Feb-Mar-97

THE WAR ON DRUGS:

Because the "war on drugs" makes some chemicals worth four times their weight in gold, government policy can take credit for incentives that entice many people into com-mitting crimes. Our government insists on clinging to this failed drug war with little regard for its immense, destructive fallout.

The political realities associated with drugs began with the astonishing river of cash and cocaine that flowed through Miami between 1975 and 1986. In the mid-1970's, a Treasury Department bureaucrat named Robert Stankey became suspicious of cash deposits at Miami banks. He prodded the Federal Reserve into doing a systemic study of the issue. That study, released in September 1979 , found that the federal reserve branch in Miami had taken in $2.4 billion more in cash than it had paid out in 1978. Dubbed the "cash surplus," this difference became accepted as the rough index of drug business. The "cash surplus" in Miami jumped to $3.9 billion in 1979, to $4.5 billion in 1980. In July of 1980 Stankey's study led to the creation of Operation Greenbacks. The IRS and Treasury officials began to examine the practices of 25 Miami banks.

By 1982, Ronald Reagan's new administration was philosophically committed to easing bank regulatory requirements. Reagan's drug campaign, led by Vice President George Bush, preferred to emphasize interdiction of drug shipments and enlisted U.S. military personnel in the drug war for the first time. The daily flow of cash into Miami banks continued. In 1982, the cash surplus still topped $4 billion. In March 1982, federal agents seized a 3,700-pound cocaine shipment at the Tampa Airport, four times the size of the previous record seizure. The price of cocaine on the streets of Miami was dropping steadily. A kilo that had been $47,000 to $60,000 in 1982, cost only $25,000 to $30,000 in 1983. Now that anybody could buy powder and double their profits by cooking it into crack, the drug business became an easy entry. Because of the high volume of crack sales, the business revolved less around controlling the drug, than around controlling the turf and competition. As a result, guns flooded the streets, established gangs claimed control of areas, and the inner cities exploded.

This country now has over a million prisoners, many sentenced to long prison sentences for victimless, nonviolent drug crimes. It costs upward of $25,000 a year for each one. We have spent over $50 billion over the past 15 years building new prisons, and have already drawn plans to spend hundreds of billions more, with no end in sight. Guns and HIV accompany drugs, and hundreds of innocent children are incidental victims of unending street battles. By one estimate, there are 10,000 drug-related homicides a year. In 1994, a half million Americans came to hospital emergency rooms with drug-related problems. In addition to drug overdose, other drug-related emergency-room admissions include suicide attempts, complications from withdrawal, and adverse reactions to drugs in combination with alcohol.

Drugs directly contribute to the spread of infectious diseases, violence, job accidents, auto accidents, child and spousal battery. The percentage of AIDS cases attributed to injecting drugs has nearly tripled since 1981, and accounts for one third of all AIDS cases nationwide. The rate of congenital syphilis in newborn babies increased eightfold between 1985 and 1994-the increase linked to the crack cocaine epidemic where sex was exchanged for drugs. The role of drugs accounts for two-thirds of AIDS in women and more than half in pediatric cases. Some 40,000 Americans each year die of direct and indirect effects of drug abuse.

The huge amount of money spent in recent years on the drug war has not reduced addiction or the prevalence of drugs. Since 1980, we have spent $290 billion nationwide on anti-drug efforts-twice as much as the federal government spends annually for all biomedical research combined, including research on heart disease, cancer, AIDS and hepatitis. Most of the money goes to trying to reduce the supply of drugs through enforcement and interdiction. In these efforts we have failed. Ending June 30, 1995, there was a record increase of 89,707 in the number of state and federal prison inmates. In 1995,state prison populations went over 1,000,000 to 1,004,608. Add 99,466 federal inmates and the total count is 1,104,074 and rising.

Harsher and harsher criminal penalties have only made importation and distribution of drugs immensely profitable. That in turn has lured large numbers of Black men and children into the drug trade. "We are giving these kids a criminal identity when we should be trying every possible way to keep them in school and get them employed," said Joseph McNamara, former police chief of San Jose, California.

Federal prisons hold 60,000 drug offenders. Fourteen states have laws that treat crack and powder offenders differently. The U.S. Sentencing Commission, a panel that monitors the federal prison system and makes recommendations to Congress, voted in April 1995 to eliminate the disparity between sentences for less than 500 grams of crack or powder. But Congress objected and voted to sustain the disparity.

Jesse Jackson called the 100 to 1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences, as established by the 1986 Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act, "wrong, unfair, racist and ungodly." Imagine two dealers, one a supplier, one a street dealer. The supplier sells the street dealer 3 grams of cocaine. The street dealer mixes the drug with baking soda, cooks it, producing 6 grams of crack. If he gets arrested and sent to federal court, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. The supplier, however, would have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine (1.7 pounds) to face that much time in a federal prison. Thus flows the racial disparity. Powder cocaine offenders in federal prison are predominantly white (32%), or Latino (39%), but 94% of the 3,430+ crack defendants in federal court in 1995 were Black. The L.A. Times reported that year that no white person has ever been convicted of a crack offense in the federal courts of Boston, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas or Miami.

Nowhere is the need for reform more urgent for African Americans than in the field of injection-related spread of HIV. On October 20, 1995, "Health Emergency," a second report produced by Dawn Day of the Dogwood Center in New Jersey, focused on the disproportionate impact of drug injection-related AIDS cases among African Americans and Latinos. It revealed the deadly results of the lack of access to clean needles, combined with higher drug arrest rates in communities of color. According to Day, through the end of 1994, over 73,400 African Americans and 28,000 Latinos either had been diagnosed HIV+ related to sharing infected needles, or had died from AIDS. Her data indicate African Americans are 5 times more likely to contract HIV than white injectors and that among African Americans as a whole, the risk of contracting HIV and dying of AIDS is more than 7 times the risk of dying from an overdose.

A special study panel organized by the National Academy of Sciences with the Institute of Medicine, concluded in September of 1995: "Solid scientific support was found for the notion that needle-exchange programs slow the spread of HIV and Hepatitis B and C, and do not increase drug abuse." The panel recommended that the Clinton Administration lift the ban on federal funding for these programs. The administration refused.

We have a government that says, "We will not study drug policy, nor will we allow people to buy needles to reduce the spread of AIDS." Yet, we don't mind spending $100,000 annually on every person who develops AIDS, to take care of them, to watch them die. This policy doesn't make sense. Drug use is a medical problem, a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem. To make any real headway, we need programs and policies that focus on prevention rather than intervention after problems develop.

1. All children need to have early childhood education and comprehensive health education from kindergarten to 12th grade. Don't say if you tell them about it, they'll do it. They are already doing it!

2. Of the babies born HIV+, 71% were infected through an infected syringe. That's over 4,000 babies. Clearly the ban on needle exchange programs should be lifted.

3. Arrests for possession of drugs should correlate with drug usage among the population. African Americans constitute about 13% of monthly drug users, yet they make up 35% of possession arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of prison commitments. Blacks and Hispanic combined constitute 90% of all state prison possession commitments. Why? Police practices target inner city communities for intensive enforcement; and prosecutorial and sentencing policies affect African Americans disproportionately.

4. Inner city economic dislocation, the allure of the drug trade, and the ready availability of guns have impacted many communities adversely, but "three strikes you're out" legislation and "truth in sentencing" impact them even more.

5. We must eliminate mandatory sentencing policies that have had disproportionate impact on women and minorities; the injustices caused by these practices is well documented.

6. We must adopt legislative racial/ethnic impact reports, as is done with fiscal and environmental impact statements, in order to consider any adverse or unanticipated consequences on minorities, and promote a renewed dialogue on drug policy.

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