The Drug War Today

A couple of days ago the following article appeared in the chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/04/MNHHTNGVJ.DTL

Or if you want to skip the article and go directly to the website full of fact sheets and reports about the huge disparity about who gets incarcerated and why, please check it out:

http://www.justicepolicy.org/index.php

If you look at the history of the drug war in this country, you will see that it has been a racist war, starting with the first laws (passed right here in San Francisco) against opium which were targeted against the Chinese.  Later, the first marijuana laws were in response to the jazz scene where we saw blacks and whites smoking and dancing together

Once we got to the 60’s, conservative politicians responded to activism in the civil rights movement by demanding “law and order,” and hid behind this slogan in order to ignore social justice issues.  This led to the the war on crime, which led to the war on drugs, and eventually led to the war on terrorism.

Of course, the war on crime was focused on ‘crime in the streets’ as opposed to white collar crimes.  And it was during the Reagan administration that those harsh mandatory minimum sentences came about and one of the most telling disparities in the sentencing came at this time:

If caught with 5 grams of crack there was a 5 year minimum sentence.  You need to have 500 grams of powder cocaine to get the same sentence.

So, who uses crack?  Who uses cocaine?  Crack is the drug of poor people, and due to our history of systematic racism, the poor are often people of color.  Who uses cocaine?  The rich, usually white people who can afford to do it in the privacy of their homes or the bathrooms of their clubs.

So yeah, our system is racist AND classist.  And when the government does not want to deal with confronting the deeper issues of poverty, it goes after poor people by putting them in jail.

Look at San Francisco, which is so rapidly being gentrified by the privileged who can afford to buy homes here.   When these newcomers see the poverty in their streets, they get scared, and ask for something to be done.   So the police come and arrest people.  Often they arrest people on drug crimes.  For those who can’t be arrested for drug crimes they get targeted  with other ‘quality of life’ crimes.

I have been an outreach worker for two and a half years, and over the course of that time, I have seen less and less people out in the streets.   I would like to think that its because solutions are being created in terms of quality affordable housing available to EVERYONE.  But that is not the reality.  The reality is that the streets get swept:  Police come in huge vans to arrest people.

Drugs are simply an excuse, and prison is the garbage can solution for poverty.