related fatalities.
"African Americans fare dramatically worse than whites,"
he points out. "African Americans have 3.5 times the rate of
drug fatalities of whites."
"To put people in jail for having this stuff,
for needing this stuff, is really criminal," says Kenneth Sharpe,
professor of political science at Swarthmore College and co-author
of Drug War Policies: The Price of Denial (University of
California, 1996). Sharpe points out the absurdities in the way
our society treats addicts. Many cannot receive treatment for their
addictions unless they are in prisons, and the line in prison is
long, so sometimes judges give addicts stiffer sentences to ensure
that they will eventually get treatment. "That’s totally
perverse," Sharpe says. "For many addicts, access to treatment
is easier if you’re in the criminal justice system."
Even so, treatment in prisons is on the decline.
"In state prisons, one in ten inmates in 1997 had participated
in treatment since admission to prison, down to one in four inmates
in 1991," according to the Sentencing Project in Washington,
D.C...
The war on drugs is, to a large extent, a war
on marijuana: 43 percent of state drug prisoners are behind bars
on possession of marijuana, the least dangerous of the illegal substances,
and one that is far less toxic than alcohol or tobacco...