@Bri L: “realistic popular solutions to these problems don’t even come up for debate in our allegedly democratic system” ~Please share what these would be.
Take the War on Drugs for example. William Randolph Hearst, Pierre DuPont and Andrew Mellon, rushed a prohibition on hemp through Congress without any public comment or debate, and over the objections of the AMA ,in order to preserve their interests in a wood pulp newsprint monopoly. Harry Anschlinger, the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics teamed up with Hearst to initiate the notoriously deceitful and racist “Reefer Madness” campaign to demonize pot and pot smokers in the eyes of the American public, setting a pattern for official anti-drug propaganda that continues to this day despite its ineffectiveness.
In 1974, there were about 100,000 prisoners in the entire United States. But, in the mid-1980s, the US underwent a massive prison-building program financed by revenue bonds that didn’t have to be put before the voters, coupled with a proliferation laws targeting minority groups and criminalizing their lifestyles.
By 2007, there were 2.3 million prisoners in the US, the vast majority of whom were held on minor drug possession charges, mostly for pot. The $50 billion a year we spend on punishing people for drug use only makes them less employable and more disadvantaged and dysfunctional than before—but that actually turns out to be the whole idea. By casting millions of people out of society and continually disrupting their lives through technical violations of their conditions of parole only serves to grind them down and out of the political process.
In this respect, the War on Drugs is an extension of Jim Crow—i.e., laws whose sole purpose was to remove Blacks from public and political life by destroying their motivation and their ability to acquire the skills and organization necessary to participate in electoral politics. In some Southern states up to 26% of the black males are barred from voting due to trivial and trumped up felony charges. Indeed, felony disenfranchisement, served as a pretext for striking over 66,000 black voters from the lists in the 2000 Florida election (none of whom were actually found to be felons).
Another side effect of Prohibition is that the volume of drug cases has so overwhelmed the courts that now 99% of all misdemeanors and 90% of all felonies are decided by plea bargain. Under plea bargaining there is no presumption of innocence, no right to face or cross-examine witnesses, no requirement that the state prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and there is no more proportionality between offense and penalty. In fact, the plea bargain system depends on the prosecutor’s ability to intimidate the defendant into accepting the bargain by threatening him with insanely punitive sentences if he does not take the deal. As a consequence, no defendant in his right mind ever chooses to do go to trial, bypassing any and all constitutional protections against lying and other excesses by the police. As a result, the police and the prosecution are all-powerful with respect to ordinary citizen. Its been this way for decades, but since it only affects the lower classes, nobody “officially” seems to notice.
We knew from our experience with Alcohol that Prohibition was a failed policy when we enacted it. Nonetheless, despite decades of horrendous expense and abject failure, we have only thrown more good money after bad. Politicians compete with one another by seeing who can act “tougher” on “lawbreakers” even though the increasing punitiveness of our drug laws only damages people we should be trying to help. Yet, nobody blows the whistle on the obvious irrationality of the game.
In the case of pot, most people’s use is so moderate that their only “drug problem” is their government’s policy of persecution of their lifestyle choice. In this respect, a “drug addict” is not someone we relate to as a person with a problem (or a legitimate and remedial lifestyle choice) but as category of demonized “other” whom we regard as morally inferior. Somehow, we become not only willing but eager to overlook the other person’s humanity because in punishing them we implicitly exalt ourselves.
Our drug laws only serve as a pretext for the government to meddle in people’s private lives. It provides a legal pretext to put whole classes of people under the surveillance of the police and the supervision of social workers allowing their “betters” to closely regulate their lives, quite often to their detriment.
We have known for decades that pot is a much safer recreational drug than alcohol. Yet, despite the obvious public benefit and support for decriminalizing it, the subject simply does not come up in legislatures. It would appear that too many people make a too good a living off of sending other people to prison to allow anyone else to seriously question whether such punitiveness does anyone any good. Who, after all, is going to question the propriety of their livelihood, especially once they have grown calloused enough to participate in the deprivation and humiliation of others. In California, every dollar that goes to incarceration is a dollar taken away from higher education, and yet neither the governor nor the legislature can bring themselves to address the issue realistically.
Part of the problem is the state’s prison guard union which uses its considerable financial and political clout to intimidate any opposition to its agenda.
Composing members:
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