| RESOLUTION AGAINST THE WAR ON AFRICAN AMERICANS
By Biko Agozino Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, agozino@vt.edu 1-540-231-7699
Contrary to the claim by Times magazine that the war on drugs, the longest war that has cost American taxpayers $2.5 trillion over 40 years, has 'no clear enemy',[1] the NAACP in 2010 rightly condemned the war on drugs as a racist war against African Americans and against the poor generally.[2] Californian voters have also proposed the legalization of marijuana to avoid the unnecessary criminalization of otherwise law-abiding responsible adults, aid the sick who need the drug and create fair employment opportunities and wealth for the people and tax revenues for the state.[3]
The intensifying violence among poor urban youth across America, the Caribbean, South America, South East Asia and Africa have all been linked to struggles over the control of the lucrative illicit drugs trade that governments could tax for revenue to support education, health and social services while saving on unnecessary repressive enforcement. The attempt to arrest a single drug lord in Jamaica for extradition to the US resulted in the death of nearly 80 innocent Jamaicans in 2010 and the war on drugs in Mexico has claimed more than 30,000 lives in three years while a similar attempt to make Thailand 'drug-free' in 2003 resulted in the extra judicial killing of 2800 people. Not surprisingly, three former South American presidents, including the eminent sociologist, Dr. Cardozo of Brazil, issued a policy statement in 2009 denouncing the war on drugs as a costly failure that should be abandoned.
The Drug Czar of the Obama administration, Gil Kierekowski, in 2009 announced that the war on drugs was inconsistent with the goals of a democratically elected government that should be serving the people and not waging war against its own citizens but insisted that there is no need for a change in policy except the stopping of the raids on medical marijuana dispensers in states that approve of the legal prescription of the drug for patients and promised only a change in language.[4]
Research by Human Rights Watch in 2010 reported that "blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison … federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men."[5]
Based on the available overwhelming evidence, there is no doubt that the war on drugs is a war against African American men and women primarily and we call on the Obama administration to immediately end this injustice and free the drugs war prisoners who are in prison for no violent offences.
We declare that the war on drugs is part of the systematic processes to strip African Americans, Hispanics and the poor generally of the constitutionally guaranteed right to equal protection and return them to prison slave plantations where their labor is exploited cheaply by the industrial complex and we call on President Obama to abolish this racist affront to democracy without further delay the same way that President Lincoln proclaimed the abolition of slavery with a stroke of the pen.
As educators, we are confident that we could teach our communities to use their civil liberties to choose not to consume dangerous substances the same way we have been able to teach large sections of the community to say no to tobacco and alcohol which kill many more people around the world than all the illicit drugs put together. We know from research that one illicit drug, marihuana, has never killed anyone but is used as the major pretext (with 800,000 arrests annually in the US alone) for the criminalization of otherwise law-abiding youth from the African American, Latino, South Asian, Caribbean, African and poor white communities worldwide at huge costs to tax payers.
We suggest that illicit drug dealers are the major beneficiaries from the war on drugs and therefore they oppose decriminalization because the war makes drugs relatively expensive and directly increases their profit margins the way bootleg liquor enriched organized criminals before the ending of prohibition. We are confident that the same way the Mafia violence associated with prohibition was ended with the ending of prohibition, the violence associated with the turf wars for the drug trade would be significantly reduced once this racist war primarily against African American, Hispanic and poor communities worldwide is brought to an end with rehabilitation programs for the prisoners of the war on drugs.
In line with the emphasis on prevention in the health reform act, we call for harm reduction through the hospitalization of those who fall sick from drug dependency just like tobacco and alcohol patients who are more numerous and more likely to die despite the fact that tobacco and alcohol remain legal.
We call on President Obama to extend his policies of hope and reduce the politics of fear and greed by borrowing from the experiments in countries like The Netherlands and more recently Portugal which have been implementing different forms of decriminalization with the result that their prisons are decongested, their streets are safer and their citizens face reduced harm compared to the US, France, UK, Mexico, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa and Russia, to name a few examples of the battlefields of the so-called war on drugs.
Many law enforcement officers favor decriminalization to remove the temptation of corruption, increase respect for officers in the community, and free them from a racist war so that they could concentrate on the real bad guys. The Vienna Declaration on illicit drugs has also called for policy change to help reduce the epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS.[6]
Thanks to Dr. Cornel West of Princeton University, the only eminent public intellectual with the courage to endorse the draft of this resolution within 24 hours after it was sent to him. I invite others with moral and intellectual courage to sign on to this resolution and help to bring about a change in policy for the benefit of all. The endorsements of Prop 19 below show that more black public intellectuals and organizations need to join this campaign given that the war on drugs is a war on the black people who do not use more drugs, especially in the case of black women who are close to suspected black men.[7]
EndorsementsThe following people and organizations have endorsed Proposition 19 to allow local jurisdictions to legalize marijuana in California. To submit your endorsement of the initiative, click here. http://yeson19.com/node/13 Law Enforcement
Physicians and Doctors
Economists and Business Leaders
Elected Officials
Organizations
Labor
Faith Leaders
References: [1] Brief History The War on Drugs By Claire Suddath Wednesday, Mar. 25, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1887488,00.html See also 1994 U. Chi. Legal F. 25 (1994) Race and the War on Drugs; by Tonry, Michael [2] http://naacpoc.org/2008/03/why-are-1-in-9-young-black-men-in-prison/#more-39 See also J. Gender Race & Just. 381 (2002) Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the War on Drugs Was a War on Blacks; by Nunn, Kenneth B.; [3] Miron, Jeffrey A. (2007-09-17). "Costs of Marijuana Prohibition: Economic Analysis". Marijuana Policy Project. http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/ See also Gender Race & Just. 225 (2002) Recovering from Drugs and the Drug War: An Achievable Public Health Alternative; Blumenson, Eric. [4] ^ "White House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs'". The Wall Street Journal. May 14, 2009. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225891527617397.html [5] See, e.g., Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, "The Crack Attack, Politics and Media in the Crack Scare," in Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine, Crack in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Cole, No Equal Justice (New York:The New Press, 1999); David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973);. See also http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/04/10/drug-policy-and-human-rights [7] Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson, 'Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System' in Social Research: An International Quarterly Issue: Volume 73, Number 2 / Summer 2006 Pages: 445 – 472. See also SR Bush-Baskette 'The war on drugs as a war against Black women' in Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected readings, edited by Meda Chesney-Lind, Lisa Pasko, Thousand Oaks, Sage, 2004; Doris Marie Provine , Unequal under law: race in the war on drugs, Chicago, University of Chicago Press; Agozino, Biko 'Editorial: Foreign Women in Prison' in African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, Vol. 3 No. 2, 2008, http://www.umes.edu/ajcjs/index.cfm?id=18504 |
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