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The war on drugs is a global campaign, led by the U.S. federal government, of drug prohibition, military aid, and military intervention, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the United States. The initiative includes a set of drug policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of psychoactive drugs that the participating governments and the UN have made illegal. The term was popularized by the media shortly after a press conference given on June 18, 1971, by President Richard Nixon—the day after publication of a special message from President Nixon to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control—during which he declared drug abuse "public enemy number one". That message to the Congress included text about devoting more federal resources to the "prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted" but that part did not receive the same public attention as the term "war on drugs". Two years prior to this, Nixon had formally declared a "war on drugs" that would be directed toward eradication, interdiction, and incarceration.[14] In 2015, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the War on Drugs, estimated that the United States spends $51 billion annually on these initiatives, and in 2021, after 50 years of the drug war, others have estimated that the US has spent a cumulative $1 trillion on it.
On May 13, 2009, Gil Kerlikowske—the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)—signaled that the Obama administration did not plan to significantly alter drug enforcement policy, but also that the administration would not use the term "War on Drugs", because Kerlikowske considers the term to be "counter-productive". ONDCP's view is that "drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated... making drugs more available will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe".
In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring: "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and years after President Nixon launched the US government's war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed." The report was criticized by organizations that oppose a general legalization of drugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugsBiden passed the legislation that toughened the War on Drugs that disproportionately targeted minority populations in the inner cities, and Harris prosecuted those laws.
Last we checked, millions of black, brown and poor people were locked up under the War on Drugs, and many are still incarcerated. Today those same people are talking about the injustice of someone who smuggles hashish oil into a foreign country. It makes one wonder, if this is more political pandering to special interests during an election season.
War on Drugs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
(Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355/text
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The war on drugs thus offers seamless continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system. ( Jan M. Chaiken, ""Crunching Numbers: Crime and Incarceration at the End of the Millennium,"" National Institute of Justice Journal, January 2000, p. 14. )
https://www.aclu.org/other/drug-war-new-jim-crow
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Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs
Unravelling decades of racially biased anti-drug policies is a monumental project.
by Nkechi Taifa
May 10, 2021
This essay is part of the Brennan Center’s series examining the punitive excess that has come to define America’s criminal legal system.
I have a long view of the criminal punishment system, having been in the trenches for nearly 40 years as an activist, lobbyist, legislative counsel, legal scholar, and policy analyst. So I was hardly surprised when Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman revealed in a 1994 interview that the “War on Drugs” had begun as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize Blacks and the anti-war left.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman said.
Before the War on Drugs, explicit discrimination — and for decades, overtly racist lynching — were the primary weapons in the subjugation of Black people. Then mass incarceration, the gradual progeny of a number of congressional bills, made it so much easier. Most notably, the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Act eliminated parole in the federal system, resulting in an upsurge of geriatric prisoners. Then the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, including the infamous 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine sentences. Its expansion in 1988 added an overly broad definition of conspiracy to the mix. These laws flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses.
During the early 1990s, I walked the halls of Congress lobbying against various omnibus crime bills, which culminated in the granddaddy of them all — the Violent Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1994. This bill featured the largest expansion of the federal death penalty in modern times, the gutting of habeas corpus, the evisceration of the exclusionary rule, the trying of 13-year-olds as adults, and 100,000 new cops on the streets, which led to an explosion in racial profiling. It also included the elimination of Pell educational grants for prisoners, the implementation of the federal three strikes law, and monetary incentives to states to enact “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which subsidized an astronomical rise in prison construction across the country, lengthened the amount of time to be served, and solidified a mentality of meanness.
The prevailing narrative at the time was “tough on crime.” It was a narrative that caused then-candidate Bill Clinton to leave his presidential campaign trail to oversee the execution of a mentally challenged man in Arkansas. It was the same narrative that brought about the crack–powder cocaine disparity, supported the transfer of youth to adult courts, and popularized the myth of the Black child as “superpredator.”
With the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentences during the height of the War on Drugs, unnecessarily lengthy prison terms were robotically meted out with callous abandon. Shockingly severe sentences for drug offenses — 10, 20, 30 years, even life imprisonment — hardly raised an eyebrow. Traumatizing sentences that snatched parents from children and loved ones, destabilizing families and communities, became commonplace.
Such punishments should offend our society’s standard of decency. Why haven’t they? Most flabbergasting to me was the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision asserting that mandatory life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense was not cruel and unusual punishment. The rationale was ludicrous. The Court actually held that although the punishment was cruel, it was not unusual.
The twisted logic reminded me of another Supreme Court case that had been decided a few years earlier. There, the Court allowed the execution of a man — despite overwhelming evidence of racial bias — because of fear that the floodgates would be opened to racial challenges in other aspects of criminal sentencing as well. Essentially, this ruling found that lengthy sentences in such cases are cruel, but they are usual. In other words, systemic racism exists, but because that is the norm, it is therefore constitutional.
In many instances, laws today are facially neutral and do not appear to discriminate intentionally. But the disparate treatment often built into our legal institutions allows discrimination to occur without the need of overt action. These laws look fair but nevertheless have a racially discriminatory impact that is structurally embedded in many police departments, prosecutor’s offices, and courtrooms.
Since the late 1980s, a combination of federal law enforcement policies, prosecutorial practices, and legislation resulted in Black people being disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for possession and distribution of crack cocaine. Five grams of crack cocaine — the weight of a couple packs of sugar — was, for sentencing purposes, deemed the equivalent of 500 grams of powder cocaine; both resulted in the same five-year sentence. Although household surveys from the National Institute for Drug Abuse have revealed larger numbers of documented white crack cocaine users, the overwhelming number of arrests nonetheless came from Black communities who were disproportionately impacted by the facially neutral, yet illogically harsh, crack penalties.
For the system to be just, the public must be confident that at every stage of the process — from the initial investigation of crimes by police to the prosecution and punishment of those crimes — people in like circumstances are treated the same. Today, however, as yesterday, the criminal legal system strays far from that ideal, causing African Americans to often question, is it justice or “just-us?”
Fortunately, the tough-on-crime chorus that arose from the War on Drugs is disappearing and a new narrative is developing. I sensed the beginning of this with the 2008 Second Chance Reentry bill and 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I smiled when the 2012 Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. Alabama came out, which held that mandatory life sentences without parole for children violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2013, I was delighted when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his Smart on Crime policies, focusing federal prosecutions on large-scale drug traffickers rather than bit players. The following year, I applauded President Obama’s executive clemency initiative to provide relief for many people serving inordinately lengthy mandatory-minimum sentences. Despite its failure to become law, I celebrated the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, a carefully negotiated bipartisan bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015; a few years later some of its provisions were incorporated as part of the 2018 First Step Act. All of these reforms would have been unthinkable when I first embarked on criminal legal system reform.
But all of this is not enough. We have experienced nearly five decades of destructive mass incarceration. There must be an end to the racist policies and severe sentences the War on Drugs brought us. We must not be content with piecemeal reform and baby-step progress.
Indeed, rather than steps, it is time for leaps and bounds. End all mandatory minimum sentences and invest in a health-centered approach to substance use disorders. Demand a second-look process with the presumption of release for those serving life-without-parole drug sentences. Make sentences retroactive where laws have changed. Support categorical clemencies to rectify past injustices.
It is time for bold action. We must not be satisfied with the norm, but work toward institutionalizing the demand for a standard of decency that values transformative change.
Nkechi Taifa is president of The Taifa Group LLC, convener of the Justice Roundtable, and author of the memoir, Black Power, Black Lawyer: My Audacious Quest for Justice.
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