Daily Archives: May 4, 2021

Case preview ByEkow Yankah on May 3, 2021 at 11:03 am

The Supreme Court will hear argument over the crack cocaine sentencing disparity (josefkubes via Shutterstock)

Academics naturally believe that even obscure cases in their field are underappreciated; each minor tax or bankruptcy case quietly frames profound issues of justice. But, doubtful readers, rest assured that Terry v. United States which the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday in the final argument of its 2020-21 term packs so many swirling issues of great importance into an absurdly little case, it can hardly be believed. The national debate on historical racism in our criminal punishment system? Yes. Related questions of how we address drug use with our criminal law rather than as a public health issue? Undoubtedly. Redemption after committing a crime? Of course. The ramifications of a contested presidential election? Sure. The consequences of hyper-technical statutory distinctions on the fate of thousands? Goes without saying. A guest appearance by a Kardashian? Why not.

In 2008, Tarahrick Terry, then in his early 20s, was arrested in Florida for carrying just under 4 grams of crack cocaine, about the weight of four paper clips. He was charged under 21 U.S.C. 841(a)(1), which outlaws possessing with intent to distribute crack cocaine. He was sentenced, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. 841(b)(1)(C), to just over 15 1/2 years in prison.

His sentence was a result of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which created a 100:1 disparity in the punishment of crack cocaine compared to powdered cocaine. Under the law, a person arrested for crack cocaine was subject to the same prison sentence as a person arrested for 100 times that amount of powdered cocaine. The sentencing disparity was borne not of differences in the drugs themselves; despite the widespread myth, both drugs have the same effects on the body. Rather, it was the social, political and, above all, racial valences of the drugs that produced the law. Despite being used by more white people, crack was considered a Black inner-city drug, its addictive power mythicized and its threat hyped by the media as existential. This is not to deny the obvious: An addictive drug that struck already beleaguered neighborhoods created drug markets and violence. Indeed, even many African American communities denied pro-social methods of dealing with the crime wave, often called for harsher punishment. What is clear is that the panic surrounding crack was refracted through the nations racial lens, resulting in an unremitting tough-on-crime policy reflected in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and culminating in the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act.

The 100:1 crack cocaine sentencing disparity came to symbolize the racist differences in how we treat drug addiction in Black and white communities, thrown into starker relief by the shifts in public sentiment in the current, much larger white opioid epidemic. In 2010, President Barack Obama and Congress addressed the by-then iconic disparity, enacting the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity to 18:1 and eliminated the mandatory five-year sentence for crack.

Because so many sentenced under the discriminatory 100:1 disparity remained locked in prison, in 2018, President Donald Trump and a bipartisan Congress passed the First Step Act, making sentencing reforms retroactive and past offenders eligible for resentencing. In a divisive presidency, the First Step Act garnered Trump rare bipartisan praise, bringing together an unlikely coalition of White House advisers, including Jared and Ivanka Trump, and criminal justice reform advocates from both the left and the right. Indeed, according to the political tale, the bill owed its passage to the advocacy of Kim Kardashian West. Kardashian was moved by a story of 63-year-old Alice Johnson, a first-time drug offender in 1993, now a great-grandmother, who remained in prison on a life sentence. It was this celebrity lobbying of friend Ivanka Trump to press the reform on her father that ultimately resulted in the most significant criminal justice legislation of his presidency.

After that, it gets weird.

The First Step Acts resentencing applies retroactively to people sentenced for a covered offense, which is defined as a violation of a Federal criminal statute, the statutory penalties for which were modified by section 2 or 3 of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 that was committed before August 3, 2010. Hold on the word modified is about to go for a rather unhappy spin.

Recall the Fair Sentencing Act vastly reduced the crack cocaine disparity. Specifically, the law increased the amount of crack punished as so-called Tier 1 offenses from 50 grams and above to 280 grams and above. (That tier is defined in subparagraph (A) of 21 U.S.C. 841(b).) In turn, the range of Tier 2 offenses was changed from between 5 and 50 grams to between 28 and 280 grams. (That tier is defined in subparagraph (B) of the statute.) Thus, one would think that Tier 3 offenses, previously between 0 and 5 grams, would now be those between 0 and 28 grams. (Tier 3 is defined in subparagraph (C) and is the provision under which Terry was sentenced.) Though that would seem the only sensible legislative math, Congress did not actually change the text of the Tier 3 provision.

Armed with this congressional oversight, federal prosecutors took the position that penalties for Tier 3 offenses were not modified by the Fair Sentencing Act and thus not eligible for retroactive resentencing under the First Step Act. To be clear, this commits one to the proposition that Congress intended for those sentenced to long prison sentences for carrying around significant amounts of crack to be resentenced more equitably, while leaving someone sentenced for carrying under 5 grams in prison for just short of a couple decades. This may seem so counter-intuitive that one might wonder why federal prosecutors would adopt such a view, why the government would defend it and whether any court could find it persuasive.

(Sigh.)

Some courts did. Four federal appeals courts (including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Terrys case) ruled that the First Step Acts resentencing provision does not apply to Tier 3 offenses. Two other federal appeals courts disagreed, granting relief to low-level offenders and presenting a clear circuit split for the Supreme Court to resolve.

The circuits that adopted the prosecutorial argument concluded that Congress, by not explicitly changing the language governing Tier 3 offenses in 21 U.S.C. 841(b)(1)(C), did not modify those penalties. Tier 3 offenders, these courts held, thus are not eligible for resentencing despite the fact that offenders carrying 10, 20 or 56 times more crack were made explicitly eligible. This reading is sufficiently odd that the four bipartisan senators largely responsible for drafting the bill filed an amicus brief explaining that Congress intended to extend relief to low-level offenders.

Such intent, they argue, is contemplated by the language applying retroactivity to all modified offenses a broader term than all the language that Congress might have amended. The change in the Tiers 1 and 2, the argument goes, necessarily modified Tier 3, even if that language was not explicitly amended. Thus, Terrys freedom hangs, in part, on the distinction between modifying or amending language.

Or so it would seem. If the opening acts of this drama are steeped in lasting racism of our punishment practices and the serendipitous sympathies of a well-connected celebrity, its closing act borders on the head-scratching. After Terry lost in the 11th Circuit and shortly before the Supreme Court agreed to review his case the 2020 presidential election ushered in a new Democratic administration, powered to the White House in no small part on the strength of minority voters. The politically astute would also note that the new president himself had come under withering criticism as a candidate for his past support of the same tough-on-crime measures that the Fair Sentencing Act sought to reverse. Many wondered how a new Justice Department would treat a case seen as a step toward racial justice in criminal law.

On March 15th mere moments (at least in Supreme Court terms) before the cases originally scheduled April 20 argument date Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar informed the court that the Biden government could no longer support the 11th Circuits ruling that the First Step Act did not cover lower-level offenders.

This forced the court to reschedule the argument and appoint outside counsel Adam Mortara, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas to serve as amicus in arguing to uphold the judgment below. Terrys counsel, of course, will argue for reversal and so will a representative of the solicitor generals office, which filed a brief in support of Terry and was granted argument time to express the federal governments views. In addition, Terrys position is supported by a diverse coalition, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Foundation, representing a growing left/right agreement on shrinking mass incarceration.

And what of Terrys fate hangs in the balance? Even that is unclear. As Prelogars letter to the court outlined, Terry is scheduled to complete the remainder of his term, served almost entirely under home confinement, on Sept. 22 of this year. (Afterward that, he will begin a six-year term of supervised release.) Even moving at remarkable speed, the court is in position to do little for him other than add a summer barbeque or two.

The peculiar interpretation that brought us here and the strange machinations of the current argument make it tempting to find this all an absurd exercise in high-powered lawyers carefully weighing amend versus modify. But for Terry, the reforming of his sentence (and, perhaps, a reduction in his term of supervised release) are surely significant. Not to mention all the other low-level offenders who remain in prison and would be entitled to resentencing if Terry were to prevail. As the ACLU highlighted in its amicus brief, there are many people like Trentavius Arline, who pled guilty to selling 500 milligrams of crack, less than a paperclips weight worth $40. Arline was sentenced to 16 years in prison and remains there 11 years later.

Lastly, the case raises questions about the methods Congress must employ when reforming punishments retroactively. Beginning in a history of racially uneven punishment, the question of how dedicated the machinery of government must be in undoing past harm lurks just beneath the surface of this tiny little case and the few months of prison time at stake for Tarahrick Terry.

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In final case the court will hear this term, profound issues of race, incarceration and the war on drugs - SCOTUSblog

In March 2004, during a news conference with widespread coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report that claimed that obesity was killing 400,000 Americans a year, and that it was becoming Americas number one preventable deathsurpassing tobacco. The CDC defines obesity as weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height. Body mass index (BMI) is used as a screening tool to determine who is and is not obese. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. Since Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC at the time, and other top CDC scientists co-authored this report, it had the credibility it needed for waves of reporters and news outlets to publish it. It would soon lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, fat bodies, and the alarming rate at which they were allegedly dying from obesity. It would also be cited repeatedly by officials including then Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, several members of Congress, and creators of weight loss drugs seeking to draw attention and funding to anti-obesity efforts. From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the American people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. This was the start of The Obesity Epidemic.

There were a few public indictments of the JAMA report, starting with Science magazine in May 2004. In a report of their own, they wrote: Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the papers compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncementsrather than sound analysispropelled it into print. This became, at least on record, the first acknowledgment of an emerging anti-fat theme within government, health, and science institutions. Soon after Science magazines report, the Wall Street Journal published a story of their own that covered the errors in the study published in JAMA. On November 23, 2004, they opened their story with Americas obesity epidemic may not be as deadly as the government has claimed. Continuing, they wrote that the study inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors. On April 30, just a month after the later-disputed report was published, Dr. Terry Pechacek, who was the associate director for science in the CDCs Office on Smoking and Health, wrote in an email to his colleagues that he was worried that the scientific credibility of the CDC likely could be damaged by the manner in which this paper and valid, credible, and repeated scientific questions about its methodology have been handled. After stating that he had warned two of the reports authors along with another senior scientist, Pechacek wrote, I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review.

According to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story behind Americas Obesity Epidemic:

the CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition.

In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with the hope to punish fat people for their bodies. And it worked. The damage had already been done. The people and institutions who would stand to benefit from that report had already won, and it was the start of the modern genocide of fatness and fat people. As Oliver states, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than their thin counterparts, but it isnt because of their weight. Fat people tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose them, or refuse to treat them, due to their fatness.

In January 2005, the CDC admitted that their 400,000 deaths number was a result of a mathematical error, and in February of that same yearjust after the CDC published a summation of the internal investigation that was launched following the initial reports releasethe Los Angeles Times published a response to the investigation. Their report opened with this firm statement: A controversial government study that may have sharply overstated Americas death toll from obesity was inappropriately released as a result of miscommunication, bureaucratic snafus and acquiescence from dissenting scientists. This would become the second public acknowledgement of governmental disarray that was leading the nation in one of the most violent pseudoepidemics in the nations history.

In April 2005, just a year after the initial report was published, the CDC released another reportalso through JAMAwherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesity, but also claimed that moderately overweight people live longer than people at a normal weight. The new report in JAMA cut the death toll to 112,000, which was well under half of what was initially reported, but the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDCs original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. The diet industry, at the time, was already well over a century old. Americans had been dieting and trying to lose weight for decades. But with this war waged on obesity, the early-to-mid 2000s is a pivotal moment in history for the creation of this modern diet industrial complex. The CDCs report cemented a growing belief: fat people were dying rapidly and the only solution was to kill them quickereither through forcing them to transform their bodies or to die trying. Despite how theatrical that reads, that is what was being demanded of fat people. The goal was, and continues to be, to eradicate fatness. To do that, one was to either overinvest in dietingwhich has proven to be ineffectiveor die trying to reach an ideal weight defined by organizations like the CDC and WHO, either on an operating table or in a gym.

But this was not the first time in Americas history that a genocide would be declared on an entire community at the behest of this countrys leadership. Just three decades before the start of the War on Obesity there was the genesis of the War on Drugs.

In the 1960s, drugs were a prominent part of the sociopolitical climate of the times. They became associated with juvenile uprisings, and in many ways, they became emblematic of the political and ideological contestation over harmful policies and practices by the United States governmentarguments led mostly by Black and other marginalized people. As such, the government ceased all research on the safety of these drugs and, in 1971, former president Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Nixon substantially increased the amount and power of federal drug control agencies in the country and bulldozed mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants into the forefront of the legislation being passed at that time. Though it passed during his tenure as president, the legislation picked up momentum under Reagans presidency in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, local police had used over 1,500 no-knock warrants, according to Peter Kraska, a professor with the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. By the year 2000, that number had increased to 40,000 per year. In 2010, it increased to 70,000 per year. Of these searches, over 40 percent impacted, and continue to impact, Black homesincluding the home of Breonna Taylor who was killed in Louisville, Kentucky in 2020.

Soon after that legislation was passed, Nixon placed marijuana in the most restrictive category of drugs, schedule one, where it would stay until it was reviewed by a commission led by then Governor Raymond Shafera commission appointed by Nixon. Despite the concordant recommendation from the commission in 1972 to decriminalize the possession and distribution of marijuanafor personal useNixon ignored the report and did not adhere to the proposed recommendation. Irrespective of this, eleven states around the country decriminalized marijuana possession between the years 1973 and 1977a year in which former president Jimmy Carter ran and was elected on a platform inclusive of the decriminalization of marijuana. And in that same year, the Senate Judiciary Committee motioned to decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. But soon after, these efforts were left behind as former president Ronald Reagan ushered in what would become known as mass incarceration through his expansion of Nixons war on drugs. The incarceration of people charged with nonviolent drug offenses grew from 50,000 in Reagans first year in office to 400,000 by the end of 1997. Stress levels and concerns induced by the fearmongering of the Reagan administration were high, forcing upon mostly Black communities a proliferation of arrests. By the end of 1999, over half a million Black people were held in state or federal prisons. In 1980, the overall federal prison population was 24,000. By 1996, the number had grown to 106,000the majority of which were arrested for drug offenses. According to Kenneth B. Nunn in Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the War on Drugs Was a War on Blacks, from 1979 to 1989, the percentage of Black people arrested on drug charges doubled from 22 percent to 42 percent of the overall number of drug-related arrests. Also during that time, the amount of Black arrests for drug use violations grew exponentially from 112,748 to 452,574an increase of over 300 percent.

Ronald Reagan introduced zero tolerance policies in the mid-80s and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gateswho, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, once stated that casual drug users should be taken out and shotfounded the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program that would soon be implemented in schools across the country despite there being no evidence stating that it was useful. This also meant, however, that there was no widespread evidence that it was ineffectivean unsurprising failing of the United States medical industry. The Drug Policy Alliance also states that the increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, making the War on Drugs not only a war on recreational use of drugs but also on medicinal use. They continue:

In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nations number one problem was just 26 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percentone of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. The draconian policies enacted during the hysteria remained, however, and continued to result in escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.

In 1994, John Ehrlichmandomestic affairs advisor and top aide to Nixon, as well as a Watergate co-conspiratortold investigative reporter Dan Baum a truth that had long been understood but never really confirmed: the War on Drugs was a legal way to criminalize and abuse Black people. In his report, published in Harpers Magazine, Baum records Ehrlichman saying:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what Im saying? We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing 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 on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

In a recording of a conversation between Nixon and Reagan, released by the National Archives in 2019, Reaganwho was the governor of California at the timewas quoted saying, Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did To see thosethose monkeys from those African countriesdamn them, theyre still uncomfortable wearing shoes. At best, this was a conversation between two anti-Black white men ranting about their hatred of Black people. At worst, this was a collusion of two anti-Black white menboth of whom held social, economic, and political powerwho met with the intent to forge a plan that would help them leverage that power over the people and communities for whom they held a lot of hate. It was a success. The warthat was and has been more accurately called a genocide, waged first by Nixonhas been continued by every president that followed him, across party lines.

At the core of the War on Drugs is the Black, and at the core of the War on Obesityeven if not as explicitly sois the Black fat. Black people make up roughly 13 percent of the American population, but about 51 percent of Americas fat population. Obesity is determined by body mass index (BMI), something people have been taught is a direct measure of ones health. Over two hundred years ago, a Belgian man named Adolphe Quetelet created what we now know as the BMI. Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine in any capacity; Quetelet was a mathematician and a sociologist, and it was that on which the BMI was created. Quetelet is known for his envisioning of lhomme moyenan image of what he understood to be the average manwhich he developed through the measurement of human features with the deviation plotted around the mean. He began the development with the use of physical features of the human, whoat least as his work suggestshe understood to be cisgender white men. Those features included the chests of Scottish Highland regiment soldiers. After, he moved on to moral and intellectual qualities like suicide, crime, and madness. On Quetelet, Erna Kubergovic writes in the Eugenics Archive:

For Quetelet, the average body presented an ideal beauty; the normal, conceived of average, emerged as an ideal type to be desired. It was Quetelet that formulated the BMI, initially through the measurement of typical weights among French and Scottish conscripts. Instead of labelling the peak of the bell-curve as merely normal, he labelled it ideal, with those deviating either overweight or underweight instead of heavier than average or lighter than average. Thus, while informed by statistics, Quetelet was still working within the medical context of the normal; that is, he envisioned the normal (i.e., typical) as the ideal or something desirable.

What he had created was the standard for male beauty and health, built only with white Europeans in mind and determined by something that measured whole populations and not individuals. By the twentieth century, Quetelets work was being used as the basis of, and justification for, eugenics. And though all of his work in that time period was based in anti-Black race science, he was clear that the intent of the BMI was to measure populations to develop statistics. Aubrey Gordon, creator of Your Fat Friend and author of What We Dont Talk about When We Talk about Fat, wrote more on this in an online essay:

By 1985, the National Institutes of Health had revised their definition of obesity to be tied to individual patients BMIs. And with that, this perennially imperfect measurement was enshrined in U.S. public policy. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health once again changed their definitions of overweight and obese, substantially lowering the threshold to be medically considered fat. CNN wrote that Millions of Americans became fat Wednesdayeven if they didnt gain a poundas the federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight.

It was that second change, Gordon notes, that gave way to a new public health panic: the Obesity Epidemic. Gordon continues:

By the turn of the millennium, the BMIs simple arithmetic had become a de rigueur part of doctor visits. Charts depicting startling spikes in Americans overall fatness took us by storm, all the while failing to acknowledge the changes in definition that, in large part, contributed to those spikes. At best, this failure in reporting is misleading. At worst, it stokes resentment against bodies that have already borne the blame for so much, and fuels medical mistreatment of fat patients.

As covered in chapters 3 and 4, health was created as the antithesis of Blackness; the Black fat was always already removed from the possibility of good healthmeaning always situated inside / under the label of bad healthand was to always and already be the criminal. From the moment white Europeans saw fat Africans, the science that followed was intended to always separate them from the rest. In this way, the BMIcreated to maintain whiteness as superior was always going to harm the Black fat and it is for this reason that Black people make up over half of the fat population and why Black people also have more health risks than their white counterparts.

Crack, too, is a health failing. The government convinced the public that Black people were the only ones doing hard drugs; that the crackheads were rummaging the streets looking to harm anyone who may stand in between them and their fix; that addiction was a moral failing rather than a direct result of ones immediate environment, overrun by poverty, anti-Blackness, and the inability to acquire proper (mental) health care. And it was this that led to punitive, carceral responses to drug addiction rather than methods rooted in harm reduction. Because the Black always already fails in, or is removed from, morality, and as such never has access to care.

The worlds obsession with obesity and being overweight is less about health and is more about the cultural and systemic anti-Blackness as anti-fatness that diet, medical, and media industries profit from. Just like with the War on drugs and the crack epidemic, major institutions falsified evidence about the effects of fatness or obesity as a way to criminalize and profit off fat peopleespecially the Black fat. That damage is still being done. The Black fat is not dying from being obese, nor is the Black dying from drug addiction. The Blackthe Black fatis dying because of a medical industrial complex committed to seeing fatness, Blackness, and Black fatness as death; they are dying because of a lack of proper resourceslike housing and employmentthat would provide them with money, health care, and a place to rest their heads; the Black fat, in particular, is dying because of an inherently anti-Black system of policing that sees them as the deadly Beast that needs to be put down. This is the Belly of the Beast: removed from care and placed always in the way of harm.

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is available for pre-order now.

JOIN WEAR YOUR VOICE ON PATREON Every single dollar matters to usespecially now when media is under constant threat. Your support is essential and your generosity is why Wear Your Voice keeps going! You are a part of the resistance that is neededuplifting Black and brown feminists through your pledges is the direct community support that allows us to make more space for marginalized voices. For as little as $1 every month you can be a part of this journey with us. This platform is our way of making necessary and positive change, and together we can keep growing.

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"Belly of the Beast" Excerpt: The War on Drugs and the War on Obesity - Wear Your Voice

Disclaimer:The views expressed in this article solely belong to the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Fresh Toast.

President Biden has announced that the U.S. and our allies will be out of Afghanistan no later than September 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Finally, we are seeing the end of what is being called our longest war.

But it is no such thing. Of course, the Prime Directive of U.S. public policy, journalism, and politics, religion, and pet care, is Dont Mention The Drug War (see: Americas Longest Ongoing War: The War on Drugs).

Our drug war actually began over 100 years ago with the International Opium Convention.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Ironically, it was signed at The Hague, the Netherlands. on January 23, 1912, during the First International Opium Conference. It was the first international drug control treaty. The United States was unsuccessful in its attempts to have cannabis included in the 1912 Convention.

In 1937, the notorious Harry Anslinger got Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act (see: Harry Anslinger: The Godfather Of Cannabis Prohibition). It was signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt, and almost every President since has contributed to an escalation in the violence.

The comparison between the war in Afghanistan and the Drug War is particularly appropriate. They even overlap. Afghanistan is still a major source of heroin, but the once famous Afghani hash is impossible to find. Surprise, surprise!

The most important point is that the War on Drugs was never just a figure of speech, like the War on Cancer or the War on Poverty. It was and is real violence by the users and sellers of some drugs against the users and sellers of other drugs.

First, the United States was never officially at war with Afghanistan. In fact, after easily overthrowing the Taliban terrorists who had seized control, the war was very much like the Drug War in the U.S. and Latin America.

Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, and other countries that are barely functioning have been destabilized by both the violence and corruption of the Drug War. It has also spread to Africa to supply Europe with cocaine.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we had the National Guard rappel from helicopters into feral hemp fields, aptly called Ditch Weed. We have militarized our police with war surplus equipment, even armored cars. We kick down doors and violently storm into American homes under no-knock warrants. Just like Afghanistan.

SEE: Louisville Settles With Breonna Taylors Family Ending No-Knock Warrants But Only In Louisville

It is still a war, even if the violence is all from one side. In fact, most of the violence in the domestic Drug War is simply threatened by the police against peaceful marijuana users. There have been over 22 million Americans arrested for marijuana possession since the late 1960s. Even now, there are still over half a million marijuana arrests every year, more than for all violent crimes combined.

The Drug War was also like other wars because truth really was the first casualty, and the lying about cannabis is still the foundation of most state violence in western democracies.

As Patrick Henry once said, Gentlemen may cry, Peace! Peace! but there is no peace.

Richard Cowan is a former NORML National Director and author of The Differences Between Hemp CBD And Terpenes.

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We Need To Recognize That The War In Afghanistan Is Not Our Longest War - The Fresh Toast

QC Harm Reduction says COVID-19 protocols and expiring relief have hit hard some of the most vulnerable in the Quad Cities.

ROCK ISLAND, Ill. Facing a drug crisis during a global pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge for one local non-profit in the Quad Cities.

Laura Rodriguez with QC Harm Reduction says they try to provide for people struggling to get on their feet while battling drug addiction. Her team has been collecting personal care items like toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo and conditioner.

"The purpose of that is to just maintain the dignity of our unhoused neighbors," the project director says. "There's just so many people that are on the street without somewhere to go to, even change their clothes."

Rodriguez says a month ago, emergency motel housing for people impacted by COVID-19 ran out. Now, some people struggling with addiction are left on the street.

"You look at kind of the desperation that people have been facing," she says. "You don't even have to look at numbers. Just look around the community and see that people are struggling, everywhere."

Rodriguez says communities of color and those facing poverty are seeing the biggest impacts, as well as the results of the war on drugs.

Despite that, President and Co-Founder Kim Brown says they dispensed more Narcan into the community last year than they did in 2019.

She says that's a good sign that people are becoming educated and knowing how to use the overdose reversal drug. She adds it's been their big push throughout the pandemic.

"The services and the resources that are typically available for folks in the community when they're in need were very hard to access in 2020," she says. "People were behind doors, they were behind computers, they were behind phones and they weren't out and taking care of the folks that needed care."

Nationally, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saw a 27 percent increase in calls to it's helpline from 2019 to 2020. And the Overdose Mapping Application Program estimated a 17 percent increase in suspected overdoses immediately after stay-at-home orders went in place last year; a connection between isolation and addiction.

"Based on the amount of people who have lost their jobs, kind of, extrapolating on that, that leads to something else and a snowball effect," Rodriguez says.

QC Harm Reduction is accepting donations to help people in the community. You can learn how to donate personal care items and even tents on its Facebook page.

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COVID has kept some struggling with drug addiction from getting help - WQAD.com

As pot legalization rolls through the U.S. like a modern-day Johnny Reeferseed, there have been concerted efforts to continue the demonization of weed that has lit up prohibitionists for decades.

Even as advocates work to pass initiatives to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana for adult-use or for medical patients, there is a parallel phenomenon amongst elected officials proposing legislation intended to neutralize the cannabis laws that enjoy majority support from citizens across the country.

In states across the country, lawmakers have sponsored bills that seek to set limits on THC blood content for DUI, create THC caps for flower and other cannabis products and fund studies to determine the correlation between pot smoking and violent behavior or mental illness.

Even if those bills have no chance to pass into law (either through lack of support or because they violate existing rules or protections written into legalization), they are stark reminders that the same arguments that led to cannabis prohibition in the early part of the 20th century are still alive and well.

Arizona has had no shortage of bad bills this year attempting to weaken Prop 207, which enjoys a certain amount of protection as a citizen initiative. We have been fortunate that most of the them have died unceremonious deaths.

HB 2084 set a THC limit similar to blood-alcohol limits for DUI, but was pulled by Rep. John Kavanagh (R-Fountain Hills) because it would not have garnered the three-quarters Senate support required by statute. Had it passed, it likely would have been found unconstitutional and not survived a court challenge. Likewise, HB 2809, which would have put the kibosh on your local dispensary sponsoring community events, went nowhere (although it may rear its ugly head again in the future).

In the 2020 legislative session, House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R-LD25) advanced HCR 2045, which would have asked voters to set a 2% cap on THC in medical marijuana. The pot in your local dispensary has 20% to 25% THC, while concentrates have levels that are much higher.

In a House Health and Human Services Committee meeting in February 2020, Bowers stated his belief that marijuana is "habit forming" and a "gateway drug," as he invoked the names of "friends" who used pot in the 1950s and '60s, but are now inexplicably dead.

He then went on a Reefer Madness style diatribe inspired by his reading of Alex Berenson's 2019 book Tell Your Children the Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.

Bowers' statements harkened back to a time when Americans received their news via newsreels at the talking pictures. They included all the classic Reefer Madness tropes about schizophrenia and violent mental illness brought about by the devil's lettuce designed to scare middle-class suburban mothers from letting their children leave the house.

He posited that marijuana use leads to "violent violence: Not just somebody punching you in the face, but very horrendous insanity violence."

Blaming it on "the hyper increase in THC," Bowers was performing CPR, breathing new life into old tropes that have been used for decades to justify keeping cannabis listed as a Schedule I narcotic and continue punishing even the most benign recreational users.

At the same time, Bowers admitted that there are "limited" benefits to medical marijuana, "but the data does not show, as yet, that there is a very strong correlation, but there are individuals that have received benefit."

To that end, HCR 2045 would have directed the Department of Health Services to study cannabis as it relates to mental health problems and crime, research intended to verify a predetermined outcome rather than clinical testing to actually study the effects and efficacy of the psychoactive parts of the drug. The studies would be funded with revenues taken from the state's Medical Marijuana Fund.

Fortunately, Bowers amended the THC cap out of the bill, but his willingness to perpetuate the scary caricature of a hyped-up doper (as well as the existence of similar proposals in other states with some form a legalized cannabis) should make legalization advocates vigilant for these kinds of bills in the future.

Bowers' claims of higher THC content in what is available now compared to the good old days is a refrain that prohibitionists have used for decades, according to Paul Armentano, deputy director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

In several recent opinion articles, particularly in Colorado (which is experiencing the same legislative phenomenon despite several years of legal pot), Armentano cites the same argument from the 1930s, when Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics Henry Anslinger said that cannabis was so potent that it is "entirely the monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured" to justify federal prohibition of the plant.

Likewise in the 1960s and '70s, public officials claimed "Woodstock weed" was so uniquely powerful that smoking it would permanently damage brain cells and mere possession needed to be heavily criminalized to protect public health.

Even former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates (of Rodney King fame) said advanced growing techniques had increased THC potency to the point that "those who blast some pot on a casual basis ... should be taken out and shot."

President Joe Biden even joined in the chorus when he was a senator in the '90s, claiming the cannabis of that time was like "comparing buckshot to a laser guided missile."

"Fast forward to two-and-a-half decades, prohibitionists are now harkening back to the '90s as if that was some time when marijuana was so low in potency, no one cared about it," Armentano said. "This is a tried and true tactic that seemingly works to some degree of effectiveness every generation: It's a very useful tactic, because if you recognize the majority of the country has first-hand experience with cannabis and if you recognize for most of those people that experience was largely innocuous, you have to convince those people that their firsthand experience is somehow anomalous."

Southern Arizona NORML Director Mike Robinette said there is a good possibility that arbitrary cap limits would drive cannabis consumers to the black market, particularly medical patients who need larger doses for their afflictions.

"THC caps would have the effect of driving consumers out of the controlled market and back to the underground economy," he said. "This was certainly not the intent of Prop 207 as it sought to create a regulated and controlled market. Without a crystal ball, we have no way of knowing if a bill supporting THC caps will drop in the next legislative session."

Robinette said he believes cap limits would not survive a challenge in the courts, because it would not "further the purpose of Prop 207," although NORML has not received a legal opinion on the matter.

"We really don't believe that when voters resoundingly passed Prop 207 with a 60-40 margin, that they had THC caps on their minds," he said. "In fact, Prop 207 was clear that voters were voting to legalize both the plant and the resin extracted from the plant. It is generally known that concentrates have higher levels of THC and are valued by both patients and adult-use consumers."

Robinette also voiced concern that should one of these bills pass in any state, it would set a precedent that could be used to continue efforts to nullify the will of voters in states that have spoken out loudly in favor of legal weed.

"Southern Arizona NORML and Arizona NORML have been working with Colorado NORML to lobby against THC caps and are grateful for the work that Colorado NORML is doing to oppose [them]," he said. "We do not want to see THC caps get any traction since that traction will serve to motivate other states to consider introducing such damaging and detrimental legislation to cannabis consumers and the legalized markets."

Is It SAFE?

For the fourth time, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the SAFE Banking Act, that would ease federal regulation on legal marijuana businesses so they might have full access to banking services other types of businesses take for granted. Last week's vote was 321-101 in favor of the bill.

Unfortunately, given the current make-up of the Democratic-controlled Senate, the bill has once again run into a roadblock.

This follows on the heels of the Biden Administration backpedaling on its promise to deschedule cannabis and lead a charge for social justice for those adversely affected by the failedand failingWar on Drugs.

The bill received support from the governors of 20 states as well as several bankers' associations and even "a coalition of state treasurers," who sent letters of support to House leadership.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), one of the few voices in the Biden Administration who's maintained his stance on legalization throughout the transition of power, is proposing an attempt to pass the legislation through the reconciliation process.

That would mean a simple majority could pass the SAFE Act, reflecting the actual will of the people, instead of the democracy-killing super majority needed to pass anything into law given the current mess in the Capitol.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema has voiced her support of the filibuster that basically gives all the power to the minority party (Republicans), which has hindered this bill as well as any other bills proposed by Democratic leaders.

Legislation does not happen in a vacuum, so contact your representatives and let them know what you think and why you voted for them in the first place.

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Weed Limit: Pot prohibitionists regurgitate tired tropes from the bygone days of the War on Drugs - Tucson Weekly