Category Archives: War On Drugs

June 17, 2021, marked the 50th anniversary of the War on Drugs, when President Richard Nixon declared a full-scale attack on drug use. Trillions of dollars later, incarceration and preventable overdose deaths have skyrocketed and continue to rise.

The War on Drugs has failed. After 50 years, all our government has to show for the trillions it has spent to punish people who use drugs is broken lives, broken families and broken communities. So, we must move away from this failed strategy, to what we now know will work: treatments based on evidence and compassion.

Its encouraging to see some changes on the federal level, such as the recent announcement of the Biden administrations support for ending more severe sentences for crack cocaine possession, which overwhelmingly target people of color, versus powder cocaine. Handling the overdose crisis as a public health emergency is what saves lives. It is clearer than ever, as we continue to weather the pandemic, that a well-organized public health response can determine who lives and who dies.

Nationally, 2020 was the worst year for overdose deaths that weve ever seen: 90,000 people lost their lives to this crisis. Ohio knows this all too well. We are third in the nation for highest fatal drug overdose rate, with 4,000 deaths, according to the CDCs most recent 2019 statistics. With Medically Assisted Treatment or access to harm reduction tools that are proven to save lives, instead of punishment, these people would still be alive today. A person cant recover from drug addiction if they are no longer alive.

Thats why Nelsonville Voices and other groups like us have joined New York Rep. Paul Tonkos call to pass the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act. This bill would make it easier for health care providers to prescribe treatments like buprenorphine, which have been proven to save lives.

When President Nixon first launched his crusade against drugs, he too called for more treatment and rehabilitation, but he quickly realized being tough on crime was better for him politically.

As Nixons White House Advisor John Erlichman explained to journalist Dan Baum years later, 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.

Nixons War on Drugs has entirely failed to reduce overdose deaths, but it has exponentially expanded our prisons and funding for our police and military. Presidents of both parties have since followed Nixons path and put millions of people behind bars, spending billions every year on drug enforcement at home and abroad. They have raised legal barriers to seeking treatment, rather than easing access to recovery services and supports. We know that poor people and people of color are most affected by this.

A substance use disorder is not a moral failure, but our response as a nation to this health issue has been. Denying access to forms of care which have been proven time and again to save lives, is what kills. Were fifty years past due. End the War on Drugs now.

Andrea Reany is Southeast Ohio Field Organizer for Showing Up for Racial Justice Ohio.

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It's time to end the war on drugs - Athens NEWS

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or onbangordailynews.com.

Elijah Munro-Ludders is a recent graduate from the University of Maine Political Science Department where he was a Drug Policy Research Fellow.These are his views and do not express those of the University of Maine System or the University of Maine. He was invited to share his perspective by the Maine chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network, which brings together scholars across the country to address public challenges and their policy implications. Members columns appear in the BDN every other week.

Despite a decades-long war on drugs, problematic substance use remains an issue across the country. Maines Legislature had the opportunity to pass a bill, L.D. 967, that would have reformed our failed approach by decriminalizing possession of drugs for personal use. But our elected officials in the state Senate rejected itand failed our state.

In Maine, nearly 50 Mainers a monthare dying from overdoses, and 2021 is on track to be our deadliest year on record. The most recent Maine datashows that we continue to arrest and incarcerateindividuals for possession at striking rates. Maine alone spent more than $6.5 millionpolicing substance use between 2017 and 2018. The war on drugs has had devastating effects on Maine communities. Punishing people who use drugs doesnt work.

L.D. 967, would have restructured our states sentencing procedures for low-level possession of drugs. Minor amounts of drugs for personal consumption would no longer have been a criminal penalty, but a civil one instead. Rather than sending people who possess only small amounts of drugs to prison, this would have provided pathways to recovery.

L.D. 967 is not as radical as it sounds. Countries around the worldhave used decriminalization policies to successfully address their opioid crises. If youre skeptical about decriminalization, consider the following points.

First; the stigma around substance use often flows from misguided understandings of drug use and addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that less than a quarterof those who use heroin in their lifetime struggle with addiction. This means that the majority of people who use heroin do not experience problematic drug use and live perfectly healthy lives.

Second; despite this, the punishment for being arrested for possession has life-long consequences. Those charged with possession, holding even small amounts of drugs, have a significantly harder time obtaining jobsand housing prerequisites for being a functional member of society.

Third; substance-use disorder often begins with health issues that are entirely unrelated to someones decision to use drugs. Research conducted in 2011 found that a staggering 80 percentof people with substance-use disorder began first with prescription opioids. Its no secret that the pharmaceutical industry has a history of overprescribingpowerful drugs for even minor injuries doctors are even paidto do it.

Finally, systems designed to hold bad actors accountable have failed us. The real bad guys in this story arent our community members getting locked up. Big Pharma has been involved in countless trials and faced huge legal settlements totaling in the billions of dollars but this does not compare to the thousandsof Mainers who have died in the opioid epidemic sparked by these companies. Nor do these settlements even approach the actual costs of opioid use disorder, an annual loss that one recent studyput at over half a trillion dollars.

With our antiquated system, we have to ask ourselves what to do next. We could keep throwing money at the problem, arresting Mainers on minor possession crimes despite the lack of progress. Or we could consider fair and reasonable alternatives. Thats what L.D. 967, and the diverse coalition of advocates working on it, boldly did.

L.D. 967 could have been a turning point in Maines failed war on drugs. It was a sign that our state is coming to understand that substance use isnt what we thought it was, and that trying to punish away the problem hasnt worked.

This conversation about policy alternatives should not, and will not, stop here. We must return to decriminalization as a policy alternative if we want to stop the irrational policy of drug criminalization, and follow a fair and compassionate path forward.

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Maine lawmakers had a chance to end the state's war on drugs. They failed. - Bangor Daily News

This article was originally published here

Int J Drug Policy. 2021 Jul 9;97:103351. doi: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103351. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Between the years 2017-2019 in Philadelphia, more than 70% of all deaths from opioid overdose occurred in a private residence. To learn more about home-based opioid use and overdose, researchers conducted qualitative interviews with next of kin of overdose victims to learn their perceptions about the decedents drug use and their opinions about city-led harm reduction efforts, specifically naloxone administration and collaborative efforts to open an overdose prevention site.

METHODS: In 2019, researchers conducted 35 qualitative interviews with next of kin of persons who died of opioid overdose in Philadelphia in 2017. Data were coded and analyzed using NVivo software.

RESULTS: Data reveal that while persons who use drugs may benefit from enhanced harm reduction interventions that target their family members and caregivers including naloxone education and public health messaging about overdose prevention, these efforts may be up against other realities that Philadelphia families navigate-in particular structural inequalities exacerbated by decades of War on Drugs policies.

CONCLUSION: Existing health disparities and structural barriers to care increase vulnerability to overdose and highlight the urgency to collaborate with impacted families and communities to design relevant harm reduction interventions. Without efforts to redress the consequences of war on drug policies, however, harm reduction interventions will not reach their full potential.

PMID:34252788 | DOI:10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103351

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Legacies of the war on drugs: Next of kin of persons who died of opioid overdose and harm reduction interventions in Philadelphia - DocWire News

It looks like, after 20 years, America is finally calling it quits in Afghanistan.

Even many of those who were early champions of the war have developed plenty of reasons for finally wanting out of the never-ending operation. Since the death of Osama Bin Laden (maybe even earlier) the objectives of our mission have been unclear at best. Our never-endingand never progressingperpetual occupation of the region has caused countless casualties, a fortune in taxpayer dollars and has generated distrust, angst and radicalization throughout the region.

Such is the way with never-ending wars: One of their many casualties is the reputation and credibility of those who wage them.

Its a phenomenon thats not unique to seemingly endless occupations in foreign lands. Those who lead unending wars of a political nature often suffer from the same eventual erosion of credibility and support. With the legalization of marijuana, decriminalization of other drugs and a broadly bipartisan pushback against modern policing practices, the nations perpetual War on Drugs, for example, seems to be facing a similar deterioration of support from the American public.

For decades, an ideologically diverse coalition of activists and intellectuals have warned that the war on drugs was doomed to failure. The conservative icon, William F. Buckley Jr, argued in the 1990s that the war was already lostand his warnings have only become more poignant as the years wore on.

As Buckley pointed out, governments declaration of war against drugs hasnt achieved the grandiose outcome of eliminating the social ills that accompany the recreational use of narcotics. In fact, it has done quite the opposite. Just as alcohol prohibition gave rise to a new form of organized crime in the first part of the 20th century, so too has the criminalization of other recreational intoxicants in the decades that followed.

Even more important, however, is the fact that this so-called war wasand continues to belittle more than a convenient excuse for government to circumvent, suspend and outright ignore the constitutional limitations that normally restrain its behavior. From questionable prosecutorial actions, to law enforcement practices like civil asset forfeiture, the campaign against drug use has basically been a cavalcade of civil rights abuses from the beginning.

This war, however, is more than a simple case study in the way governments regulatory excess threatens the civil rights of citizensits also a perfect example of the role panic and manufactured crises play in allowing politicians to legitimize otherwise unconscionable governmental behavior.

Theres a reason, after all, that it is called a war rather than a regulatory framework to incarcerate citizens who consume (some) mind altering substances. The verbiageespecially in the 1970s when Richard Nixon popularized the termdenoted an urgent need for extreme measures to combat a supposed threat to our way of American life. The messaging conveyed an immediate call for sweeping and unprecedented action.

In short, it is propaganda aimed at panicking the masses into welcoming the kind of extraordinary government overreach that wouldin times of peace, tranquility and prosperitybe utterly unimaginable.

Its a theatrical parlor trick that has long been popular among the political class. War, as it turns out, has always been a handy tool for politicians to circumvent otherwise well-respected constraints on their power. Franklin D. Roosevelt used the crisis of a real war to nationalize the labor movement. Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the mere risk of war to terrorize ideological rivals. And in post-9/11 America, the war on terror legitimized everything from torture to warrantless surveillance on American citizens.

The emergency nature of war has always been a useful way for politicians to justify the infringement of civil and social liberties. Today, politicians continue to leverage this same power of public panic through the practice of declaring virtually any difficult challenge an emergency.

Just as the war on drugs allowed cultural scolds to act as de facto advisors to presidents and senators, the never-ending COVID emergency empowered public health experts to act as de facto consiglieres to governors and regulatory agencies across the nationwith their policy preferences being codified into emergency government mandates without the usual deliberative process of legislative debate.

And the power such emergency declarations confer to the executive branchjustified or nothas certainly not gone unnoticed by our electeds. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for example, has proudly declared he intends to do with gun violence with what we just did with COVID.

Just like the abandonment of deliberative democracy in times of war, Cuomos state of emergency is poised to produce unintended collateral damage and civil rights concerns. After all, which communities will Cuomos law enforcement agencies be targeting in their quest to solve this emergency of gun violence? It seems unlikely that wealthy donors who fund Cuomos future political ambitions will find themselves subjected to a reincarnated form of stop-and-frisk. It will, instead, be disadvantagedlargely minoritycommunities targeted by such actions.

Examples of declared emergencies from politicians are becoming disturbingly commonplace as a way to justify otherwise contentious policies. From climate to race relations, an ever growing list of political priorities seem to qualify for urgent (and drastic) government action by one ideological faction or another.

Certainly, some of these challenges deserve an elevated state of prioritization, but the concept of granting emergency powerswhere the norms of our representative government are subverted, or the considerations of civil rights suspendedruns the very real risk of being weaponized by politicians looking to justify their political ambitions. And thats a trend that should give pause to Americans of all ideological persuasions.

How long, after all, until a Republican declares social media censorship to be worthy of emergency government intervention? Certainly, there are already some within the GOP who would be happy to employ such tactics to suspend certain voting lawsjust as some Democrats undoubtedly would love to see emergency intervention where the political landscape has been unfriendly to their political preferences.

And, as the never-ending war on drugs should teach us, while such states of manufactured emergency might be nothing more than a propaganda tool for politicians, the casualties are nonetheless real and numerous.

Two decades of fighting in Afghanistan prove that real wars are unimaginably difficult to win over long periods of time. Winning imaginary ones invented by politicians, however, will prove to be impossible.

Michael Schaus began his professional career in the financial sector, where he became deeply interested in economic theory and the concept of free markets. Over a decade ago, that interest led him to a career in policy and public commentaryworking as a columnist, a political humorist and a radio talk show host. Today, Michael is director of communications for the Nevada Policy Research Institute and lives with his wife and daughter in Las Vegas.Follow him on Twitter at @schausmichael.

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Afghanistan isn't the only war that should be coming to an end - The Nevada Independent

City councillors E. Denise Simmons and Patty Nolan introduced an order June 21 for a reparations fund. When I attended the City Council meeting to speak and listen to public comments, a lot of confusion due to lack of clarity was apparent. People who spoke in support of the fund seemed to be unaware that it was a reparations fund; I have continued to have conversations with Cambridge residents, many of whom are shocked and completely unaware of this policy. This confusion is undoubtedly intentional.

Many of color, the Black and brown community in particular, have been unfairly impacted by the war on drugs, particularly the war on drugs that pertains to marijuana, and that has not stopped. This is an opportunity to repair that damage, acknowledge that damage and make a way for the Black and brown community to heal and repair themselves, and as a community come forward, Simmons said during the meeting.

I want to be clear: Simmons is correct. This city is complicit in the ongoing violence and dismantling of our Black communities as part of the war on drugs. All of our councillors owe us a public apology for their support toward racism. The war on drugs, in its 50th year anniversary as of 2021, is a racially motivated, federally sanctioned, state-backed and municipally enforced war. To quote former Richard Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman: We knew we couldnt make it illegal to be either against the war or black [people], 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.

This war is one in which our municipal leaders worked with the police to destroy our Black and brown communities. And our Black and brown communities remain devastated to this day. The city of Cambridge talks all day long about social equity funds, yet to this day zero apologies have been made toward our communities.

I want to also be clear that the war on drugs disproportionately affects our Black and brown communities, but it affect white people too addiction affects everyone. This is why our states economic empowerment program is open to white people as well as people of AAPI, African American, Hispanic or Latino descent. Essentially everyone regardless of ethnicity is within the program as long as they live in a certain city across the state. So it was shocking for me to read the reparations policy give reparations to economic empowerment applicants and local Black-owned businesses.

This policy is backed by a study sponsored by Revolutionary Clinics, which has sued our city three times for creating a priority period for economic empowerment applicants with cannabis licenses from our city. This is a policy on which I worked with city councillors literally line by line to ensure it would uphold legal requirements and that our city would not lose to a lawsuit nor be met with a federal investigation, unlike cities that created pay-to-play systems that led to corruption charges. Revolutionary Clinics is a wealthy, white male-owned cannabis business that flaunts its racism in the cannabis community and where a former employee has complained she was sexually assaulted by a member of senior management. My organization, the Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council, kicked off a boycott against Revolutionary Clinics two years ago at the Democracy Center because of a disrespect toward women and racist actions toward our Black and brown communities. And our cannabis community stands to this day, largely in utter disgust against Revolutionary Clinics.

Revolutionary Clinics is also a part of a larger nonprofit, the Cannabis Dispensary Association. The CDA is also being boycotted for ongoing flagrant attacks against social equity, including threatening the state Cannabis Control Commission with a lawsuit for having a priority period for delivery licenses. Every business in the CDA has been blacklisted and banned from attending cannabis events in Massachusetts with the exception of its own. This is a dirty group. And it has no business interjecting itself in race relations in Cambridge, never mind using the war on drugs as an insidious method to have white people obtain reparations. Thats right folks! Its study was used to back the language on the Cambridge reparations policy that allows our municipal cannabis tax funds to go toward everyone who is an economic empowerment applicant. These are people of all backgrounds living in 28 cities across the state. Shouldnt municipal funds be kept for Cambridge residents?

And why Black-owned businesses? What about our Black disabled people? And our Black people that are retired? And Black people who dont own a business and dont want one? Why are Black lives recognized once again only through our labor? All Black Lives Matter. We deserve to be treated as whole human beings, and not workhorses for a capitalistic system. We matter and we are worthy, and we are tired. Black people need space to heal and rest. The influence of the Big Canna industry lobbying our city councillors is on full display, and Im appalled.

I write to you today no, I urge you, my fellow Cantabrigians to stand your ground. We as a community must come together immediately: Reparations is a conversation to be held among us, the people and open to all Cambridge residents, and one in which black voices will be centered and heard, beginning 7 p.m. Monday. Please join us in community by registering at bit.ly/cambridgereparations.

The Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council is a BIPOC, woman- and queer-founded cooperatively run nonprofit that was established in 2017. In fact, it is the only lobbying organization in the state founded and operated in which equity is practiced through an intersectional lens. As leaders, we practice what we preach. I have been a resident of Cambridge for more than 15 years, have a child attending Cambridge Public Schools and am working to create systemic change for our communities through MRCC, which is an honor. The organization was birthed partially from Cambridge and Harvard one of our co-founders is also a Harvard graduate and is a reflection of our community. With our community we continue to stand.

If you would like to support MRCCs fundraising efforts as we lead our citizen-led campaign for reparations, please go to http://www.massreccouncil.com/donate. Massachusetts has made more than $1 billion with zero funds going toward restorative justice; the racism we face makes advocacy work on behalf of our communities that much harder, and it is everyday donations from people such as you that help us achieve our mission. All donations will go in support of our restorative justice work.

Saskia VannJames, Garden Street

Saskia VannJames is a lobbyist and board Member of the Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council.

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What do 'reparations' mean for you? Forum asks Mondays throughout summer; Join and be heard - Cambridge Day

The process, called civil asset forfeiture, has been a staple of the drug war. Like other aspects of the drug war and like police violence, forfeiture tends to disproportionately affect Black Americans and other minorities. Unlike with police violence, however, forfeitures haven't sparked widespread public outrage.

Civil forfeiture is one of those technocratic things that happen in the dark, says Wesley Hottot, a litigator with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm. Nobody can be made to care about it until it happens to them.

Nevertheless, the institute and other civilliberties advocates have campaigned against civil forfeitures, and newspaper exposs have documented abuses elsewhere in the country. In 2019, in an Indiana case argued by Hottot, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Eighth Amendments ban on excessive fines extended to property seizures, so police couldnt takean expensive Land Rover in a minor drug case that carried a much smaller criminal penalty.

This is the second of three storiesin aCrosscut series examining civil asset forfeiturein Washington state. Skip toPart1orPart3.

Legislatures in other states have moved to limit civil asset forfeitures or impose stricter requirements on them. Three New Mexico, Nebraska and North Carolina have effectively eliminated civil forfeiture altogether.

But in Washington theres hardly been a peep. A small cadre of legislators has tried for two decades to reform the states forfeiture lawsbut failed to gain traction in Olympia or much attention outside it. When forfeiture makes local news at all, it tends to be routine, police-centered crime news U.S. attorneys touting annual forfeiture hauls and big border busts, or the closure and seizure of motels accused of harboring drugs and prostitution.

The silence around forfeiture in this state is not for lack of forfeitures. Washingtons cities and counties took in a near-record $11.9 million in forfeiture revenues last year, minus a 10% cut to the state Treasurers Office. All but $300,000 came from alleged drug offenses.

The most optimistic view is that law enforcement here is not engaging in the kind of wholesale abuse seen elsewhere. says Hottot, whos based in Seattle. The other possibility is that the abuse is just not apparent. It could be there's no abuse, or it could be it's under the radar.

One would-be reformer, state Rep. Roger Goodman, D-Kirkland, thinks its the latter.

The forfeiture authority has been grossly abused, says Goodman, who chairs the House Law and Justice Committee, in particular in the war on drugs, and particularly by several federally funded drug task forces multiagency outfits devised in the 70s and 80s to franchise the federal war on drugs to local governments.

These task forces perform a sizable share of Washingtons civil forfeitures. One, the Kent-based Valley Narcotics Enforcement Team, took in $726,000 in 2019. The Grays Harbor Drug Task Force, whose members include police from Aberdeen, Hoquiam and Grays Harbor County, forfeited more than $1.6 million in 2018, a bumper year.

That Grays Harbor take reflected a 2017 operation dubbed Green Jade, one of the largest police operations against cannabis in Washington since marijuana was legalized in 2012. The task force raided 44 sites and seized more than 20 houses. Its commander, Hoquiam Police Assistant Chief Joe Strong, calls it a blow against transnational crime: What we have seen nationwide is organized crime, Chinese nationals coming in to grow marijuana.

Strong acknowledges that forfeitures support the task forces operations, but denies that it seizes property to pay the bills. Sometimes well draw from forfeitures to equip our teams, he says, but theyre not our main funding source.

Forfeitures real value, he insists, is as a deterrent. Sometimes you have to take away the assets of drug dealers and hurt them where it hurts the most, Strong told me. They can often do their one to two years behind bars standing on their heads no problem. But when you take away a gun or car or $5,000 in illicit proceeds, thats what hurts.

Recent experience in other states, however, undercuts the oft-repeated contention that forfeiture dissuades would-be criminals. In 2015, New Mexico effectively eliminated civil forfeitures by requiring that money raised through the practice go into the state general fund rather than to law enforcement; policeeased off seizing property once they couldnt keep what they seized. Five years later, researchers with the Institute for Justice found that New Mexicos crime rates held steady relative to those of neighboring Colorado and Texas, which continued forfeiting on an industrial scale.

The system turns police and prosecutors into tax farmers when they should be addressing violent crimes, argues Hottot, the attorney with the institute. It treats property owners as worse than criminals. It's far easier to take their stuff than it is to try to put a person behind bars and more lucrative.

Eight federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Fish & Wildlife Serviceand Justice and Treasury departments, perform civil forfeitures. The Institute for Justice, which has compiled the most complete database of forfeitures nationwide, calculates that federal agencies forfeited about $46 billion worth of property from 2000 to 2019. In recent years, Justice alone has taken in $1.4 billion to $4.5 billiona year $2.2 billion in 2019.

Another agency, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, gets less attention but is a prolific forfeiter. Postal inspectors routinely seize cash sent by mail; a recent Postal Inspection Service notice of forfeitures lists cash seizures of as little as $1,200, as well as hundreds of seized money orders. Forfeitees have 30 days to petition to have their money returned assuming they even know it's been seized.

People may have innocent, if naive, reasons both for mailing cash and for not claiming it. In June 2015, postal inspectors seized $8,700 mailed to a man who had recently moved to Everett from Alabama to take a job at Boeing. Hottot, whom the man spoke with at the time, says the cash was the mans savings, which he had his sister send him once he settled in.

Innocent people were at worst foolish sending it through the mail, says Hottot, who offered to help the man recover his money. They weren't criminal. But going to court to claim it back that's a daunting proposition. He told me, Look, I grew up as a Black man in Alabama. My relationship with the government is very different from your relationship. I don't want to get involved in this.

State and local law enforcement agencies received a fifth of the federal take, about $8 billion, between 2000 and 2019. Agencies in Washington state received about $87 million from federal forfeitures in the past two decades. Its a significant dividend for some departments; six agencies, including the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriffs Office and the Spokane Regional Drug Task Force, got six-figure payouts in 2018.

Fewer than half of the states reported their own forfeitures during that 20-year period, but those that did forfeited $23 billion more. Washington police agencies took in nearly $157 million.

For police, traffic stops are an especially easy way to rake in forfeiture dollars. They don't require surveillance, raids or GPS trackers; officers just pull cars over, look for drugs or suspicious cash, and seize everything. Drivers with legitimate reasons to carry large sums can still face forfeiture or, in one Wyoming case, be pressured to donate the money to police in order to be released. The Institute for Justice has documented a number of victims, including a Karen Christian refugee from Myanmar who was touring churches in Oklahoma to collect donations for an orphanage back home.

Cops have a way of talking their way into a car, says Robert Schiffner, a veteran Moses Lake attorney who has handled many forfeiture and stop-and-search cases, including one appeal that established new limits on vehicle searches in Washington. If a person is upside down on the car, they wont seize it. If it's a piece of junk, they won't seize it. Ive jokingly asked detectives why they didnt seize my clients car. One said, Have you seen it?

Ryan Rectenwald, the undersheriff of Grant County, where Moses Lake is located, disputes Schiffner's claims: The value of a vehicle doesnt matter. If a 2005 Porsche Carrera and a 1988 Subaru show the same sort of nexus to crime, well forfeit them both.

For decades, the road winding down to the Gorge Amphitheater, also in Grant County, was the highway interdiction equivalent of fishing in a barrel. But court decisions in the state have put a damper on baseless stops. As a result, Rectenwald says, vehicle stops [to search for drugs] aren't something we do.

Gorge concerts still yield many drug arrests and vehicle seizures, but police now make them via undercover buys on the grounds, typically with informants posing as fans asking other concertgoers if they have a bit of MDMA to spare. People who literally have one or two tabs of ecstasy in their trunks can lose their cars, says Schiffner. The police, he adds, love Dave Matthews concerts everybody drives a BMW.

There and elsewhere in Washington, those who contest forfeitures go before a police-appointed hearing examiner typically a police officer, sometimes the chief. Rectenwald, who serves as hearing examiner in Grant County, says hes able to stay sufficiently neutral because as undersheriff I dont supervise the arresting officers.

Who cares? replies Seattle attorney Douglas Hiatt, who handles forfeiture cases around the state. He knows them all. Hes a cop. Hes hardly an impartial intermediary. Hiatt and other experienced attorneys routinely bypass the hearing examiners by having forfeiture cases moved to district court.

Law enforcement may use the threat of criminal charges to make sure seizures arent contested. Prosecutors aren't allowed to offer such swaps outright, notes Schiffner, but theyre implicitly on the table: It's a game. The prosecutor says, 'Make me an offer.

Gary Ernsdorff, a deputy prosecutor with the King County Prosecuting Attorneys Office, agrees that such global resolutions, where a prosecutor might say, Well offer to reduce charges if you concede to a forfeiture action, are a serious concern. In some jurisdictions, weve seen conflicts with criminal and civil actions going on at same time. Thats why this office doesnt do any forfeitures.

Two King County deputy prosecutors do in fact specialize in forfeitures. One is assigned to the Sheriff's Office and the other to the Valley Narcotics Enforcement Team. Ernsdorff says those assignments keep the two prosecutors at arms length: Theyre supervised by our office, but operate separately.

Thats bullshit! Hiatt exclaimed when he heard Ernsdorffs contention, noting that the deputy assigned to the Sheriffs Office still works for Attorney Dan Satterberg. Shes on loan to the sheriff. She has an office in the Sheriffs Office but reports to the prosecutor. This is Satterbergs policy. Thats all there is to it.

A 2017 email exchange between Hiatt and Satterberg shows that, despite his image as a humane, progressive prosecutor, Satterberg strongly supports forfeiture actions. Our criminal case response is insufficient to deter Chinese money from fueling black market grows, so the tool for accountability and deterrence we are left with is forfeiture, he wrote to Hiatt, who had urged him to get out of the forfeiture business.

I doubt you'll get much public sympathy for these enormous grows and huge sums of money involved to send tons of black market weed back East, Satterberg continued in the email, which Hiatt provided. I will be interested to see what you come up with, but I am not inclined to interfere with the local police desire to forfeit these houses and proceeds.

Not all the legislators trying to reform Washingtons forfeiture laws want to interfere either, but theyd at least like to know exactly what is being forfeited, from whomand on what grounds. They represent an unlikely marriage of ideological opposites.

In the House, liberal Democrat Goodman teamed up with then-Rep. Matt Shea, R-Spokane Valley, before Sheasinvolvement in what a House report called domestic terrorism made him too toxic for the Republican caucus. In the Senate, one of the chambers most conservative members, Republican Mike Padden, also from Spokane Valley, has allied with Democratic Seattle liberal Bob Hasegawa.

It's an interesting example where the libertarian right and the left come together around issues of privacy and civil rights, Goodman notes.

I am generally a strong supporter of law enforcement, Padden told me last year. But I am concerned that property can be taken away even without any conviction for a crime. I would rather let there be a conviction first.

Theyre two in a long line of legislators who have tried to rein in Washington's civil forfeitures, only to be blocked by the police lobby. In 2002, a bipartisan group of nine House members sponsored a bill that would have effectively done away with civil forfeituresabsent a criminal conviction. Proceeds would have gone exclusively for drug treatment, not to the police. That bill, like many to follow, never made it to the House floor.

In the 2019 session, Goodman signed on to Sheas more modest bill, which would have let owners collect legal costs when they successfully contest forfeitures and made clear that the burden of proof falls on the agencies doing the seizing rather than on owners trying to recover their property. It would also have required that the hearing examiners not be members of the police agencies performing the forfeiture.

Goodman says law enforcement signed off on that legislation. But when they brought it forward, both the law enforcement point people on the issue, James McMahan of the Washington Association of Police Chiefs and Kent Prosecutor Michele Walker, opposed it, claiming it wasnt what they'd agreed to. They insisted they were open to change but, in McMahan's words, wanted to make sure we do not lose the ability to make sure crime does not pay. In his final and most curious argument against the bill, McMahan, who like Walker did not respond to repeated requests for comment, objected to language requiring that, when forfeitures get overturned, agencies return property in the same condition they seized it.

If we return a car we seized, do we change the oil, check the tires, charge the battery? McMahan asked rhetorically. Would the sheriff have had to water and trim 40,000 marijuana plants?

The bill passed out of committee but never made it to the House floor. It was still on the docket in 2020 but went nowhere. Sheas sponsorship may have been a kiss of death. But the issue did not go away when he did, and forfeitures keep on coming into police coffers.

This story was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, https://economichardship.org.

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The strange, failed fight to rein in civil forfeiture in Washington - Crosscut

Criminal justice reform and racial equity have emerged as the central issues in the national conversation around cannabis policy. As states pass cannabis reform laws, modify their existing laws, and as Congress engages the issue in a more comprehensive way, efforts to reverse the War on Drugs and its effects have expanded significantly. In the Democratic Party, that conversation has been transformational, as police reform, racial justice, opportunity, equity and equality, and decarceration have become top-tier issues.

As the Biden administration deals with a variety of crises at home and abroad, the coalition of voters who brought him to officeliberals and progressives, people of color, women, young people, college-educated voters, and urban votershave demanded the president do more on issues of race. Despite commitments to take on those issues, President Biden has distanced himself from full-scale, federal cannabis reforman issue many voters see as inherently connected to race and justice. That difference of opinion on cannabis could induce significant skepticism among some voters as to the presidents seriousness of taking on race.

Committing to federal cannabis legalization would align the president with the more than two-thirds of Americans (and about 80% of Democratic voters); however, that is currently not part of the Biden agenda. This paper lays out a series of unilateral policy actions the Biden administration can take to advance the causes of justice and equity and help reverse some of the disastrous effects of the War on Drugs.

Connecting cannabis to issues of race and justice is not difficult. Despite usage rates between whites and non-whites being at parity, people of color are much more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense. A 2020 report from the ACLU shows that Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense than white Americans. Those racial disparities are meaningful on their own but are particularly alarming in the context of how many drug arrests occur each year. Between 2018 and 2019, for example, data compiled by the FBI show that there were more than 1.2 million cannabis arrests across the United States.

And while in states where cannabis has been legalized, there have been significant drops in the number of cannabis arrests, racial disparities in arrest rates endure. Per the ACLU, among states that legalized by 2018, Black Americans were 2.2 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis in 2010, and that figure only dropped to 1.72 times in 2018. While legalization significantly reduces the magnitude of cannabis arrests, racial disparities in cannabis enforcement are institutionalized and affect every state.

The racialization of cannabis enforcement was not accidental. The entire foundation of the War on Drugs was built on racial resentment and outgroup targeting by the government. In my 2020 book Marijuana: A Short History, I trace the history of federal and state efforts to outlaw cannabis as a means of dividing white Americans from racial and political minorities and to remove people of color from society via incarceration. In her groundbreaking 2012 book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how the use of mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts people of color in the United States has been used to dilute voting rights, economic achievement, wealth building, and educational attainment. And work by my Brookings Institution colleagues, including Andre Perry, has examined the connection between the criminal justice system in the United States and concepts of economic inequity, including the racial wealth gap.

Cannabis policy in the United States was designed and has been implemented to harm communities of color for generations, and given that intent, it has been a wildly successful policy endeavor. However, many Americans and people from both sides of the political divide see drug policy broadly and cannabis policy specifically for what it is, and that has led to a decades-long effort to step away from drug prohibition and criminalization and find a different policy path forward. In todays policy conversations, that path typically centers on cannabis reform.

Since the early 1990s, support for cannabis legalization has changed dramatically. According to Gallup, in 1992 fewer than 1 in 4 Americans believed legalizing cannabis was a good idea. By 2012, the poll showed nearly half of Americans did. And the most recent polling from Gallup shows that more than 2 out of every 3 Americans now support cannabis legalization. And with the rise of Black Lives Matter and other racial justice movements in the U.S., capped off by months of protests in the summer of 2020 in the wake of George Floyds murder, more Americansespecially white Americansare opening their eyes to what Black and brown Americans have known for centuries: The criminal justice system is systemically racist.

More than 2 out of every 3 Americans now support cannabis legalization.

We also know that when an individual is convicted of a crime, that conviction and criminal record follows him or her around for life. That record can mean missed opportunities for education, employment, promotions, wealth formation, social interactions and networking, home ownership or other access to housing, and more.

Although a criminal conviction occurs on one day in a persons life, its impact is felt for the remainder of ones days.

As a result, the problems an individual faces compound as each foregone opportunity will be affected by both the conviction and other foregone opportunities. Although a criminal conviction occurs on one day in a persons life, its impact is felt for the remainder of ones days.

The enduring impact is felt disproportionately among younger Americans, males, and Americans of colorand the intersection of all three. Research by Holly Nguyen and Peter Reuter demonstrates that even when controlling for use, 15-19 year-olds and 20-29 year-olds are significantly more likely than Americans over 30 to be arrested for a cannabis offense. Men are significantly more likely than woman to face such an arrest, and finally, controlling for use, Black men and particularly Black men under the age of 30 are significantly more likely than other groups to face a cannabis arresta disparity that has increased in the 21st century. Because these charges are more likely to impact people before the age of 30, the lingering effects of that arrest affects a significant period of that persons life, reducing even more opportunities over time.

And the impact of criminal convictions, especially geographically and demographically concentrated convictions, has a horizontal impact on communities. Those convictions impact more than just the people who are arrested. They impact families in direct and indirect ways; incarceration can create struggles and strife in social networks and neighborhood relations. Overcriminalization and mass incarceration becomes a scourge to communities that spreads throughout its fabric and has enduring intergenerational impacts.

Because of this history and contemporary reality, no serious conversation about criminal justice reform, racial justice, and opportunity can be had without a serious reconsideration of our nations drug laws. And that conversation has been obvious not simply with state-level ballot initiatives, but even in presidential politics. In 2016, both major party presidential candidates publicly supported some form of cannabis reform for the first time in American history. In the 2020 Democratic primary, most candidates powerfully embraced full-scale legalization, including the current Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Even President Biden, as a candidate, endorsed the legalization of medical cannabis, and famously stated, Nobody should be in jail for smoking marijuana.

However, Joe Biden was the only top-tier 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to eschew full scale legalization. And looking at the first six months of his administration, it appears that he has not changed his mind. Although he has placed cannabis reform supporters into his administration including Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the White House position has not changed.

Might the president flip on this issue in the way President Obama switched his position to embrace marriage equality? That is possible. Like on the issue of marriage equality, much of the country and a large percentage of Democrats already support the idea of cannabis reform. However, President Bidens background and the obvious political opportunity he has already had to align himself with a supermajority of Americans on this issue make it unlikely that change will happen.

So, if full scale legalization is not going to be part of the presidents agenda for at least the next three and a half years, is there any chance to address some of the issues related to cannabis and race? Absolutely. The remainder of this paper lays out a five-point plan that the administration can implement unilaterally to improve opportunity, equity, and justice even for a president who opposes full-scale federal legalization.

1) A powerful national apology for the War on Drugs

Americans who are demanding justice are also demanding action, and the Biden administration must act in a variety of ways to meet the expectations of those who voted for him and those who did not. However, there is also an important role for moral leadership in the drug policy conversation. Mr. Biden should issue a presidential proclamation that apologizes for the War on Drugs and the U.S. governments role in perpetrating it at home and around the world. This proclamation should include a recognition that racism and other forms of bias served as the foundation for the War on Drugs and that systemic racism became and remains a central part of its enforcement.

This proclamation will be about more than just cannabis offenses, as the War on Drugs expanded far beyond that substance. We know that racial biases in drug enforcement are not unique to cannabis. And it is clear there are biases throughout the criminal justice system regarding how defendants of color are treated relative to their white peers.

At the same time, a proclamation of this nature should be personal one. As a senator, Mr. Biden played a significant role in maintaining, funding, and expanding the War on Drugs in a variety of ways. While he has publicly discussed his own regrets about participation in some efforts, such as drafting the 1994 Crime Bill, he has not done so in a significant way as president. His history on these issues would make a formal apology-by-proclamation all that more powerful, as he apologizes on behalf of the nation, the government, the elected officials who for more than a century propelled such as a system, and for himself and his role in it.

2) A presidential commission to study federal legalization

One challenge many opponents or skeptics of legalization have is that they lack a thorough understanding of the broader issue of cannabis, the extent of the harms prohibition has had on specific communities, and the impact of legalization in the states that have reformed their laws. While for many cannabis reform supporters, the idea of a presidential commission may be unappealing, there are a several reasons why it could be beneficial.

First, if President Biden is truly a legalization skeptic, reform supporters who believe the choice to legalize is a no-brainer should embrace the opportunity for the president to be more deeply informed. If they are confident that a full explication of the pros and cons of cannabis reform will push people in their direction, President Biden can serve as a very important audience of one. His obvious discomfort in discussing the issue on the campaign trail in 2019 and 2020 likely shows that he has not fully studied the issue. A presidential commission can help fix that knowledge gap.

Second, such a commission would be historic in nature. Previous presidential commissions on cannabis specifically or drug policy broadly often recommended the government reform its laws in some manner, but ultimately fell on deaf ears from the presidents who commissioned them. A president who is more open to the true findings of a report could transform the governments approach to the issue more broadly.

Third, a commission of this kind would naturally be bipartisan in nature, a quality Mr. Biden has already demonstrated he wants to see in policy making. Democrats and Republicans have united around the idea that drug prohibition is a failed policy and some other alternative must be the way forward. That bipartisan agreement extends from the grassroots of everyday American voters to state legislatures to governors mansions to the United States Congress. Although some may disagree on exactly what a post-prohibition world would and should look like, the point of a commission is to work through those precise questions and find common ground.

Finally, federal legalization will not be easy. It will not function as a simple on or off switchjust ask any state official in a jurisdiction that has taken that step. There will need to be extensive conversations and hundreds of decisions made as to the details of federal cannabis legalization. It is an area of policy that will affect agriculture, trade, transportation, taxation, criminal justice, the environment, small business funding, banking, international relations, labor policy, and much more. The federal government has not taken a serious stepin the executive or legislative branchestoward working through the complexities of what legalization would take. One can look at the challenges faced by the agriculture department in legalizing hemp (without first doing sufficient planning work) to understand what cannabis could face. It is critical that such advance work is done before legalization comes to fruition, and a presidential commission can achieve exactly that.

3) A joint pardon ceremony between the White House and governors

An important part of the cannabis reform conversation engages restorative justice. Some states that have reformed their cannabis laws have built restorative justice provisions into the law, through the ability for those with low-level cannabis convictions to petition for their records to be expunged, automatic expungement to occur, or for governors to use the pardon power to advance that cause.

Expungement is a critical first step in helping right some of the wrongs from the War on Drugs, particularly for the geographic and demographic communities that were targeted. Many national cannabis reform organizations have called on President Biden to use the pardon power to achieve just that. And while that effort is an important one, it is incomplete. The vast majority of cannabis arrests happen at the state or local levelnot the federal level. Typically, most federal cannabis arrests are for much more serious crimes such as trafficking, and not for the low-level offenses often targeted through restorative justice efforts.

For example, in 2019 while there were 545,000 cannabis offenses charged in the United States, the federal government was involved in a fraction of them. That year the FBI charged only 5,350 individuals with a top-line charge for any drug offensenot just cannabis. For the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2019, that number was 1,109. Yes, over the course of decades there will be some number of individuals who would qualify for a pardon of low-level, federal cannabis charges. However, the reality is that the FBI is not arresting people for only having a joint; those charges are most often transferred to and handled by state and local law enforcement.

The optics of a presidential pardon ceremony for federal, low-level cannabis offenders would be a powerful one; however, President Biden can make that image more powerful and the policy more impactful by coordinating with governors to do the same. Because criminal justice reform has bipartisan support throughout the country, the president could likely find multiple governors from both parties who wield the pardon power and are willing to use it to recognize and deal with the war on cannabis.1

This effort would have the potential to impact hundreds of thousands more individuals than the president could alone. Such a ceremony would also signal the importance of intergovernmental cooperation and leadership on issues of restorative justice. As I have written elsewhere, on a technical and implementation note, the pandemic has normalized the coordination of events remotely, which would be necessary as many governors are constitutionally prohibited from exercising executive powers outside of the state borders. Thus, a Zoom-type meeting with President Biden in the Oval Office and governors in their respective statehouses all working to help people start their lives fresh without the burden of a past cannabis conviction would significantly advance the cause of justice.

4) Expand funding to improve state capacity around restorative justice

As restorative justice programs have advanced in states and cities around the country, advocates and government officials are encountering a common challenge. Not every state record keeping system is ready for restorative justice efforts. Many criminal conviction records, especially ones from decades in the past, are not digitized and in jurisdictions where record expungement is intended to be automatic or where those convicted must petition for their expungement, the process can be slowed dramatically by a paper records system.

Illinois provides an important case study for this challenge. When the state legalized cannabis in 2019, part of the new law included an automatic expungement provision for low-level, non-violent cannabis offenders, and Governor J.B. Pritzker was committed to using his pardon power as needed. The officials implementing these provisions recognized the paper-based system for criminal conviction record keeping presented an enormous burden. Some jurisdictions, like Chicagos Cook County, teamed up with private firms like Code for America to successfully digitize and make searchable these records.

The state of Illinois and Cook County are not alone. Many jurisdictions around the country face this challenge, and it is one that is likely to bubble to the surface when a broad effort toward implementing restorative justice takes place.

To ameliorate this challenge and bring the record-keeping aspect of the criminal justice system into the 21st century, the president should call on Congress to create a funding program that will help subsidize jurisdictions efforts to digitize their records. That funding could be fully covered by federal monies or it could be used as seed money to partner with private organizations and companies committed to restorative justice and racial equity. Provisions could be included in such a program that makes restorative justice efforts part of the criteria for receiving the funding. Such funding could be structured so that a jurisdiction could apply for a portion of a digitization effort to be subsidized, but that the complete cost would be covered by federal funds if the jurisdiction passes legislation, or the governor commits to restorative justice for low-level cannabis convictions.2

Finally, as my colleague Makada Henry-Nickie and I note elsewhere, any effort to digitize criminal justice records must also be done with the proper privacy and security protections to ensure that those records, prior to or after expungement cannot find their way to the public sphere. It is the obligation of the federal government to put standards in place by which state criminal justice agencies must implement in order to be eligible for the subsidization of record digitization. States across the country from Illinois to New York to recently legalized Virginia have put into effect programs that include record expungement, including automatic expungement. Each state has recognized that challenges both in terms of time and resources needed for those programs to maximum effect, particularly without broader guidance regarding best practices.

As in the Illinois case and as has happened with other states, such a record digitization program provides an opportunity to expand programming that teaches individuals digital skills. Such opportunities and training can be targeted to specific communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs, and in many cases engage with those individuals who will be directly impacted by record expungement. It provides an ideal setting to use a bureaucratic challenge as an opportunity to create multiple policy benefits to assist those who often times are cast aside by society.

5) A Superfund program to clean up the disaster of cannabis enforcement

One important aspect of cannabis reform and its connection to restorative justice and racial equity involves investment in communities. As states like Illinois, New York, and New Jersey have reformed their cannabis laws, they have put center stage the importance of reinvesting in the communities hit hardest by the War on Drugs. Even efforts in Congress such as Sen. Cory Bookers (D-N.J.) Marijuana Justice Act and the bicameral Marijuana, Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act seek to use funds to be targeted to communities that were harmed by the War on Drugs.

One important aspect of cannabis reform and its connection to restorative justice and racial equity involves investment in communities.

This effort is a critical one. As I mentioned above, cannabis enforcement, especially that which is geographically and demographically concentrated, creates an ongoing cycle of crises and reduced opportunities for those who are convicted. In many cases, even those who are arrested and not convicted still face institutionalized barriers to specific opportunities that compound over time. Record expungement is an important step in the right direction toward helping these individuals. However, as I often note, record expungement fixes one day in a persons lifethe day he or she is convicted of a crime; it does not fix all of the subsequent days in which economic, financial, social, and community hardships manifest.

At the same time, overcriminalization of cannabis that is concentrated in specific communities has broad impacts on individuals beyond those facing charges. That reality is paired with decades of government policies that were either designed with racist intent or had very demonstrable effects that left communities of color woefully underfunded, relative to white communities. That situation happens in every corner of the nation and endures today.

In order to reverse the effects of the War on Drugs, legalization and expungement are just parts of an ongoing community rehabilitation process that must be comprehensive in nature and targeted to areas facing the most need. In many ways, this mirrors environmental challenges in the 1970s.

Now, our communities are facing a significant crisis as a result of another historical, largely unchecked scourge: a systemically racist criminal justice system.

In the 1970s, the government recognized that some communities and sites within communities were facing significant environmental challenges due to years of neglect, and these issues were not easily fixed by residents or municipalities themselves. Now, our communities are facing a significant crisis as a result of another historical, largely unchecked scourge: a systemically racist criminal justice system.

I propose a system loosely modeled on the Superfund program for environmental cleanup to identify areas in need of assistance and then target site-specific resources to clean up the problem over a period of time. The Superfund program was created from a law passed in 1980 that charged EPA to conduct investigations into the illegal and harmful release of environmental hazards, often into land and water. An investigation would be launched that would seek to identify the presence and extent of an environmental hazard, seek to identify those responsible for the hazardous site (often, private entities), fine those responsible and use that funding to decontaminate an area. Effectively the program identified a place in which years or decades of bad behaviors and neglect led to significant public health and public safety problems.

In the context of drug policy, years of racially discriminatory and targeted enforcement has not created an environmental disaster, but a disaster of economic and physical infrastructure. And just like the rehabilitation the federal government understood was necessary for Superfund sites, so too should the administration recognize a need for rehabilitation in these targeted communities.

There exist other ideas at a smaller scale in states to identify such communities. As mentioned before Illinois legalization program sought to fund community reinvestment in what are called Disproportionately Impacted Areas. Those areas are ones in which the War on Drugs was waged the fiercest and were damaged. In previous work, Henry-Nickie and I argue that a program could be modeled similar to the Obama-era Opportunity Zones program that identified specific community needs and facilitated support via tax incentives accordingly.

I propose that the Justice Department, in conjunction with other relevant agencies, create a program to identify Drug War Affected Communities (DWACs) and designate them as such. A request for such designation can come from the Justice Department itself, state or local governments, community nonprofits, faith-based organizations, etc.

First, DWACs must be localized by census tract or a set of tracts, rather than designating entire cities, which may include neighborhoods that should be eligible and those that should not be eligible. Second, DWACs must demonstrate current and/or historical cannabis enforcement at significant levels. This provision recognizes that in states that legalize or decriminalize cannabis or in places where law enforcement leaders informally use enforcement discretion, current cannabis enforcement may have plummeted, but the damage was already done before those recent policy changes.

Third, DWACs must demonstrate systematic racial and/or ethnic disparities in arrest rates, relative to other communities or within the communities themselves. Fourth, DWACs must maintain significant populations of people of color and community demographics as they did during periods of racial disparities in enforcement. This provision is essential to account for gentrification that has happened in many major U.S. cities, dramatically transforming neighborhoods demographics in a relatively short period of time. The program must ensure that the communities most in need of such support are the ones getting it.

Once DWAC designation is granted, the community will be eligible for additional federal funding that will help rehabilitate the economy in a variety of ways. Unlike programs like Opportunity Zones that focused solely on tax incentives to spur investment, the DWAC program, like the Superfund program, would focus on direct funding to support communities or funding that can be used to match state and local program funding. The obvious challenge here involves identifying funding for such an effort. One step the administration should take is to charge the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) with identifying any federal program related to economic development, education, infrastructure, housing, workforce development, etc. in which agency discretion exists to adjust the criteria for eligibility. In every situation in which that discretion exists, the agency should use the administrative authority to include DWAC status as a criterion for initial eligibility and, if possible, for additional funding within the program.

This use of executive authority will be imperfect. Not every program includes statutory provisions that grant the type of flexibility necessary to expand eligibility in that way. However, there will be some subset of programs in which it is achievable, and in each case, funding could be diverted to begin addressing the harms of the War on Drugs. And although such an effort will not require congressional action, it will also not increase outlays for a program. Instead it will just adjust the manner in which funding is distributed.

Next, as Henry-Nickie and I propose in previous work, any community reinvestment funding should be targeted to the types of programs that will best serve an individual community. While the War on Drugs certainly affected cities in very similar ways, there are likely significantly varied needs from place to place. State and local policy, private investment, faith-based efforts, and other community-specific interventions can mean that certain communities may be more in need of workforce development and housing assistance funds, while another may see funding better spent on health care facilities and schools. Part of the DWAC designation request should also include a space for communities to advocate for themselves and design and prioritize the types of community development funding that will best serve their needs.

The worst modelother than doing nothingwould be for the federal government to believe a one size fits all model of development is the ideal. Both in practice and for community engagement, self-advocacy must be part of process toward rehabilitation from the War on Drugs. Just like with the Superfund program, each environmental hazard site had its own unique pollutants, challenges, community impacts, and needs. The investigations into those sites identified the most efficient ways to deal with those specific environmental and site-specific challenges. The DWAC program must also have that type of precision and flexibility.

The worst modelother than doing nothingwould be for the federal government to believe a one size fits all model of development is the ideal.

Next, the president should also task OMB with including an evaluation process to understand the efficacy of DWAC designations and the success of funding strategies over time. OMB should also make recommendations as to how best the program should be adjusted and improved to ensure long-term success. That focus on long-term success reflects the need for a long-term program. While this program seeks to reverse economic, education, and labor market challenges, it should not be seen as a short-term stimulus package like the multiple COVID relief packages that Congress passed in 2020 and 2021 or the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that sought to pull the United States out of the Great Recession. Each of those were viewed as short-term stimulus programs intended to deal with an acute set of economic challenges. The DWAC program is seeking to assist with chronic, ongoing, institutionalized economic challenges. Just as the War on Drugs functioned as a decades-long wrecking ball on communities opportunity and chance of advancement, the solution to it must be conceptualized as an ongoing, long-term program. And in fact, similar to the Superfund program, some issues or communities may be able to rebound in an expedited way. However, many will take extended periods of time to clean up from the damage done in the past.

The Superfund program has its challenges and its critics, and does not serve as a perfect model for the DWAC program. The Superfund program faced funding challenges, especially in collecting fines from responsible parties. The DWAC program would face challenges in identifying responsible parties for whom funding could be extracted from, although Sen. Bookers Marijuana Justice Act sought to withhold funding from law enforcement agencies that did not correct racial disparities. The latter could not be done unilaterally by a president. Yet, the concept of the government consciously and purposefully identifying a policy disaster and use data and evidence to design a comprehensive, long-term, community-specific plan to make positive changes should guide the design of the DWAC program.

If implemented, the president should also ask Congress both to fund the DWAC program either through a general fund that could then be allocated to specific programs as is reflected by demand or as a program by program appropriation supplemental specifically for DWACs. The president should also ask Congress for agencies to be granted additional discretionary authority to adjust program eligibility specifically for the purposes of the DWAC program. In addition, but not as a substitute, the president could also ask Congress to create tax incentives similar to the Opportunity Zones program to spur targeted economic and community investments that works to reduce the harms of the drug war. However, direct funding is essential for this program to be successful. Surely, in a divided Congress, additional funding for programs that would target these communities as a direct denouncement of this countrys history of drug enforcement would be difficult. However, the tools the president currently has at his disposal should be combined with a genuine effort to advance the conversation around racial healing and empowerment in the wake of the War on Drugs.

While cannabis reform supporters will be disappointed by anything short of full-scale legalization, that is an unlikely goal with the current composition of Congress and Joe Biden as president. However, the five-part plan laid out above offers some immediate and long-term benefits that will even assist policymakers when federal cannabis legalization is realized.

First, the presidential proclamation, legalization study commission, and commitment to restorative justice and addressing the fallout of the drug war will show real moral leadership by a president on the issue of cannabisleadership that none of Mr. Bidens predecessors showed. That signaling and change in tone from an American president can have significant effects on the broader policy conversation across the country and also around the world. The United States was the leader in the march toward global drug prohibition and many countries are looking to America for a different path forward.

Second, the legalization study commission can help begin the onerous legal, regulatory, and intergovernmental task of reforming cannabis at the national level. It can help engage agencies on the precise issues they will need to deal with, identify potential challenges, consider how communication and coordination will need to happen at all levels of government. By putting even broad recommendations into the public sphere, it will make the job easier once legalization happens.

Third, the use of the bully pulpit to bring leaders together to exercise pardon powers to assist those who were targeted by the War on Drugs and whose lives and futures were upended by the possession of a small amount of cannabis is key to healing. Cannabis record expungement is popular, bipartisan, and has already been successful in multiple states without political or policy consequences. It, combined with efforts to improve criminal justice record digitization, also provides a more meaningful change than would be had by proposals that solely focus on a federal level endeavor.

Fourth, the use of executive authority the help redevelop Drug War Affected Communities is an essential aspect of helping those hurt most significantly by cannabis enforcement. It will help address generations of underinvestment in these communities that have contributed to cycles of poverty, violence, substandard housing, insufficient educational options, and community stagnation.

The use of executive authority the help redevelop Drug War Affected Communities is an essential aspect of helping those hurt most significantly by cannabis enforcement.

In the process it uses a community-specific program that assists those specifically harmed by mass incarceration, while appreciating that its effects reach far beyond the currently and formerly incarcerated.

Finally, the DWAC program will provide an existing policy infrastructure that is targeted to the at-need populations that can be supported with more significant funding post-legalization. When cannabis sales tax revenue begins flowing into the Treasury (an almost certain part of federal legalization), some portion of those monies can be used in a proven, effective program. The MORE Act calls for a federal cannabis tax and funding to be sent for community reinvestment. The best way to put that funding to work is that have an existing system to distribute it.

President Biden holds less reform-oriented views with regard to cannabis than most other Democrats. His failure to commit to passing federal legalization has left some inside and outside his party in Congress, in the public, and in the cannabis reform community disappointed. However, that position does not mean he cannot make specific cannabis policy changes that can have immediate results and lay the groundwork for more successful legalization policy down the road, especially in the context of racial equity and criminal justice reform.

Mr. Bidens voters, particularly members of the core Democratic base, expect him to do everything in his power to address the serious problems of racial bias and discrimination that plague this country. So, too, do millions of Americans who did not vote for Mr. Biden but who recognize systemic racism is a deeply rooted policy problem in the United States. As those issues have become a core part of the policy conversations in this country, they have also become central to discussions around cannabis. Cannabis reform presents a huge opportunity to help address the racial justice crisis in the United States. More needs to be done than simply reforming cannabis, but a serious racial justice conversation must include it.

Although the current White House is not focused on cannabis and sees it as more of a peripheral issue, nothing could be further from the truth. Cannabis enforcement and its decades of effects have significantly contributed to the issues we now face around race relations, mass incarceration, policing policy, and economic opportunity. A president who is serious about each of those issues must also be serious about cannabis.

See more here:

Reversing the War on Drugs: A five-point plan - Brookings Institution

On September 23, 1987, first lady Nancy Reagan accepts on behalf of the Just Say No Club a check from the Proctor & Gamble company for $150,000, in Washington, D.C. (Mark Reinstein / Shutterstock)

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Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon stood before the White House press corps, staffers at his side, to announce a new, all-out offensive against drug abuse, which he denounced as Americas public enemy number one. He called on Congress to contribute $350 million for a worldwide attack on the sources of supply. The first battle in this new drug war would be fought in South Vietnam where, Nixon said, a number of young Americans have become addicts as they serve abroad.

While the president was declaring his war on drugs, I was stepping off a trans-Pacific flight into the searing tropical heat of Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, to report on the sources of supply for the drug abuse that was indeed sweeping through the ranks of American soldiers fighting this countrys war in Vietnam.

As I would soon discover, the situation was far worse than anything Nixon could have conveyed in his sparse words. Heroin vials littered the floors of Army barracks. Units legendary for their heroism in World War II like the 82nd Airborne were now known as the jumping junkies. A later survey found that more than a third of all GIs fighting the Vietnam War commonly used heroin. Desperate to defeat this invisible enemy, the White House was now about to throw millions of dollars at this overseas drug war, funding mass urinalysis screening for every homeward-bound GI and mandatory treatment for any who tested positive for drugs.

Even that formidable effort, however, couldnt defeat the murky politics of heroin, marked by a nexus of crime and official collusion that made mass drug abuse among GIs possible. After all, in the rugged mountains of nearby Laos, Air America, a company run by the CIA, was transporting opium harvested by tribal farmers who were also serving as soldiers in its secret army. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close ally, then operated the worlds largest illicit lab, turning raw opium into refined heroin for the growing numbers of GI users in neighboring Vietnam. Senior South Vietnamese commanders colluded in the smuggling and distribution of such drugs to GIs in bars, in barracks, and at firebases. In both Laos and South Vietnam, American embassies ignored the corruption of their local allies that was helping to fuel the traffic.

As sordid as Saigons heroin politics were, they would pale when compared to the cynical deals agreed to in Washington over the next 30 years that would turn the drug war of the Vietnam era into a political doomsday machine. Standing alongside the president on that day when Americas drug war officially began was John Erlichman, White House counsel and Nixon confidante.

As he would later bluntly tell a reporter,

The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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.Current Issue

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And just in case anyone missed his point, Erlichman added, Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.

To grasp the full meaning of this admission, you need to begin with the basics: the drug wars absolute, unqualified, irredeemable failure. Just three pairs of statistics can convey the depth of that failure and the scope of the damage the war has done to American society over the past half-century:

Despite the drug wars efforts to cut supplies, worldwide illicit opium production rose tenfoldfrom 1,200 tons in 1971 to a record 10,300 tons in 2017.

Reflecting its emphasis on punishment over treatment, the number of people jailed for drug offenses would also grow tenfold, from 40,900 in 1980 to 430,900 in 2019.

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Finally, instead of reducing domestic use, the drug war actually helped stimulate a tenfold surge in the number of American heroin users from just 68,000 in 1970 to 745,000 in 2019.

In addition, the drug war has had a profound impact on American society by perpetuating, even institutionalizing, racial disparities through the raw power of the police and prisons. Remember that the Republican Party saw the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ended decades of Jim Crow disenfranchisement for Blacks in the Deep South, as a rare political opportunity. In response, Nixon and his men began developing a two-part strategy for winning over white voters in the South and blunting the Democratic advantage with Black voters nationwide.

First, in the 1970 midterm elections, the Republicans began pursuing a Southern strategy of courting disgruntled white supremacist voters in the South in a successful attempt to capture that entire region politically. Three years later, they launched a relentless expansion of the drug war, policing, and prisons. In the process, they paved the way for the mass incarceration of African Americans, denying them the vote not just as convicts but, in 15 states, for life as ex-convicts. Pioneering this cunning strategy was New Yorks Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. The harsh mandatory penalties of 15 years to life for petty drug possession he got the state legislature to pass raised the number of people imprisoned on drug charges from 470 in 1970 to 8,500 in 1999, 90 percent of them African American or Latinx.

Such mass incarceration moved voters from urban Democratic bailiwicks to rural prisons where they were counted in the census, but otherwise disenfranchised, giving a bit of additional help to the white Republican vote in upstate New Yorka winning strategy Republicans elsewhere would soon follow. Not only did the drug war let conservatives shave opposition vote tallies in close elections, but it also dehumanized African Americans, justifying repressive policing and mass incarceration.

None of this was pre-ordained but the result of a succession of political deals made during three presidenciesthat of Nixon, who started it; of Ronald Reagan, whose administration enacted draconian punishments for drug possession; and of the Democrat Bill Clinton, who expanded the police and prisons to enforce those very drug laws. After remaining remarkably constant at about 100 prisoners per 100,000 population for more than 50 years, the US incarceration rate started climbing relentlessly to 293 by the end of Reagans term in 1990 and 464 by the end of Clintons in 2000. It reached a peak of 760 by 2008with a racial bias that resulted in nothing less than the mass incarceration of African Americans.

While Nixon fought his war largely on foreign battlefields trying, and failing, to stop narcotics at their source, the next Republican president, Ronald Reagan, fully domesticated the drug war through ever harsher penalties for personal use and a publicity campaign that made abstinence a moral virtue and indulgence a fiercely punishable vice. Meanwhile, he also signaled clearly that he was determined to pursue Nixons Southern strategy by staging a major 1980 election campaign rally in Neshoba County, Miss., where three civil rights workers had previously been murdered.

Taking office in 1981, Reagan found, to his surprise, that reviving the drug war at home had little public support, largely because the outgoing Democratic administration had focused successfully on drug treatment rather than punishment. So, first lady Nancy Reagan began crisscrossing the country, while making TV appearances with choruses of cute kids wearing Just Say No T-shirts. Even after four years of the first ladys campaign and the simultaneous spread of crack cocaine and cocaine powder in cities and suburbs nationwide, only about 2 percent of the electorate felt that drug abuse was the nations number one problem.

Then personal tragedy provided Reagan with the perfect political opportunity. In June 1986, just a day after signing a multimillion-dollar contract with the NBAs Boston Celtics, college basketball sensation Len Bias collapsed in his dorm at the University of Maryland from a fatal cocaine overdose. Five months later, President Reagan would sign the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, aka the Len Bias Law. It would lead to a quantum expansion of the domestic drug war, including a mandatory minimum sentence of five years just for the possession of five grams of cocaine and a revived federal death penalty for traffickers.

It also put into law a racial bias in imprisonment that would prove staggering: a 100:1 sentencing disparity between those convicted of possessing crack-cocaine (used mainly by inner-city Blacks) and those using cocaine powder (favored by suburban whites)even though there was no medical difference between the two drugs. To enforce such tough penalties, the law also expanded the federal anti-drug budget to a massive $6.5 billion.

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In signing that law, Reagan would pay special tribute to the first lady, calling her the co-captain in our crusade for a drug-free America and the fight against the purveyors of this evil. And the two of them had much to take credit for. After all, by 1989, an overwhelming 64 percent of Americans had come to feel that drugs were the nations number one problem. Meanwhile, thanks largely to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Americans jailed for nonviolent drug offenses soared from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. Driven by drug arrests, in 1995 nearly one-third of all African American males between 20 and 29 would either be in prison or on parole.

If those two Republican presidents were adept at portraying partisan anti-drug policies as moral imperatives, their Democratic successor, Bill Clinton, proved adept at getting himself reelected by picking up their seductive rhetoric. Under his administration, a racialized drug policy, with its disenfranchisement and denigration of African Americans, would become fully bipartisan.

In 1992, two years after being elected president, Clinton lost control of Congress to Republican conservatives led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Desperate for something he could call a legislative accomplishment, he tacked hard right to support the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994. It would prove the largest law-enforcement initiative in American history: nearly $19 billion dollars for 100,000 new cops to sweep the streets for drug offenders and a massive prison-expansion program to house those who would now be sentenced to life after three criminal convictions (three strikes).

A year later, when the non-partisan US Sentencing Commission recommended that the 100:1 disparity in penalties for crack-cocaine and cocaine powder be abolished, along with its blatant racial bias, Clinton flatly rejected the advice, signing instead Republican-sponsored legislation that maintained those penalties. I am not, he insisted, going to let anyone who peddles drugs get the idea that the cost of doing business is going down.

The countrys Black political leaders were eloquent in their condemnation of this political betrayal. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a former Democratic presidential candidate, claimed Clinton knew perfectly well that crack is code for black and labelled the presidents decision a moral disgrace by a man willing to sacrifice young black youth for white fear. The Congressional Black Caucus would similarly denounce the sentencing disparity as a mockery of justice.

As they predicted all too accurately, the relentless rise of Black incarceration only accelerated. In the five years following passage of Clintons omnibus crime bill, the country added 204 prisons and its inmate population shot up by a mind-boggling 28 percent to 1,305,300. Of those, nearly half (587,300) were Black, though African Americans made up only 13 percent of the countrys population.

Facing a tough reelection campaign in 1996, Clinton again worked with hard-right congressional Republicans to pass the Personal Responsibility Work Act, which, as he put it, brought an end to welfare as we know it. With that laws work requirement for welfare, even as unemployment among Black residents of cities like Chicago (left behind by industry) hit 20 percent to 25 percent, youth in inner cities across America found that street-level drug dealing was fast becoming their only opportunity. In effect, the Clintons gained short-term political advantage by doing long-term social and economic damage to a core Democratic constituency, the African American community.

Nonetheless, during his 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton trumpeted such dubious legislative achievements. Speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, for instance, Hillary Clinton celebrated her husbands Violent Crime Control Act for taking back the streets from murderous minority teenagers. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators, Clinton said. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.

The term super-predator had, in fact, originated with a Princeton University political scientist, John Dilulio, who described his theory to the first couple during a 1995 White House working dinner on juvenile crime. In an article for a neoconservative magazine that November, the academic trumpeted his apocalyptic analysis. Based solely on the spottiest of anecdotal evidence, he claimed that black inner-city neighborhoods would soon fall prey to such super predatorsa new kind of juvenile criminal marked by impulsive violencevacant staresremorseless eyes. Within five years, he predicted, there would be 30,000 more murderers, rapists, and muggers on the streets who would place zero value on the lives of their victims, whom they reflexively dehumanize as just so much worthless white trash. This rising demographic tide, he warned, would soon spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.

By the way, the truly significant part of Hillary Clintons statement based on Dilulios analysis was that phrase about bringing super-predators to heel. A quick quiz. Who or what does one bring to heel: (a.) a woman, (b.) a man, or (c.) a child? Answer: (d.) None of the above.

That term is used colloquially for controlling a leashed dog. By implicitly referring to young Black males as predators and animals, Clinton was tapping into one of Americas most venerable and virulent ethnic stereotypes: the Black buck or brute. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan reports that the brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminaldeserving punishment, maybe death. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators.

Indeed, Southern fiction of the Jim Crow era featured the Black brute as an animal predator whose natural prey was white women. In words strikingly similar to those Dilulio and Clinton would later use for their super-predator, Thomas Dixons influential 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan described the Black brute as half child, half animala being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger. When turned into a movie in 1915 as The Birth of a Nation (the first film ever screened in the White House), it depicted a Black mans animalistic rape of a virtuous white woman and reveled in the Klans retribution by lynching.

In effect, the rhetoric about super-predators revived the most virulent stereotype from the Jim Crow lexicon. By the end of President Clintons term in 2000, nearly every state in the nation had stiffened its laws on juveniles, setting aside family courts and sending young, mainly minority, offenders directly to adult prisons for long sentences.

Of course, the predicted wave of 30,000 young super-predators never happened. Instead, violent juvenile crime was already declining when Hillary Clinton gave that speech. By the time President Clintons term ended in 2001, the juvenile homicide rate had fallen well below its level in 1985.

Amazingly, it would be another 20 years before Hillary Clinton was compelled to confront the meaning of those freighted words of hers. While she was speaking to a donors meeting in South Carolina during her 2016 presidential campaign, Ashley Williams, a young Black activist, stood up in the front row and unfurled a small banner that read: We have to bring them to heel. Speaking calmly, she asked: Will you apologize to black people for mass incarceration? And then she added, I am not a super-predator, Hillary Clinton.

When Clinton tried to talk over her, she insisted: I know that you called Black people super-predators in 1994. As the Secret Service hurried that young woman out of the room amid taunts from the largely white audience, Clinton announced, with a palpable sense of relief, Okay, back to the issues.

In its report on the incident, The Washington Post asked Clinton for a comment. In response, she offered the most unapologetic of apologies, explaining that, back in 1994, she had been talking about violent crime and vicious drug cartels and the particular danger they pose to children and families.

As an advocate, as first lady, as senator, I was a champion for children, she added, though admitting as well that, looking back, I shouldnt have used those words.

That was it. No mention of mass incarceration. No apology for using the power of the White House pulpit to propagate the most virulent of racial stereotypes. No promises to undo all the damage she and her husband had caused. Not surprisingly, in November 2016, the African American turnout in 33 statesparticularly in the critical swing states of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsinwas markedly down, costing her the election.

As much as both Republicans and Democrats might wish us to forget the costs of their deals, this tragic past is very much part of our present. In the 20 years since the drug war took final form under Clinton, politicians have made some relatively inconsequential reforms. In 2010, Congress made a modest cut in the sentencing disparity between the two kinds of cocaine that reduced the prison population by an estimated 1,550 inmates; Barack Obama pardoned 1,700 drug offenders; and Donald Trump signed the First Step Act that released 3,000 prisoners. Add up all those reforms and you end up with only 1.5 percent of those now in prison for drug offensesjust the tiniest drop of mercy in a vast ocean of misery.

So, even 50 years later, this country is still fighting a war on drugs and on nonviolent drug users. Thanks to its laws, petty drug possession is still a felony with heavy penalties. As of 2019, this countrys prisons remained overcrowded with 430,900 people convicted of drug crimes, while drug offenders represented 46 percent of all those in federal penitentiaries. In addition, the United States still has the worlds highest incarceration rate at 639 prisoners per 100,000 population (nearly double Russias), with 1,380,400 people imprisoned, of whom 33 percent are Black.

So many decades later, the drug wars mass incarceration still denies millions of African Americans the right to vote. As of 2020, 48 states refused their convicts the vote, while 34 states imposed a range of restrictions on ex-convicts, effectively denying suffrage to about 2.2 million Blacks, or 6.3 percent of all African American adults.

Recent challenges have made more visible the drug wars once largely invisible mechanisms for denying African Americans their rightful political power as a community. In a 2018 plebiscite, Florida voters restored electoral rights to that states 1.4 million ex-convicts, including 400,000 African Americans. Almost immediately, however, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis required that 800,000 of those felons pay whatever court costs and fines they still owed before votinga decision he successfully defended in federal court just before the 2020 presidential election. The effect of such determined Republican efforts meant that fewer than 8 percent of Floridas ex-convicts were able to vote.

But above all, Black male drug users are still stigmatized as dangerous predators, as we all saw in the recent trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who tried to defend kneeling on George Floyds neck for nine minutes by blaming Floyds death on the opiods an autopsy found in the victims blood. And in March 2020, a paramilitary squad of Louisville police broke down an apartment door with a battering ram on a no-knock drug raid for a suspected Black drug dealer and wound up killing his sleeping ex-girlfriend, medical worker Breonna Taylor.

Maybe now, half a century later, its finally time to end the war on drug usersrepeal the heavy penalties for possession, pardon the millions of nonviolent offenders, replace mass incarceration with mandatory drug treatment, restore voting rights to convicts and ex-convicts alike, and, above all, purge those persistent stereotypes of the dangerous Black male from our public discourse and private thoughts.

If only

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The War on Drugs Is 50 Years Old - The Nation

When Alice Coachman shattered every barrier and became the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal in 1948, her accomplishment set the stage for what would lead to decades of Olympic games benefitting from Black female athletes grit, determination, style, and star quality. It set the stage forShaCarriRichardson.

Just a few weeks ago, Richardson awed us on her journey as an inspirational athlete and icon. Then the news broke that a THC-positive drug test would disqualify her from competing in the Olympic 100-meter race. Now, there are reports shehasbeen left offthe 4 x100 meter relay team,which willcompeteafterher30-day ban ends.

What the world is seeing in real time is how the now 50-year-old racist and politically motivated War on Drugshas infiltrated our everyday lives, far beyond jails and prisons.Its tentacles have spread, with drug testing and other rules and regulations that prohibit recreational drug use and unnecessary punitive reactions. These are tools of the drug war, yet drug testing does nothing to show a current, existing state of impairment. It does, however, unjustly rob individuals of their livelihoods, future, and dreams. And for what?

There is awealth of research and informationonthe unfair ways in which these practices have failed our communities and have specially targeted Black and Brown people. Governing institutions investments in surveillance and punishments as a response to drug use is not only unscientific, its actively harmful.It has led to devastating disruption in all aspects of life including education, employment, child welfare, housing, immigration, and family support structures. And too often its Black women who face the brunt of the impact.

As a nation, we must end these practices and create new opportunities that correct the abuses of this War which have led to Black, Latinx, low-income, and immigrant populations suffering higher rates of incarceration and divestment from health care, non-police alternatives to public safety, and education in their communities.

Weve seen how racist non-consensual drug testing of Black and Latinx parents can lead tonewborn children being ripped from their parents armsover allegations. And weve called out how faulty drug tests have been used totorture incarcerated people with solitary confinement.Now a young, autonomous Black woman is at the center of the firestorm.

Naysayers have taunted and blamed Richardson, saying she should have followed the rules. First, lets acknowledge this way of thinking is often disingenuous and ignores the evidence emerging that marijuana is only banned by the USADA (US Anti-Doping Agency) because of pressure from the White House, not because of concerns over performance enhancement.

What is lacking is compassion, grace, and the same ingenious problem-solving and concern for humanity that has created a legal marijuana market that grossedUSD $9.1 billion in 2020 worldwide.

Arbitrary criminalization like this across many aspects of our societyfrom housing policies to employment practices and education policingleads to surveilling and penalizing Blackpeople forsimply existing. However,the rules are also inconsistent.

ShaCarrireportedly used marijuana in Oregona state where adult use is legal.In fact, her consumption in a legal state might have been considered acceptable by USADA code, which prohibits marijuana only during in-competition periods. These policies also reinforce that use of the drug does not indicate a sign of addiction or problematic use.

What is lacking is compassion, grace, and the same ingenious problem-solving and concern for humanity that has created a legal marijuana market that grossedUSD$9.1 billion in 2020 worldwide.

These punitive policies and their harsh enforcement ensure a far greater impact beyond lost economic opportunities. Richardsons disqualification is not the first story that weve heard out of the 2021 Olympics that attemptsto strip athletes of their dignity and their right to compete on a world stage. However, as with other cases involving drug testing, it has been the most efficient and effective at crushing opportunitya fate experienced by far too many Americans because of biased drug testing practices.

Richardson has already explained her rationale for her actions and apologized publicly. But she shouldnt have to apologize for being anautonomous Black woman and for the choices she makes to navigate her life and recent trauma (she chose to use marijuana to cope with the grief of just losing her biological mother).

Let me be clear: I would stand with Richardson even if she used to relax or for a fun night out with friends. The marijuana rule is draconian, politically motivated, and scientifically flimsy. Some people solely believe she is deserving of compassion because she used cannabis to cope with her biological moms death, but I disagree with that vigorously. As Richardson said, she is a humanand for me that is enough, especially when we know the rule is illegitimate. Black women dont have to share their pain to get your sympathy. Richardson deserves our support because it is the right thing to do.

What weve seen this week withShaCarriRichardsons journey is the insidious ways in which testing as a tool can create a destructive cycle, suddenly and viciously. But let this be the catalyst for change. LetRichardonsstory change the policy:The USADA must undo this archaic, inhumane, and unscientific policy. Let her run.

But this is also more than just one USADA policy.

We see outdated and wrongheaded criminalization and targeting because of marijuana every day in our work.ShaCarrissuspension serves as a cautionary tale and a reminder of how insidious the drug war is in our everyday lives, far beyond the carceral state.

WATCH: At ESSENCE Festival of Culture 2021, Black women discuss how incarceration aims to dehumanize people and their fight to raise awareness of struggles post-incarceration.

Finally,marijuana should be legal for all. The House should pass the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (MORE) Act H.R. 3617 absent of a harmful provision that was added to exclude federal workers of drug testing protectionsto decriminalize anddeschedulecannabis as a critical first step toward racial justice and equity. We can jumpstart that by finally taking the lead to undo the draconian policies that they have spread across the world and influenced the Olympics. LetShaCarrirun and lets get rid of drug testing in this country once and for all so we can create a world where more Black girls run free and scream Im that girl!

From low-income communities to Olympic-caliber athletesand the communities that have lost the most cannot wait any longer. We need unequivocal commitment to comprehensive federal legalization, an end to policing and surveillance, evidence-based drug education,and drug policies now.

Ending the drug war would mean a restoration of dignity and respect within affected communities especially for Black women and create new avenues for better health outcomes,safety,and overall quality of life. It would allowShaCarrito run without fear of an arbitrary policy crushing her dream. No one should be subjected to contradictory and punitive rules about what they can and cannot put in their own bodies.

Kassandra Frederique is the Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Drug Policy Alliance is a national organization working in coalition to eliminate punishment for drug use and repair the harms of the drug war and its policies.

TOPICS: shacarri richardson Tokyo Olympics war on drugs

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The Punitive War on Drugs Unnecessarily Harms Sha'Carri Richardson and Many Other Black Women - Essence

Journalist Michael Pollan, author of the 2018 psychedelic history/memoirHow To Change Your Mind, seems to have changed his own mind about the best way to address America's unjust and irrational drug laws. The evolution of Pollan's thinking illustrates the arbitrariness of the categories that Americans use to classify intoxicants and the confusion it causes even for well-meaning and thoughtful observers who are sympathetic to drug policy reform.

In a 2019 New York Times opinion piece, Pollan expressed concern about using ballot initiatives to decriminalize or legalize psychedelics, suggesting that we should rely on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decide who may use which psychoactive substances under what circumstances. "Psilocybin has a lot of potential as medicine," the subhead said, "but we don't know enough about it yet to legalize it."

In aNew York Timesessay posted this morning, Pollan, whose new book on psychoactive plants was published this week, acknowledges the limitations of treating psilocybin and other psychedelics as medicines and welcomes the success of the ballot initiatives that initially worried him. He also extends his critique of the war on drugs to "hard ones like heroin and cocaine."

There are two main problems with relying on the FDA to decide how drugs should be treated. First, approval of a new medicine takes years and requires spending millions of dollars on clinical studies. Second, the agency's mission is limited to assessing the safety and efficacy of drugs that are presented as a treatment for a recognized medical or psychiatric condition.

The war on weed continued after the FDA approved synthetic THC as a treatment for the side effects of cancer chemotherapy in 1985, after it added AIDS wasting syndrome as a recognized indication in 1992, and after it approved the first federally sanctioned cannabis-derived medicine as a treatment for two rare kinds of epilepsy in 2018. The war on psychedelics likewise will continue after the FDA approves MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder or psilocybin as a treatment for severe depression. FDA approval means only that patients who have the requisite diagnosis and prescription can legally use substances that are otherwise forbidden. Every other user is still treated as a criminal.

Another "path to normalization" that Pollan discusses is religious exemptions. "Since 1994," he says, "the Native American Church, now with an estimated 250,000 members, has had the constitutional right to use peyote as a sacrament." Pollan is wrong about both the origin and the nature of that exception, and the history of this issue shows that pharmacological freedom for members of one religious group does not necessarily imply a similar tolerance for other sects, let alone Americans generally.

The ceremonial use of peyote by members of the Native American Church has been protected by federal regulation since 1965. That exception was codified in 1994 by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which said "the use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by the United States or any State." Far from establishing a "constitutional right," that law was a response to a Supreme Court decision that said there was no such right.

In the 1990 caseEmployment Division v. Smith, the Court upheld the denial of unemployment benefits for two drug counselors who had been fired for violating Oregon's drug laws by using peyote in Native American Church ceremonies. Departing from precedent, the justices said the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause does not require exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws that impinge on religious conduct. Congress reacted by passing both the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and a broader statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which revived the test that the Court had rejected. Under RFRA, the government may not "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion" unless it is using "the least restrictive means" to pursue a "compelling government interest."

In 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that RFRA protected the ceremonial use of ayahuasca by the religious sect Centro Espirita Beneficente Unio do Vegetal. Eight years later, the Court ruled that RFRA also protected business owners who for religious reasons objected to a federal mandate requiring them to provide their employees with medical insurance that covered 20 specified kinds of contraception. Citing both of those cases, Pollan suggests "this Supreme Court's expansive jurisprudence on religious freedom has created a wide opening through which a parade of new psychedelic churches may be able to march."

Given the skepticism with which federal courts have greeted such claims, I have my doubts. More to the point, RFRA protection is available only to psychedelic users who belong to organized religious groups that describe a particular drug as central to their rituals. What about the rest of us?

Pollan, who in 2019 expressed trepidation about the psilocybin initiative that Oregon voters approved last year, is now more sanguine about that measure, which gave the Oregon Health Authority two years to write rules for licensing and regulating "psilocybin service centers" where adults 21 or older can legally take the drug under the supervision of a "facilitator" after completing a "preparation session." The initiative specifies that regulators "may not require a client to be diagnosed with or have any particular medical condition as a condition to being provided psilocybin services."

Pollan describes this newly permitted drug use as "psilocybin therapy," a hangover from his earlier focus on psychedelics as officially approved medicines. But the significance of Oregon's initiative lies in its departure from the FDA's approach, which allows drug use only by prescription for treatment of a "particular medical condition."

Oregon nevertheless will restrict psilocybin use to licensed, supervised settings, which reassures Pollan. Building on the Oregon model, he imagines "spa-like retreat centers" that would cater to "Americans who want to use psychedelics in a more secular setting." He suggests those services would include a psychiatric screening, administration of psychedelics by "a doctor or nurse practitioner," and supervision by "trained facilitators."

In terms of liberalizing the legal treatment of psychedelics, that is about as far as Pollan seems willing to go. "The prospect of magic mushrooms being commercialized like cannabisadvertised on billboards and sold next to THC gummy bears in dispensariesshould fill us with trepidation," he says. "Microdoses perhaps, but a macrodose of psilocybin is a powerful, consequential and risky experience that demands careful preparation and an experienced sitter or guide."

Keep in mind that Pollan himself has used a wide range of psychedelics, experiences that he describes in How To Change Your Mind. He did that without joining a church, getting permission from a doctor, or visiting a government-licensed "retreat center." And while he says there should be some allowance for "healthy people without a psychiatric diagnosis who want to use psychedelics for therapy, self-discovery or spiritual development," where does that leave people who use psychedelics out of curiosity or just for fun?

Pollan's insistence that would-be psychedelic users demonstrate a serious purpose and comply with regulations that he never followed reflects a disdain for psychonauts who have not written bestselling books about their adventures. While he can be trusted to take appropriate precautions, he thinks, the rest of us need to be constrained by legal rules.

To his credit, however, Pollan has begun to overcome the "psychedelic exceptionalism" that irritates Columbia psychologist Carl Hart, author ofDrug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. Hart, a temperate heroin user, decries the bigotry of people who see nothing wrong with marijuana or psychedelic use but look down on drug consumers with different pharmacological tastes.

"This is uncomfortable territory, partly because few Americans regard pleasure as a legitimate reason to take drugs and partly because the drug war (with its supporters in academia and the media) has produced such a dense fog of misinformation, especially about addiction," Pollan writes. "Many people (myself included) are surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of people who take hard drugs do so without becoming addicted. We think of addictiveness as a property of certain chemicals and addiction as a disease that people, in effect, catch from those chemicals, but there is good reason to believe otherwise. Addiction may be less a disease than a symptomof trauma, social disconnection, depression or economic distress."

Although addiction experts such as Stanton Peele have been making these points for half a century, they apparently were news to Pollan, despite his keen interest in chemically assisted mind alteration. In support of the observation that drugs do not cause addiction, Pollan cites the "Rat Park" experiments that Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander conducted in the late 1970s, inspired by Peele's 1975 book Love and Addiction (co-authored by Archie Brodsky). Pollan also mentions a classic study of veterans who used heroin in Vietnam that was published in 1974.

Better late than never. The newly enlightened Pollan endorses "harm reduction" measures such as "drug treatment, instead of incarceration," needle exchange, heroin maintenance, anddecriminalizing low-level possession (as Oregon voters also did last year). He even broaches the possibility of repealing prohibition, which is where the logic of harm reduction ultimately leadsthe reason the concept "terrified drug warriors," as Maia Szalavitz notes in her new history of the movement. Pollan suggests that "the uneasy peace our culture has made with alcohol may point to a way drugs like heroin and cocaine might someday be used in the post-war-on-drugs era." Indeed it might.

"The long history of humans and their mind-altering drugs gives us reason to hope we can negotiate a peace with these powerful substances, imperfect though it may be," Pollan says. "We have done it before. The ancient Greeks grasped the ambiguous, double-edged nature of drugs much better than we do. Their word for them, 'pharmakon,' means both 'medicine' and 'poison'it all depends, they understood, on use, dose, intention, set and setting. Blessing or curse, which will it be? The answer depends not on law or chemistry so much as on culture, which is to say, on us."

Our disastrous drug control regime is built on pharmacological prejudices that cannot withstand rigorous study or careful thought. Pollan deserves credit for discarding some of his.

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Psychonautical Journalist Michael Pollan Is Finally Ready To End the War on Drugs - Reason