For a guy who campaigned on “change” and who emphasizes the African half of his heritage, Barack Obama is denying the one change that would most benefit black Americans: withdrawal from the war on drugs. Instead, his administration announced Wednesday that it will compel users to submit to treatment – as if it’s somehow better when doctors rather than wardens control prisoners.
Ending this senseless battle would benefit all Americans except politicians and narcs. The cost of persecuting cancer patients for smoking medical marijuana and farmers who grow hemp is pushing $40 billion per year between state and federal spending. That’s about $300 per taxpayer. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got better things to do with my money in these tough times than ruin some poor kid’s life because he partied last weekend.
That’s what the government’s war on its own citizens mostly does – throw 600,000 of our friends and neighbors in jail each year for owning, smoking, buying, selling, growing or sometimes even just talking about pot. At least cops haven’t yet arrested everyone over the age of 12 who has sampled marijuana: 40 percent of us would join those unlucky 600,000 in the clink.
Another 900,000 Americans wind up in prison every year for choosing drugs stronger than marijuana. Why? Unless an addict robs someone, what harm does he do? Prosecute him when he mugs us or burglarizes a building. But if he wants to waste his life hallucinating on a filthy mattress until his next fix, why is that anyone’s business, let alone the state’s? And it’s certainly beyond government’s abilities to cure such complex, personal problems.
That doesn’t stop it from rabidly ferreting out these pathetic souls. It humiliates young athletes by forcing them to urinate in cups while a teacher or coach watches. Many employers, particularly those with government contracts, now mortify potential hires with the same abuse. And they don’t call it a “war” for nothing: Cops on no-knock raids have killed homeowners who mistake them for thieves and resist the armed agents catapulting through their door. Wouldn’t we all be better off if Americans who prefer pot or even crack to alcohol were free to pursue their idea of happiness?
Meanwhile, black people endure most of the war’s casualties and suffering – though they tend to use illegal drugs in roughly the same percentages as whites. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found in 2005 that 8.1 percent of whites and 9.7 percent of blacks admitted trying “illicit drugs” within the last month. Other studies report similar figures.
But equality ends at imprisonment. Twenty-five of every 100,000 white adults landed in jail for some sort of drug offense in 2003; the rate zoomed to 10 times that for blacks. Largely because of the government’s war on drug users, every third black man aged 20 to 29 is imprisoned, on probation or on parole. Imagine living in a society with so many men either missing completely or, once returned, unable to find work. What would jail and the resulting unemployment do to your son, brother, husband, fiancé?
So we might expect that consigning this cruel conflict to the same dustbin as Prohibition would top Barack Obama’s list of changes. After all, as his partisans endlessly remind us, he’s not only the country’s first black president, he admits in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” that he smoked pot, snorted cocaine and was “headed” toward life as a “junkie.”
How tragic, then, that he threatens instead to expand “drug courts” and “continue the fight” against “meth addicts.” Rather than ending the war, he’s tweaking the rules of engagement. His vice president, Joe Biden, will work with newly appointed “drug czar” R. Gil Kerlikowske “to reduce the flow of drugs,” as Kerlikowske put it – as though the Constitution allows either official to dictate to Americans.
Meanwhile, his attorney general would have jailed the young Obama: as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., during the 1990s, Eric Holder announced that he wanted to “[be] tougher on marijuana crimes” – by which, of course, he meant “marijuana criminals” such as Barry Obama. He also wanted to make “distributing” pot a felony while restoring mandatory minimum sentences for drug dealers. His solution to the drug war’s horrors was imprisoning white suburbanites as often and for as long as the district’s black residents.
The civil war against Americans who like cannabis and coke is a cure far worse than the disease. How tragic that Obama’s administration is neither compassionate nor constitutional enough to call a truce.
Becky Akers has written for the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, the Freeman, the New American, the Independent Review, American History Magazine, Military History Magazine and other publications.
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