Category Archives: War On Drugs

With nearly $32 million available from recreational marijuana taxes, the state expects to award grants next month to help repair damage from the war on drugs, and Springfield hopes to be a player. Mayor Jim Langfelder says the city has applied for a grant that would fund home rehabilitation to help neighborhoods deemed by the state to have been disproportionately impacted by the government's war on drugs. The mayor pegged the request at more than $700,000, which he said was the maximum allowable, and added that the city also has made a smaller request for planning efforts. Both public and private entities are eligible for grants set to be awarded by a state board that includes elected officials and representatives of agencies ranging from the Department of Corrections to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Langfelder says that he's endorsed a grant application submitted by The Outlet, a nonprofit agency that provides mentoring to fatherless kids. Michael Phelon, Outlet founder and chief executive officer, could not be immediately reached for comment.

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WE'RE IN THE MONEY, MAYBE | Cap City - Illinois Times

For all practical intents, the United States is at war with China. This may come as a surprise since no bullets have been fired nor declarations made. Yet there is little question that, for over a decade, the Chinese government has engaged in a sustained campaign of cyber-enabled economic aggression against us and our allies. They have targeted our most productive economic sectors and are currently winning. But as we restart our economy after Covid-19, we have a unique opportunity to shift this fight decisively back in our favor.

At the heart of this conflict is a series of grand economic competitions across key industries, including telecommunications, advanced computing, robotics, energy generation, resource extraction, aerospace, and the medical sciences, to name just a few. We are currently facing off with China on 5G technology, machine learning, quantum computing, nuclear and solar power, satellites, rare earth metals, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. Fundamental to the Chinese strategy for winning in each of these areasand many moreis the rampant theft of American intellectual property.

The Chinese playbook is deceptively simple: Why spend trillions of dollars on basic science or advanced research when it can be stolen with almost no penalties? The Chinese government is stunningly good at this theft. Not only do they employ thousands of government operatives to engage in this effort, a new federal indictment charges that they have fostered a criminal hacker class that works for its personal economic gain as well as for the Chinese state.

This brazen theft is not just limited to intellectual property. It also involves the pilfering of massive amounts of datafrom the likes of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Equifax, Marriott, and Anthemthat will fuel intelligence operations and train machine learning algorithms, generating economic and political gain for decades.

Chinese companies also look to acquire American technology through investment, acquisition, litigation, and bankruptcy, turning our own markets and courts against us. They masquerade as American companies while under the control of the Chinese government. Even worse, they take advantage of our companies looking to do business in China by extorting them into creating joint ventures, transferring intellectual property, and providing data to the Chinese Communist Party.

They likewise send students and researchers to our best research universities, all the while pressuring them to steal information for the Chinese state. The recent indictment of a Chinese military officer allegedly masquerading as a researcher at Stanford is but one such example. Chinese intelligence agencies likewise seek to co-opt American academics by providing grant funding for joint research projects and invitations to write for cash.

All of this economic warfare is directed at one key goal: to replace the United States as the global leader. Their agents do this by handing over the spoils of the state-run hacking and extortion campaign to Chinese companies which, in turn, exploit Chinese (and other) workers to make goods at reduced cost, selling them back to us and our allies, making us more reliant upon them.

Weve all now seen the price of this reliance in the difficulty many Americans face in getting medical gear and life-saving drugs. But our reliance is hardly limited to these goods. We also rely on China for all manner of finished goods and key inputs, the loss of which could grind our economy to a virtual halt overnight. Indeed, years ago, the Chinese created a plan to make us reliant on them in a dozen key areas. They now see Covid-19 as an opportunity to surge forward. But it need not be so. We have a chance, in this very moment of economic turmoil, to regain the edge.

First, the U.S. government must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our private sector to protect and push back. Just as the Chinese back their companies in competition with us, we must do the same for our industry. We should collect and share actionable threat intelligence and actively collaborate with the private sector to protect them through collective defense. We must also push back, using all elements of national power, to end the Chinese campaign of cyber-enabled economic warfare, including through the use of trade measures, sanctions, persistent cyber engagement, and, where necessary, more aggressive actions. We cannot allow trade deals or our desire for cheap Chinese goods to force us to sit on our hands, leaving our private sector alone to fight this war. Doing so means certain defeat.

Second, we must also work with our allies across the globe, including in the Indo-Pacific region, which the administration has identified as the single most consequential region for our future. Indias recent travails at Chinas hands should be a warning to all in the region and we must reject this aggression just as we have in the South China Sea. Likewise, having brought the British back on board on 5G, we must also now convince Germany to join this unified front. America need not stand alone. Making common cause with our longstanding allies is the right approach.

Finally, as we look to restart our economy, we must incentivize Americans to invest their money here and protect our innovation base. We must create tax and regulatory incentives that encourage investment in American companies struggling to survive and protect their intellectual property. These investors should be able to take advantage of low-cost capital to reorganize and reorient companies working on dual-use technologies to accelerate us into recovery and bring manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.

If we are to preserve this nation and remain a global leader, we cannot permit the continued theft of our childrens future right from under our noses. Now is the time to act.

Gen. (Ret) Keith B. Alexander is the former director of the National Security Agency and Founding Commander of United States Cyber Command, and currently serves as chairman, president and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, a start-up technology company focused on network threat analytics and collective defense and is on the Board of Advisors for the National Security Institute at George Mason Universitys Scalia Law School. Jamil N. Jaffer is the former chief counsel and senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served in senior national security roles in the George W. Bush Justice Department and White House, and currently serves as senior vice president for strategy, partnerships and corporate development at IronNet Cybersecurity and as the founder and executive director of NSI.

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China Is Waging Cyber-Enabled Economic War on the U.S. How to Fight Back. - Barron's

The juvenile justice system was created 120 years ago to reform and rehabilitate wayward youth to ensure they had the opportunity to achieve productive futures. To this end, it was widely accepted that juvenile system involvement should remain confidential and that all records should be sealed or eradicated to ensure youth a clean slate upon reaching adulthood. Juvenile records laws were enacted to protect the privacy of system-involved youth.

Today, however, the privacy protections afforded by juvenile records laws have hollowed out by loopholes and limitations that make confidentiality the exception more than the rule for many juvenile offenders. The broad accessibility permitted by juvenile records laws combined with technological innovation in data storage and mining make juvenile record information more available than ever. This means, more often than not, that the record of offenses children commit can be accessed by law enforcement, employers, landlords, schools and the public.

The consequences of the loss of juvenile system anonymity are far-reaching for youth and include an inability to secure housing, maintain stable employment and pursue post-secondary opportunities. The impact of these collateral consequences is supported by the data: In college admissions, 62.5% of system-involved youth were discouraged from completing college applications because of a records disclosure requirement, while 20% of applicants who disclosed records information were automatically denied admission.

Andrew Keats

Of the over 90% of employers who run background checks on applicants, over 40% reported that they would definitely or probably not hire an applicant with a record for a job not requiring a college degree, while 50% were less likely to call back or extend a job offer. Furthermore, 11% of these employers reported that even an applicant with a minor criminal infraction would not be hired. The existence of a juvenile record may also foreclose a young person and/or their entire family from securing public housing.

Black youth suffer the collateral consequences of juvenile record disclosure most severely. It is widely known that Black youth are subject to disproportionate system involvement. It is less widely recognized, however, that the records of this disproportionate system involvement enable a disproportionate level of racial discrimination long after their actual system involvement is over.

While Black youth represent only 15% of the U.S. population between the ages of 10-17, they represent 26% of all juvenile arrests and 30% of all delinquency referrals. Black youth represent 45% of all preadjudication decisions and 46% of cases transferred to adult criminal court. These records are all searchable by and available to the individuals with power to provide youth opportunities.

So why is a system intended to rehabilitate kids being used to mark them for a lifetime of discrimination?

The answer lies in the changing nature of Americas own unique brand of institutionalized racism over the last century. As a result of sweeping civil rights victories in the 1960s, America increasingly relied on the criminalization of Black people, and especially Black children, to justify continued oppression and inequality.

From the war on drugs to the myth of the child superpredator, racist stereotypes of Black people and particularly Black youth, together with discriminatory policies (like Broken Windows and stop-and-frisk) afforded white America the opportunity to transform skin color into a record of system involvement that could legally justify continued discrimination.

Harsh punishments enacted in the 1990s amplified the stakes of early system involvement mandatory sentencing schemes, youth transfer and new three strikes laws ushered in our modern era of mass incarceration. Under this system of white supremacy, juvenile records laws that afford broad access transform juvenile missteps into life sentences that serve to immobilize and disenfranchise Black communities.

In 2014, Juvenile Law Center published the first-ever comprehensive evaluation of each states juvenile records laws. The results of that study demonstrated that, as measured against best practices, over 50% of states fail to adequately protect juveniles from the consequences of juvenile records. Now, six years later, a new juvenile record scorecard report shows continued and widespread deficiencies in the protections necessary to keep juvenile records secure.

Recognizing that broad access to juvenile records advances inequality and systemic racism and holds kids back from achieving their full potential, it is imperative that every state review its records laws and take all steps necessary to protect our youths right to privacy by mandating automatic sealing and expungement of juvenile records.

Andrew Keats is a staff attorney at the Juvenile Law Center, where his work currently focuses on addressing economic justice and equity and second chances for youth in the juvenile justice system and youth tried as adults in the criminal justice system. Before that he spent a decade as a litigator with a leading global law firm in Los Angeles and New York, where he litigated a broad range of complex commercial disputes plus securities, class action, bankruptcy and real estate matters.

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Juvenile Records Laws Must Be Reformed to Prevent Ongoing Racism - Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Editors Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Image above: A masked worker cleans a New York City subway entrance.

Updated at 1:12 p.m. ET on August 4, 2020.

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planets most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.

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In the first half of 2020, SARSCoV2the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID19infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the worlds population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.

Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantagesimmense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertiseit floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined, Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. Ive learned that almost everything that went wrong with Americas response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nations ability to prevent the pathogens spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID19. The decades-long process of shredding the nations social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.

The U.S. has little excuse for its inattention. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the spread of new diseases. In 2018, I wrote an article for The Atlantic arguing that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic, and sounded warnings about the fragility of the nations health-care system and the slow process of creating a vaccine. But the COVID19 debacle has also touchedand implicatednearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.

SARSCoV2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just bad enough in every way. Its symptoms can be severe enough to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections to move undetected through a population. It spreads quickly enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics dont spike until too late. These traits made the virus harder to control, but they also softened the pandemics punch. SARSCoV2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when we cant even deal with a starter pandemic?, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer, asked me.

Despite its epochal effects, COVID19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.

A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these peoples villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. Most infected people dont know about it, and most of the viruses arent transmissible, Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic.

Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a humanand another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID19 pandemic had begun.

There is no way to get spillover of everything to zero, Colin Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of bush meat, an exoticized term for game, but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planets animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the worlds wildlife in a crushing gripand viruses have come bursting out.

Curtailing those viruses after they spill over is more feasible, but requires knowledge, transparency, and decisiveness that were lacking in 2020. Much about coronaviruses is still unknown. There are no surveillance networks for detecting them as there are for influenza. There are no approved treatments or vaccines. Coronaviruses were formerly a niche family, of mainly veterinary importance. Four decades ago, just 60 or so scientists attended the first international meeting on coronaviruses. Their ranks swelled after SARS swept the world in 2003, but quickly dwindled as a spike in funding vanished. The same thing happened after MERS emerged in 2012. This year, the worlds coronavirus expertsand there still arent manyhad to postpone their triennial conference in the Netherlands because SARSCoV2 made flying too risky.

In the age of cheap air travel, an outbreak that begins on one continent can easily reach the others. SARS already demonstrated that in 2003, and more than twice as many people now travel by plane every year. To avert a pandemic, affected nations must alert their neighbors quickly. In 2003, China covered up the early spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government downplayed the possibility that SARSCoV2 was spreading among humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after millions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threatened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID19. The World Health Organization initially parroted Chinas line and did not declare a public-health emergency of international concern until January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast.

The United States has correctly castigated China for its duplicity and the WHO for its laxitybut the U.S. has also failed the international community. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHOs executive board, but left that position empty for more than two years, only filling it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within Chinas CDC. America First was America oblivious.

Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a deep state. In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.

Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, so that when something like this happens, youre moving quickly, Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken. Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trumps included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed Americas airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemicnot stop it. And they can create a harmful false confidence, so countries rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to dotesting, tracing, building up the health system, says Thomas Bollyky, a global-health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. That sounds an awful lot like what happened in the U.S.

This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vectors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xenophobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea.

And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining COVID19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didnt land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that the coronavirus is very much under control, and like a miracle, it will disappear. With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.

On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were going to be down to close to zero. Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.

As the coronavirus established itself in the U.S., it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being detected. For years, Pardis Sabeti, a virologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, has been trying to create a surveillance network that would allow hospitals in every major U.S. city to quickly track new viruses through genetic sequencing. Had that network existed, once Chinese scientists published SARSCoV2s genome on January 11, every American hospital would have been able to develop its own diagnostic test in preparation for the viruss arrival. I spent a lot of time trying to convince many funders to fund it, Sabeti told me. I never got anywhere.

The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested. The official data were so clearly wrong that The Atlantic developed its own volunteer-led initiativethe COVID Tracking Projectto count cases.

Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabetis lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states, she told me.

Its hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldnt find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldnt cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.

Read: How the coronavirus became an American catastrophe

Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world. Consider our buildings. In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, ushering in the era of sick buildings, says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvards T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people, Allen says.

The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.

The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, Americas incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.

Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. Americas nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administrations policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.

Read: Another coronavirus nursing-home disaster is coming

Even though a Seattle nursing home was one of the first COVID19 hot spots in the U.S., similar facilities werent provided with tests and protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care for them.

Americas neglect of nursing homes and prisons, its sick buildings, and its botched deployment of tests are all indicative of its problematic attitude toward health: Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show, as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community. The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.

At the end of the 20th century, public-health improvements meant that Americans were living an average of 30 years longer than they were at the start of it. Maternal mortality had fallen by 99 percent; infant mortality by 90 percent. Fortified foods all but eliminated rickets and goiters. Vaccines eradicated smallpox and polio, and brought measles, diphtheria, and rubella to heel. These measures, coupled with antibiotics and better sanitation, curbed infectious diseases to such a degree that some scientists predicted they would soon pass into history. But instead, these achievements brought complacency. As public health did its job, it became a target of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrheanumbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded.

Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local health departments have lost 55,000 jobsa quarter of their workforce. When COVID19 arrived, the economic downturn forced overstretched departments to furlough more employees. When states needed battalions of public-health workers to find infected people and trace their contacts, they had to hire and train people from scratch. In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore through the Democratic Republic of Congoa country with a quarter of Marylands wealth and an active war zonelocal health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people.

Ripping unimpeded through American communities, the coronavirus created thousands of sickly hosts that it then rode into Americas hospitals. It should have found facilities armed with state-of-the-art medical technologies, detailed pandemic plans, and ample supplies of protective equipment and life-saving medicines. Instead, it found a brittle system in danger of collapse.

Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plansthe essence of pandemic preparedness. Americas hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.

When hospitals do create pandemic plans, they tend to fight the last war. After 2014, several centers created specialized treatment units designed for Ebolaa highly lethal but not very contagious disease. These units were all but useless against a highly transmissible airborne virus like SARSCoV2. Nor were hospitals ready for an outbreak to drag on for months. Emergency plans assumed that staff could endure a few days of exhausting conditions, that supplies would hold, and that hard-hit centers could be supported by unaffected neighbors. Were designed for discrete disasters like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University. The COVID19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready.

Wherever the coronavirus arrived, hospitals reeled. Several states asked medical students to graduate early, reenlisted retired doctors, and deployed dermatologists to emergency departments. Doctors and nurses endured grueling shifts, their faces chapped and bloody when they finally doffed their protective equipment. Soon, that equipmentmasks, respirators, gowns, glovesstarted running out.

American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the worlds face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.

In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didnt have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. Others fashioned their own surgical masks from bandannas and gowns from garbage bags. The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italyinitially the COVID19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade glassliterally, a bottle-neck bottleneck.

The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told Americas governors to try getting it yourselves. As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.

While the president prevaricated, Americans acted. Businesses sent their employees home. People practiced social distancing, even before Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay-at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didnt run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds.

Social distancing worked. But the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because Americas leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country thatuniquely and absurdlyties health care to employment. Some COVID19 survivors have been hit with seven-figure medical bills. In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a great equalizer, the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nations history.

Read: COVID-19 can last for several months

Of the 3.1 million Americans who still cannot afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.* This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct Americas system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black peoples access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. As the COVID19 pandemic wore on, they were among the quickest to lift social-distancing restrictions and reexpose their citizens to the coronavirus. The harms of these moves were unduly foisted upon the poor and the Black.

As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID19a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. Three times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to fatal cases of COVID19. When they go to hospitals, theyre less likely to be treated. The care they do receive tends to be poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek aid for COVID19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in sicker states. One of my patients said, I dont want to go to the hospital, because theyre not going to treat me well, says Uch Blackstock, an emergency physician and the founder of Advancing Health Equity, a nonprofit that fights bias and racism in health care. Another whispered to me, Im so relieved youre Black. I just want to make sure Im listened to.

Black people were both more worried about the pandemic and more likely to be infected by it. The dismantling of Americas social safety net left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid essential workers who were expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages without paid sick leave, they couldnt afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded public transportation while more privileged people teleworked from the safety of isolation. Theres nothing about Blackness that makes you more prone to COVID, says Nicolette Louissaint, the executive director of Healthcare Ready, a nonprofit that works to strengthen medical supply chains. Instead, existing inequities stack the odds in favor of the virus.

Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation cant easily wash their hands, because theyve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID19 infections than any U.S. state.

Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal failures. Stephen Huffman, a Republican state senator and doctor in Ohio, suggested that Black Americans might be more prone to COVID19 because they dont wash their hands enough, a remark for which he later apologized. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also a physician, noted that Black people have higher rates of chronic disease, as if this were an answer in itself, and not a pattern that demanded further explanation.

Clear distribution of accurate information is among the most important defenses against an epidemics spread. And yet the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how its all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates, says Rene DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies the flow of online information. When COVID19 arrived, there was no doubt in my mind that it was coming.

Read: The great 5G conspiracy

Sure enough, existing conspiracy theoriesGeorge Soros! 5G! Bioweapons!were repurposed for the pandemic. An infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. The social internet as a system is broken, DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.

Beginning on April 16, DiRestas team noticed growing online chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti-vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistleblower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab and described Anthony Fauci of the White Houses coronavirus task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was nested inside a larger conspiracypart of an orchestrated PR campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to take down Anthony Fauci. It culminated in a slickly produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. More than 8 million people watched it in a week.

Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemics many misleading claims, but these efforts spread less successfully than the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organizations recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspiracies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, their response was: Thats interesting, but thats just stuff that happens on the internet.

From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think

Rather than countering misinformation during the pandemics early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Many health experts and government officials downplayed the threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to the ostensibly greater threat of the flu. The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversedthe virus is worse than the flu; wear masksthe changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadnt been verified or peer-reviewed.

There were many such claims to choose from. By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incentives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising ambitious scientists global attention.

In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confusion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has created a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump.

During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen and also that he felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. Both statements cannot be true at the same time, and in fact neither is true.

A month before his inauguration, I wrote that the question isnt whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, but when. Based on his actions as a media personality during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I suggested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless self-confidence. And so he did.

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a natural ability at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, I dont take any responsibility at all.

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID19 pandemic. He isnt solely responsible for Americas fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. In the best circumstances, its hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly, Ron Klain said. It moves if the president stands on a table and says, Move quickly. But it really doesnt move if hes sitting at his desk saying its not a big deal.

In the early days of Trumps presidency, many believed that Americas institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest victim. On February 25, the agencys respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that disruption to everyday life might be severe. Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didnt hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.

Again, everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contractthat the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Its appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID19.

Instead, the U.S. sleepwalked into the worst possible scenario: People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.

Read: Ed Yong on living in a patchwork pandemic

Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a wartime president, he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to LIBERATE Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leadersBrazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdomalso fumbled their response to COVID19. When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most? says Sarah Dalglish of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who studies the political determinants of health.

Trump is president, she says. How could it go well?

The countries that fared better against COVID19 didnt follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely; New Zealand didnt. Many tested extensively; Japan didnt. Many had science-minded leaders who acted early; Hong Kong didntinstead, a grassroots movement compensated for a lax government. Many were small islands; not large and continental Germany. Each nation succeeded because it did enough things right.

Read: What really doomed Americas coronavirus response

Meanwhile, the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the viruss spread. Twitter amplified Trumps misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even seasoned health experts underestimated these compounded risks. Yes, having Trump at the helm during a pandemic was worrying, but it was tempting to think that national wealth and technological superiority would save America. We are a rich country, and we think we can stop any infectious disease because of that, says Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. But dollar bills alone are no match against a virus.

Public-health experts talk wearily about the panic-neglect cycle, in which outbreaks trigger waves of attention and funding that quickly dissipate once the diseases recede. This time around, the U.S. is already flirting with neglect, before the panic phase is over. The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizonas cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the states health-services department, said, We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we cant stop living as well. The virus may beg to differ.

At times, Americans have seemed to collectively surrender to COVID19. The White Houses coronavirus task force wound down. Trump resumed holding rallies, and called for less testing, so that official numbers would be rosier. The country behaved like a horror-movie character who believes the danger is over, even though the monster is still at large. The long wait for a vaccine will likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will be last in line.

Still, there is some reason for hope. Many of the people I interviewed tentatively suggested that the upheaval wrought by COVID19 might be so large as to permanently change the nations disposition. Experience, after all, sharpens the mind. East Asian states that had lived through the SARS and MERS epidemics reacted quickly when threatened by SARSCoV2, spurred by a cultural memory of what a fast-moving coronavirus can do. But the U.S. had barely been touched by the major epidemics of past decades (with the exception of the H1N1 flu). In 2019, more Americans were concerned about terrorists and cyberattacks than about outbreaks of exotic diseases. Perhaps they will emerge from this pandemic with immunity both cellular and cultural.

There are also a few signs that Americans are learning important lessons. A June survey showed that 60 to 75 percent of Americans were still practicing social distancing. A partisan gap exists, but it has narrowed. In public-opinion polling in the U.S., high-60s agreement on anything is an amazing accomplishment, says Beth Redbird, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who led the survey. Polls in May also showed that most Democrats and Republicans supported mask wearing, and felt it should be mandatory in at least some indoor spaces. It is almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics are rare situations when people are desperate for guidelines and rules, says Zo McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. The closest analogy is pregnancy, she says, which is a time when womens lives are changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.

Redbirds survey suggests that Americans indeed sought out new sources of informationand that consumers of news from conservative outlets, in particular, expanded their media diet. People of all political bents became more dissatisfied with the Trump administration. As the economy nose-dived, the health-care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in American exceptionalism declined. Times of big social disruption call into question things we thought were normal and standard, Redbird told me. If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere? And whom are they failing the most?

Americans were in the mood for systemic change. Then, on May 25, George Floyd, who had survived COVID19s assault on his airway, asphyxiated under the crushing pressure of a police officers knee. The excruciating video of his killing circulated through communities that were still reeling from the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and disproportionate casualties from COVID19. Americas simmering outrage came to a boil and spilled into its streets.

Defiant and largely cloaked in masks, protesters turned out in more than 2,000 cities and towns. Support for Black Lives Matter soared: For the first time since its founding in 2013, the movement had majority approval across racial groups. These protests were not about the pandemic, but individual protesters had been primed by months of shocking governmental missteps. Even people who might once have ignored evidence of police brutality recognized yet another broken institution. They could no longer look away.

It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortagestheir scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

COVID19 is an assault on Americas body, and a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection. America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

The pandemic has been both tragedy and teacher. Its very etymology offers a clue about what is at stake in the greatest challenges of the future, and what is needed to address them. Pandemic. Pan and demos. All people.

* This article has been updated to clarify why 3.1 million Americans still cannot afford health insurance.

** This article originally mischaracterized similarities between two studies that were retracted in June, one in The Lancet and one in the New England Journal of Medicine. It has been updated to reflect that the latter study was not specifically about hydroxychloroquine.

This article appears in the September 2020 print edition with the headline Anatomy of an American Failure.

Listen to Ed Yong discuss this story on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantics podcast about life in the pandemic:

Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (How to Listen)

Read the original here:

How the Pandemic Defeated America - The Atlantic

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Illustration by Chris Britt

Dr. Lawrence Hatchett says he feels like he's stuck in a desert.

He grew up in Colp, a southern Illinois village once known as a safe place for African Americans amid sundown towns where folks who weren't white couldn't venture after dark. Basketball was his ticket out. Good enough to land a scholarship at Marquette University, he didn't star but went on to graduate from medical school at the University of Chicago. After a residency in North Carolina, he landed a fellowship at Harvard and ultimately returned to the region of his upbringing, where he practices urology in Marion.

"My best friend, he went to prison; I went to Harvard," Hatchett says. "He's still my most trusted friend."

If all goes well, Hatchett hopes to help folks like his friend by getting into the cannabis business with a little help from the state and perhaps Doc Rivers, who coaches the Los Angeles Clippers and played college ball with Hatchett, who says he's contacted his former teammate asking if he'd like to invest.

Hatchett is waiting for the state to decide whether he'll get licenses to grow and sell weed. By now, he should know. The law says that 75 dispensary licenses were supposed to be awarded on May 1, and 40 licenses to grow pot were due on July 1. But, like hundreds of other applicants for pot licenses in what experts predict will be one of the nation's most lucrative weed markets, Hatchett is waiting long after deadlines have passed.

State regulators blame coronavirus for delays. Hatchett, who is seeking two grow operations and 10 dispensaries, says he's spent $200,000 on the venture with no guarantee of a return. Each application can consume hundreds of pages, fueling a cottage industry of lawyers and consultants to provide guidance and advice on negotiating regulations to come up with a winning plan. Those who want to grow pot must show they have sites available, which can mean paying for options on real estate if applicants don't already have property.

"I'm like a camel that's out in the desert, and I need some water," Hatchett says. "I'm at the point of no return."

Loopholes and going slow

Hatchett and his partners have plenty of company. The state has received thousands of applications for licenses to grow or sell pot, mostly from folks who claim social equity status under a provision designed to give the disadvantaged a leg up.

Dispensaries and cultivation centers now in business that began as medical marijuana operations are mostly white, and often corporate, undertakings. The state says it wants people impacted by the war on drugs to profit from pot, and so it has established a licensing system designed to benefit "social equity" applicants. With 20 percent of the grade based on whether an applicant qualifies under the social equity program, it is the single biggest consideration in awarding licenses.

Hatchett says that he's been approached by well-heeled investors who wouldn't qualify as social equity applicants. " 'Do you really want to do that application on your own are you sure you don't want to join us?'" he recalls.

The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation has received 4,517 applications for dispensaries, with 4,400 coming from applicants who say they qualify for social equity points. Entities can have more than one license, and of more than 900 entities that have applied, more than 800 have claimed social equity status, the department says. The Department of Agriculture has received 853 applications to grow, transport and make edibles and other non-smokable products from cannabis, with 721 of the applicants asserting they qualify under the state's social equity program.

The numbers make Hatchett wonder.

"How can there be such a high percentage who say they are social equity applicants?" he asks.

Akele Parnell, attorney with the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, has an answer: The law has loopholes, he says, and the definition of "social equity applicant" is overly broad.

"I've seen a lot that makes me wary," says Parnell, who was a lawyer for Green Thumb Industries, a Chicago-based marijuana company with stock traded on the Canadian stock exchange, before taking his current job last year.

Dr. Lawrence Hatchett has applied for licenses to start 10 dispensaries and two grow operations.

People who've been arrested on marijuana charges but not convicted, whether as adults or juveniles, qualify, as do people who've been convicted. Spouses, parents and children of people who've been arrested or convicted of pot offenses also qualify. And so a wealthy person who hired top-notch lawyers to handle his son's arrest for pot possession would meet the standard, Parnell notes. He uses the example of George W. Bush, who was once arrested for driving under the influence: If it had been weed, Bush and his parents if they were still alive and his daughters would all qualify as social equity applicants if they moved here (the law requires that social equity applicants, but not other applicants, live in Illinois). Eric Clapton, who beat the rap in 1968, also would qualify, as would Snoop Dogg, who's been busted more than once.

Where someone lives, or has lived, can also make a difference. Based on demographics that include poverty rates and arrest statistics, the state has identified census tracts deemed to have suffered disproportionately from the war on drugs, and people who have lived in such areas for at least five of the past 10 years qualify. The areas include Jerome, which is adjacent to a dilapidated apartment complex that's been cleaned up, and Humboldt Park in Chicago, where gentrification has taken hold, Parnell says. And so a well-off Humboldt Park denizen who doesn't know anyone who's been arrested could qualify, as would Jerome Mayor Mike Lopez. Dr. Hatchett says he qualifies by virtue of living in a census tract deemed disproportionately impacted.

Parnell also sees a loophole in a provision allowing license seekers to qualify as social equity applicants if they have at least 10 employees and more than half live in areas deemed disproportionately impacted. Employees who've been arrested or convicted of marijuana offenses also count, as do employees who have spouses, parents or children who've gotten busted for low-level marijuana crimes. Parnell notes that there is no requirement that applicants keep such folks on the payroll once licenses are awarded. The entire provision, he argues, should be abolished: Ownership, he says, is what should matter, not whether applicants have hired disadvantaged people.

Parnell also argues for a tiered approach. A rich person with a relative who got busted for weed but was never convicted shouldn't be treated the same as a poor person who served time for pot. Instead, he suggests, give more consideration to people who have suffered the most.

"I think there's going to be a lot of folks who win who are not social equity applicants in the spirit of social equity," says Parnell, who predicts that nearly all of the licenses will go to social equity applicants. "My prediction is, less than 50 percent, maybe 25 percent, will be real social equity applicants. That's a little cynical. I hope that's not the case."

The law also rewards applicants who submit diversity plans that explain how they would provide opportunities in management, contracting and employment. In the case of grow operations, a diversity plan can earn an applicant 100 of a possible 1,000 points, more points than can be gained with plans to train employees or ensure product safety and accurate labeling. Points are awarded in 12 categories, with only social equity status, plans for security and recordkeeping, and business plans that include financing sources and evidence of business acumen carrying more weight than diversity plans. While operators will be required to submit diversity reports when renewing licenses, it's not clear how the state will ensure that diversity plans submitted by successful applicants will be carried out.

Applications are not subject to public disclosure, but the importance of diversity plans was evident last month, when backers of a proposed Pleasant Plains grow operation told neighbors that owners would concentrate on hiring minorities. Chris Stone, who's been in the pot business since the state legalized medical marijuana, explained the proposal to neighbors and said that employees who've been with the company for more than three years will get stakes through a stock ownership program after the business has been in operation for five years.

"The owners...want to provide opportunity for the creation of generational wealth for those that do not have these opportunities currently," backers wrote in a handout distributed to neighbors who attended an informational meeting.

Also, there is a question of scale. Each of the 21 existing cultivation centers established when medical pot was legalized can grow 210,000 square feet of marijuana for recreational use; there is no cap on how many square feet of medical marijuana can be grown. No more medical cultivation licenses will be issued under current law, and no additional large-scale cultivation centers for recreational pot are anticipated. New growers will be capped at 14,000 square feet at full build out. Parnell asks why startups shouldn't be allowed to establish grow operations as large as ones now allowed in an industry dominated by white people.

Photo by Bruce Rushton

LInes are common outside Illinois pot dispensaries, where nearly $240 million worth of pot and cannabis products were sold during the first six months of this year despite shortages.

"The larger ones are going to benefit from economy of scale: It's not a competitive business model," Parnell says. "Can you even survive and, if so, for how long? That's not something that's talked about a lot, but it should be, and it will be."

Toi Hutchinson, a former state senator who helped push the pot legalization bill through the legislature last year and now oversees the state's recreational cannabis program as an adviser to Gov. JB Pritzker, acknowledges that tweaks might be needed as the state gains experience.

"As a former legislator, I know there's no such thing as a perfect piece of legislation I came into this knowing that my whole role would be to identify what we figured out in the beginning and what we're learning as we go," she says. "This is a growth industry that's going to adapt and change and move."

There's nothing to prevent successful applicants who meet social equity requirements from selling licenses, although reduced licensing fees as well as state grants and low-interest loans reserved for social equity enterprises would have to be repaid if licenses are sold within five years of being granted. Larry O'Hern, who owns a Fulton County cultivation center and an interest in a Peoria dispensary, says entities that stand little chance of winning licenses are watching. "There are multiple companies from out of state, like hawks on a fence, waiting for them to be awarded so they can pick them off," he says.

While Hutchinson says the state's cannabis program is set up to promote diverse ownership that endures, there are no guarantees, and licensees can do what they wish with licenses once they are awarded. "I do not want to reduce the property rights of a minority owner so they have less property rights than white counterparts," Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson said uncertainties are why Illinois has adopted a go-slow strategy. The limited number of Illinois dispensary and growing licenses each will come with five-figure annual fees to successful applicants. The law also decrees how many dispensaries will be allowed in given cities. Springfield, where two dispensaries now do business and licenses for two additional dispensaries have been issued, has been allotted one new dispensary in the initial round of applications. By the end of next year, the state is due to issue another 110 dispensary licenses and an additional 60 licenses to grow marijuana. Beyond that, the state has set a hard cap of 500 recreational dispensaries and 150 new recreational grow facilities.

Other states have issued far more licenses, more quickly, and without geographic restrictions. The law requires Hutchinson to deliver a report next spring on whether discrimination exists in the industry and what might be preventing people from entering the pot business.

"We'll be looking at how ownership changes, how it actually ends up growing and changing in real time," Hutchinson said. "These are all reasons why this is a slow, multiyear, phased approach. ... When we get through this phase, we will study this whole process, how it started, how the application process worked, who got licenses, where are the barriers, what does the industry look like."

"We're super-excited"

Dr. Hatchett lauds the goal, and he agrees with limiting the number of licenses. "I give credit to Illinois for this process I really think they're trying to do it the right way," he says. But the wait has not been easy.

Former state Sen. Toi Hutchinson, who helped write the marijuana bill and advises Gov. JB Pritzker, says that starting slow is best.

"It's stressful that we're being put on delay," he says. "We're praying for September."

Hutchinson blames coronavirus for delays in granting licenses that were due in May and last month. The General Assembly, due to a truncated session, didn't pass legislation setting tiebreaker rules in the event top applicants have identical scores, she notes. Absent rules written into statute by lawmakers, the state Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, which establishes rules necessary for agencies to oversee laws, must approve rules. The earliest that can happen is next month.

Also, the application scoring process has taken longer than expected. The state has hired KPMG, an accounting firm, to score applications for dispensaries and growing operations, and more applications were submitted than expected. According to a recent report in the Chicago Sun-Times, the state's contract with KPMG has ballooned from $2.5 million to $6.7 million. The newspaper also has reported that the contract required KPMG to physically pick up applications for dispensary licenses, which wasn't possible because the firm instituted a travel ban in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Parnell says some applicants are skeptical that a travel ban could delay license awards for this long. "A lot of folks are suspicious, I'll say that," he says. "What's the real cause of it? I don't know." But Parnell doesn't dispute that rules to resolve ties are needed, in part to avoid litigation from losers.

Given the number of applicants, there will be plenty of losers. Still, experts say that Illinois is among the most promising marijuana markets in the nation, with predictions of annual sales ranging as high as $4 billion once there is sufficient product and retail outlets to meet demand. During the first six months of this year, nearly $239.2 million in weed, edibles and other cannabis products were sold in the state's 55 recreational dispensaries. Recreational pot isn't legal in any state that touches Illinois, and nonresidents accounted for $56.8 million of the total.

"With its permissive laws for visitors and intelligently constructed plan to make medical dispensaries the first (recreational) dispensaries, the state seems primed for an effective transition and the opportunity to bring in massive business from neighboring states," wrote attorneys for Thompson Coburn, a law firm, in a 2019 ranking of states based on how favorable they are for pot businesses. The silk-stocking firm, which provides legal advice to marijuana businesses, includes such past and present partners as John Cullerton, former Illinois Senate president, Kit Bond, former Missouri governor and U.S. senator and the late Thomas Eagleton, former U.S. senator from Missouri.

Illinois shot from number 18 to number 6 in the firm's rankings, thanks to legalization of recreational pot and a regulatory scheme the firm calls "expansive and canny." Other top-tier states include Oregon, Colorado and Nevada, which have granted far more licenses at lower cost and with less bureaucracy than Illinois. "I would say it comes down to your preference in business," says Michael Rosenblum, a Thompson Coburn lawyer who helped prepare the rankings. "If you feel you can acquire a limited number of licenses, barriers to entry will protect you." On the other hand, small businesses, he says, might prefer states with large numbers of licenses issued at low cost because it's easier to get started.

In a June appearance on "Mad Money," a CNBC television program on the stock market, Ben Kovlar, CEO of Green Thumb Industries, set the future value of the Illinois market at $3 billion. "There are going to be many, many, many winners," he said. "We're super-excited about the Illinois market."

Akele Parnell, a lawyer for the Chicago Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights, sees loopholes and predicts that fewer than half of licensees will meet the spirit of the law designed to create social equity.

GTI, which has two large cultivation centers and five recreational dispensaries in Illinois along with operations in 11 other states, plans to establish an incubator program for startups, which is one way established companies can meet a state requirement to provide financial assistance and otherwise help new licensees. Another way is to write checks for deposit into a state fund set up to provide loans and grants to social equity enterprises. In its most recent annual report, GTI says it has partnerships with other enterprises in four states, including Illinois. "The company structures its joint ventures on a case-by-case basis but generally maintains operational control over the joint venture business and a variable economic interest," the company says.

Partnerships are welcome, Hutchinson says. "It's a fact that small businesses are competing against very big businesses," she says. "I'm hoping to see a lot of these small enterprises hook up or partner. I love to hear entrepreneurs think about it in a very fulsome way."

It is better for regulators to go slow and small at the start than big and fast, Hutchinson says, because what happens now will define the future. "I can't erase the fact that the medical (marijuana) industry existed for six years before we did this," she says. The state, she says, needs to be cautious. "You can't go backwards, you can't unring that bell," she says. "Once they're there, they're there."

Meanwhile, applicants wait. Despite requirements that growers not discriminate in selling product to dispensaries, Hatchett says he needs a growing facility in addition to dispensaries to ensure an adequate supply of product. He isn't banking on getting everything he's asked for.

"If I get more than one location, I'll be tremendously happy," he says. "We're going to have diversity and we'll try to be as independent as possible and bring in people of color."

Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.

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The road to riches - Illinois Times

RVA Mag spoke with Virginia State Senator and candidate for governor Jennifer McClellan about her plan for Virginia, from renewable energy and Citizen Review Boards to marijuana legalization and the Green New Deal.

Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia State Senator representing the Richmond-based 9th District, has declared her candidacy in the 2021 race for governor. If successful, she would be the first Black woman elected governor in United States history, and the second woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. An attorney by trade, McClellan was also the first member of the Virginia House of Delegates to participate in a legislative session while pregnant. After Donald McEachins election to the House of the Representatives, McClellan won her current seat in the state senate in a special election.

A former chair of the Virginia DNC, McClellan has moved to the left of other prominent Virginia Democrats who have facilitated widely criticized energy contracts and pipelines in collaboration with energy giants such as Dominion. Below, McClellan presents a platform that includes fighting Dominion, demilitarizing the Virginia State police, and decriminalizing all drugs.

RVA Mag: Senator McClellan, thank you for taking the time to sit with us. Lets start with the main thing on everyones mind right now: policing. As a candidate for Governor, how do you view police reform on a state-wide level?

Jennifer McClellan: Starting with special session, its shifting a couple of different ways. Theres accountability, transparency, and consequences around police misconduct whether its use of force, corruption, the whole nine yards. We need independent investigations from either a Civilian Review Board (CRB) or, at the state level, just a separate entity outside the police. They need to have subpoena power, to be able to recommend, if they find a wrongdoing, that there are consequences and that that is transparent. And that you dont have a system where a police officer can be found to have done something wrong in one place, and just get transferred and go on as if nothing happened.

Police have been used as the first responder for too many issues that are not crime issues. Its not just mental health, but mental health is a big part of it. Im carrying a bill to allow localities to do Marcus Alerts and have the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Department of Behavioral Health to provide guidelines around that. Ghazala Hashmi and I are working together on the CRB, but well also have broad police reform [legislation] no chokeholds, no no-knock warrants.

Its not just the action of police and the community; its also what happens once youre in the criminal justice system. Making sure that we provide more of what Ill call prosecutor mercy getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences so that if there is a crime, the penalty for it is proportionate to the injury, and allowing prosecutors to do deferred disposition for certain things.

RVA Mag: Would you be interested in the CRB being a full-time, paid job for citizens? How do you conceive of the makeup of that board, and how do we give people enough training, confidence, and support to do that job, and do it seriously?

JMC: From the states level, we are [structuring] broad guidelines that localities could use to tailor-fit their areas. Having said that, I do think having, if not full-time, at least members who are fully trained so that they fully understand the nature of what law enforcement does on a day-to-day basis, so that they understand the training that law enforcement has.

RVA Mag: If we only put in place broad legislative guidance that municipalities need to have a CRB, arent we leaving undue leeway for racially-biased municipalities to not take it seriously? Arent we allowing them to make it toothless?

JMC: Im not ready to share the full details of [Senator Hashmis] bill, but we are talking with Princess Blanding and a lot of the advocates here. We are including their feedback in the draft we have.

We want to make sure that if a locality has a CRB, it has teeth and its independent: that it is not beholden to the police that theyre investigating. Boards of Supervisors or City Councils could have bias, and were trying to account for all of that. Were focusing on enabling legislation, because its probably going to take more time to figure out all the best practices that we can put in place going forward.

RVA Mag: Lets talk about defense contracts and the Navy. Previous governors have seemed somewhat uncritically beholden to these contracts. Its been said implicitly, and perhaps explicitly, that the economy of Virginia hinges on these contracts. How do you feel about the critical centrality of defense contracts to Virginias economy?

JMC: If youre dependent on mechanisms of war, thats just wrong. We shouldnt be dependent on war for people to eat. Our number one business is Agribusiness. Our number two industry is Forestry. We should be working to strengthen those, and working to strengthen small businesses to not be as dependent on defense contracting, because then how well our economy does is dependent on if were in a state of war, or a state of [war] readiness, or not. Thats contradictory to the view of a beloved community.

RVA Mag: For the past two months, we have witnessed firsthand the intersection of the police and military in the streets of Richmond. That extends to the Virginia State Police, which you as governor would have control of. State police have arrived in the streets of Richmond with military vehicles and artillery. What is going on, and how are we going to address that?

JMC: I do not think police should be militarized. They do not need militarized weapons, and I think we should begin to demilitarize them. A lot of equipment is paid for through grant programs. Rather than using funding to buy military grade equipment, we should be using funding to address the root causes of crime, like mental health issues, and, to a certain extent, poverty: lack of access to economic opportunity. I dont think you need military grade equipment.

RVA Mag: We already have the military grade equipment. Would you commit to selling off the stock of military equipment?

JMC: I would be open to that.

RVA Mag: And what about the formerly-known-as Robert E. Lee Monument, now known as Marcus-David Peters Circle? Are you for VSP fully standing down and staying out of that circle?

JMC: Unless someone is actively threatening someone else, I dont know why theyd be there.

RVA Mag: Kim Gray has taken issue with the Black, community-based security that has been there ostensibly to protect black protesters from white supremacists. Do you agree with Kim Gray that we should disallow the carrying of AR-15s by these security personnel who have the legal right to carry them?

JMC: Right now open carry is legal for anybody, and you cant pick and choose who can carry and who cannot. There are a lot of people who want to have a conversation about whether anybody can open carry in a public park space, and I think thats a conversation worth having. But I dont think you can pick and choose: these people can, and these people cant.

RVA Mag: Lets discuss marijuana policy. Why, under the new state law, are police still being given enforcement discretion over a petty issue such as possessing a small amount of marijuana, an issue that disproportionately criminalizes Black and brown people? Why decriminalization and not full legalization?

JMC: It needs to be full legalization for both possession and distribution. Unfortunately, the reason its just decriminalization now is that we couldnt get the votes to go farther than that this year, but were pushing to go farther as soon as possible. I would have preferred full legalization of possession now. Were doing a study on how to do distribution in a way so that the new market is not just the folks who have medical cannabis licenses now who are mostly white, upper middle class, and have a leg up. I have the resolution to have JLARC study how we do that distribution piece equitably, while also dealing with expungements and unraveling the War on Drugs, and giving people who have been arrested for what is going to be legal a path forward. We need to do both as quickly as possible. Youll see, come January, were going to have legislation to do both.

RVA Mag: What about harder drugs? For example: heroin, cocaine, crack, crystal meth. We are incarcerating people for a health issue, and it does the opposite of providing rehabilitative care. Do you think its possible that sending someone to jail for substance abuse is ever a rehabilitative gesture by the government?

JMC: I dont think we should send somebody to jail just for using drugs, let me be clear on that. Whether its drugs or anything that is a crime, how we deal with it should be proportionate to the injury caused. There are a lot of crimes where the punishment is too harsh, and we should change that.

For example, there are no gradations of assault on a police officer. If you throw an onion ring at a police officer and it hits him, you can get the same sentence as if you beat him over the head with a sledgehammer. That doesnt make sense.

Im open to looking into all crimes to say, Whats the social benefit of making this a crime? Does it still exist? If it does, is the punishment proportionate? Thats the direction we should be moving in. They shouldnt just punish you because you did something wrong and then warehouse you, throw away the key, and assume youre never getting out. It should be: what is going to be a deterrent and a proportionate punishment, and how do we focus on rehabilitation and reentry?

RVA Mag: One of the ways people approach drug abuse as a health issue is talking about harm reduction during drug use, since people cant necessarily just stop using drugs because the state says so. Do you think it would be a good idea to help facilitate safer drug use practices as we treat people for their drug addiction, like providing access to safe supplies of needles?

JMC: Yes, I do. We should be looking at the underlying reasons of what made you turn to drugs in the first place. If its a mental health issue thats gone untreated, lets get you into the treatment you need so that you wont turn back to drugs. That has to be part of the process.

RVA Mag: How do you feel about energy exploration off the coast of Virginia? How do you see Virginias energy independence moving forward, and how do you feel about Dominion colonizing that area?

JMC: Broadly, electric generation needs to shift away from fossil fuels to renewables. We are going to need more solar and more wind, regardless of who provides it. It would be better to have more wind provided by a third party, separate companies from Dominion. I dont see how we get to 100 percent carbon-free without wind. We cant get there with solar only. Wind is much better for the climate than natural gas or coal.

We did not have the votes in the General Assembly to get the full Green New Deal. The Clean Economy Act, which we did pass, does make a huge shift away from carbon into renewable, but its a first step. We need to push to try to get there faster.

RVA Mag: Do you take money from Dominion?

JMC: I do not.

RVA Mag: How do you feel about the Mountain Valley Pipeline?

JMC: I oppose it.

RVA Mag: Can you commit for the people of Virginia to make going against Dominion, and speaking out against the Mountain Valley Pipeline and offshore colonization, a central platform in your campaign for Governor?

JMC: Yes. I am focused on addressing climate change and shifting our energy policy so that it is less harmful to the environment, reducing energy demand through energy efficiency projects in a way that does not cause rate shock and allows the lights to stay on. I am fighting for the policy, and whoever stands in the way, I will fight against them.

RVA Mag: SoBig T [Terry McAuliffe] is running again. Is he the right person?

JMC: I cant explain what he does either. Im running because Virginia is ready for a new generation of leadership who will build a recovery in a way that addresses 400 years of inequity, and Im ready to do that. Im not running against anybody else. Im just running for the future of Virginia that I want to see, that comes to terms with our past. Im focused on talking to the community and talking to voters directly, and not on what other candidates are doing.

Top Photo via Jennifer McClellan/Facebook

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Dominion, Decriminalization, and Demilitarizing the Police: An Exclusive Q&A With Jennifer McClellan - rvamag.com

Reparations to Black Americans for slavery is an old and fraught national topic. It has been taken up recently by activists seeking racial justice and police reform in cities, including Asheville, North Carolina, which styles itself as a progressive city but has a history of urban renewal that largely excluded Black people from sharing in the wealth created.

In July, the Asheville City Council passed a reparations ordinance, one of only a handful enacted in the U.S. Among other measures, it pledges new investment in Black homeownership as a way to redress the racial wealth gap. As in other segregated cities, Black children in Asheville are far more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods.

Ashevilles ordinance doesnt provide financial restitution for past discrimination and its unclear how much money will be committed. But advocates say it represents a potentially new approach to reparations, one that puts the emphasis on local actions as a building block toward a national effort to tackle structural racial inequities.

Anthropologist Paul Mullins says Asheville is acknowledging its role in perpetuating injustices and providing a path forward. And thats deep-down what reparations are about: How can we have a measure of response to injustice that leads to some sort of racial reconciliation?

Asheville, N.C.

For all the funky exterior of a progressive mountain redoubt, this city has until now often looked the other way when it comes to racial inequity.

Two months after days of intense racial justice protests, however, a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that had stood for nearly a century is gone. And an obelisk in the honor of Confederate-era Gov. Zeb Vance is now wrapped in black plastic, as the city considers its removal.

But those symbolic changes have been followed by something that could prove more concrete. Last month, the majority-white Asheville City Council unanimously passed a reparations ordinance aimed at righting not just historic injustice against Black Americans, but more recent wrongs against Ashevilles Black population.

In the past 40 years, residents say, urban renewal and discriminatory banking practices dispossessed especially older Black residents from historic Asheville neighborhoods. Today, 60% of public housing residents are Black, even though they only make up 12% of Ashevilles population, reflecting thenational trend in which Black children are far more likely than their white peers to grow up in poor neighborhoods.

Asheville is a microcosm of the nation right now, says John Hennon, a retired corporate executive turned pro-Black rights protester. Its done talking and its now acting.

The city ordinance isnt strictly reparations, which involve the direct redistribution of wealth. Its real contribution, though, may be to sharpen the optics for a national rethink of the concept: how laws and practices that were both explicitly and implicitly discriminatory have reinforced yawning gaps around wealth, health, even of hope.

Closing those racial gaps runs up against entrenched opposition. Even white liberals have balked at reforms like building public housing in gentrified neighborhoods. President Donald Trump has touted his save-the-suburbs campaign by undoing federal executive orders intended to add low-income housing in predominantly white middle-class districts.

These tensions arent going to go away magically if we ignore them, and frankly were in a historical moment where the [reparations] conversation is ... more publicly palatable, says Indiana University anthropologist Paul Mullins, author of Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture.

He frames the Asheville ordinance as a political statement that acknowledges racial injustices around land ownership and dispossession after World War II. Moreover, it outlines a first step toward some sort of reconciliation. And thats deep-down what reparations are about: How can we have a measure of response to injustice that leads to some sort of racial reconciliation?

The idea of compensating formerly enslaved Black Americans has been around since before the Declaration of Independence. Even some white Southerners urged the idea as an economic stimulus for the postwar South. More recently, the U.S. has paid reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Still, two-thirds of Americans regularly pan the proposal. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senates only Black Republican, has likened reparations to trying to unscramble that egg. President Barack Obama in 2016 called the idea impractical.

Polls show most Black Americans agree with the concept of reparations. But even as support has grown in that community in recent months, overall white support has barely budged.

White people opposed to reparations say it would be unfair to force modern-day Americans to underwrite a wealth transfer for injustices they didnt personally commit. Scholars have estimated that the price tag could be as much as $10 trillion, or nearly half the nations annual economic output.

Ruben Dejernette is one of those torn by the concept. The white Asheville homeowner bought a house four years ago in what used to be the citys Black neighborhood on South French Broad.

There is no escaping that we have been doing the Black community wrong, but every time I go over it in my head I dont know what can actually be done to fix it, says Mr. Dejernette.

Nearly all Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, have come out in favor of a national commission to study reparations. A House study bill that would do just that has gone nowhere in Congress for 30 years.

Conservative Black commentator Vince Ellison says the Black community would be foolish to expect progressive Democrats to remunerate them for slavery. He calls reparations a lie.

Black people should look at white people who think theyre going to solve my problem and say, Who the hell do you think you are? says Mr. Ellison, a Virginia-based pastor and author.

Reparations just make you a slave looking for a master. Reparations is about making them pay, but youll never get enough. Forgiveness cannot be earned, and it shouldnt be expected.

In 2014, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates penned a case for reparations in a widely-read cover story for The Atlantic. [A]s surely as the creation of the [racial] wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same, he wrote.

Yet as the slow walk for the House study bill shows, even studying reparations is deeply unpopular, says David Bateman, co-author of Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction.

The question is, how do you actually amass a winning and enduring coalition that can sustain a particular vision? How do you define it and what would it look like? That might be easier done at the local level,thoughmost localities dont have the fiscal capacity or reach necessary to achieve a meaningful redistributive program.

In June, the California Assembly voted to create a reparations task force, and in July, Providence, Rhode Island, embarked on a truth telling and reparations process. The effort in Rhode Island underscores the extent to which Northern cities also profited from slavery and segregation.

In November, Evanston, Illinois, by an 8-1 vote, became the first entity to establish a reparations fund through a future recreational marijuana tax. How the money will be dispersed is still not clear.

Advocates for reparations say such efforts may ultimately nourish a broader national reparations bill by laying groundwork for what reparations look and feel like to Americans living in segregated areas, whether in the North or South.

This is a situation where many different entities states, cities, religious institutions, industries are beginning to recognize and realize that each unjustly benefited from the stolen labor during the enslavement era and through continuing laws and practice like gerrymandering, redlining, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration, says Washington, D.C., civil rights attorney Nkechi Taifa.

They are looking in their own backyards to rectify some of these abuses they themselves not personally, but institutionally were responsible for.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Black rights activist John Hennon holds a sign next to the Zeb Vance monument in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 29, 2020. In response to racial justice protests, the city wrapped the obelisk, a monument to a Confederate-era governor, in plastic.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, a familiar pattern played out here in Asheville, which has become known as a beer brewing mecca.

Urban renewal brought the promise of a fresh start, and in some ways it laid the groundwork for the tourist destination the city is today. But renewal came at the expense of Black people. The cheapest properties to buy were targeted, with the city clearing out parts of the South French Broad neighborhood where Mr. Dejernette lives. Today, even a small home there can fetch $700,000.

But it wasnt just white people who benefited from Ashevilles gentrification. Retired paper mill worker Amanuel Lytle, who is Black, bought his newly vacant lot for $1, with a promise that he would build a new house on it.

A lot of the homes were falling down, says Mr. Lytle. The people who lived there didnt have enough money for upkeep, and the taxes kept going up.

A white builder agreed to cosign Mr. Lytles mortgage so that the bank would pay for the house that now stands there.

Many others, says Mr. Lytle, didnt have such benefactors. Today, most Black people live in public housing. Rates of Black homeownership in the city have declined as housing values and white wealth have soared.

These disparities, rooted in economic and social policy, are now part of the reparations conversation here.

Ashevilles reparations ordinance offers an official apology and vows to create policy and programs that will establish the creation of generational wealth and address reparations due in the black community. It also asks the state legislature and federal government to do the same.

That process may involve replacing lost housing stock by using city-owned land and its bonding authority to create new housing that will boost Black wealth, Sheneika Smith, a Black city councilor, has said.

If a community says were going to redevelop the urban core and were going to favor descendant communities ... you could dramatically and radically reshape a city that way through modest kinds of policies that dont cost a ton of money, says Professor Mullins.

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Reparations is a nonstarter in Congress. Not in this Southern city. - The Christian Science Monitor

Part of a series by NKYs nonprofits who stand together against racism and any acts that dehumanize people.

We are still here.

As the impact of Covid-19 became increasingly evident, Womens Crisis Centers staff repeated this phrase quite often. Power-based personal violence such as sexual assault, stalking, and partner violence didnt disappear just because a pandemic showed up. The ugly truth, in fact, was that stay-at-home mandates meant that some people were stuck at home with the people who were hurting them. The way we helped folks in our community had to change. As a result, it was painfully urgent and incredibly important for us to let it be known that even though things looked somewhat different, we hadnt left. We were still there for those who needed us when they needed us. We were making sure to include that simple message in our social media posts, our press releases, in the various interviews, and even in the signs that hang on our front doors.

We are still here.

On May 25, the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers became the most recent public display of the pillars of white supremacy upon which this country was built. George Floyds name was added to a centuries-long list of Black people who have been killed unjustly in our country. In our own state of Kentucky, Breonna Taylors life had been stolen by police officers just two months prior. Sam DuBose was shot and killed by a police officer a short five years ago just across the river in Cincinnati. And it doesnt seem that long ago that the streets of Cincinnati erupted in sadness and anger after Timothy Thomas was killed by police. Our state, our region, and certainly our country are no strangers to the oppression that continues to happen time and time again to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). This isnt a new issue. It can be traced back to racist stop-and-frisk policies. Or a war on drugs that disproportionately targeted communities of color. It can be traced back to Jim Crow laws and segregation. It can be seen in our Constitutions 13th Amendment, and indeed in the enslavement of people during the very formation of this country and for nearly a century after. The progress that we have seen hasnt carried us very far away from our racist roots. We are in a very familiar place.

We are still here.

Its infuriating that a phrase used by our agency to provide reassurance and stability to folks in our community can also be used to remind us what a poor job we have done addressing racial disparities, oppression, and hatred in our country and in our communities. How disheartening it is to still be having the same discussions with what feels like such little progress.

When a person walks through Womens Crisis Centers doors for help, they bring with them the traumas that they have experienced, the most apparent of which might be a recent encounter they have had with violence. However its important for us to remember as advocates, as service providers, and as human beings that different identities carry different traumas. When we support someone who has been impacted by violence, we need to remember the additional traumas they may have experienced due to racism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia. These traumas stack, compound, and can weave themselves together. This is all before even considering the generational trauma that exists in individuals belonging to groups who have been historically oppressed.

A large part of our agencys work is in violence prevention. We place enormous emphasis on the role that each individual plays in preventing violence. We work with middle school, high school, and college students as well as individuals throughout our communities to stop violence from happening in the first place, and to create a culture that is utterly intolerant of violence. We have seen hope, and we have seen small changes. But we know that we can not end one form of violence without ending all forms of violence. Just as our identities intersect, so does violence and the roles it plays. We can not eliminate power-based personal violence without also eliminating prejudice. We can not create policies to support survivors of sexual and domestic violence without also abolishing policies that have systemically upheld white supremacy. We can not be an agency for all people without recognizing that the word all has historically meant something entirely contrary. The same man who penned we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal enslaved over 600 people in his adult life. Racial oppression and white supremacy are present in the very fibers of our countrys fabric.

It is critically important at this time in history to specifically name those who have historically been excluded from all.

Black lives matter.Native lives matter.Trans lives matter.

These statements stand alone. It is unacceptable to be anything but deliberate in shouting these phrases that have been left unsaid for far too long.

As an agency, Womens Crisis Center has committed to reviewing and improving our own internal practices and trainings. Through the lens of absolute loyalty to survivors of power-based personal violence, we will examine and evaluate the relationships we hold with our communities, with partner agencies and the systems survivors navigate. We will amplify the voices of BIPOC through our internal and external messaging. We will strive to maintain better representation of BIPOC on our staff, within our leadership, and on our board. A full breakdown of our plan and commitment can be found at wccky.org.

We must understand the role we have played in maintaining white supremacy. We must recognize that our allegiances have not always been defined clearly enough. We must accept that we have been wrong. These statements are true not only for us as an agency, but as a much larger movement of violence prevention and intervention.

We are still here, and we want to be here in a better, more impactful, and much more intentional way for the BIPOC in our communities who rely on us. And we will be.

Womens Crisis Centers Christy Burch, Executive Director, Jamie Sivrais, Communications Coordinator, and Reagan Amith, director of Non-Residential Services, contributed to this commentary.

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Advancing Equity: Women's Crisis Center staff repeats this phrase and means it 'We are still here' - User-generated content

In the history of the Academy Awards, Steven Soderbergh is the only director who had to compete against himself. And he won.

Prognosticators figured Soderbergh hurt his chances by directing two of 2000s five best pictures. (Actually, lets make that two of the four best; how did the insipid Chocolat make the cut?) The conventional wisdom was Soderbergh would cancel himself out with Traffic and Erin Brockovich splitting the vote, but he was the surprise victor for best director with Traffic. Thats even more surprising when you consider that best picture, an award that usually went hand-in-hand with best director in those days, went to Gladiator.

It cant hurt that Soderbergh is not only insanely prolific and smart but that actors by far, the biggest group of Oscar voters love to work with him. Many top Hollywood names are Soderbergh recidivists, including Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle and George Clooney. Maybe a bunch of those folks solved the double-nomination problem by conspiring to put their votes behind Traffic?

Well never know, but we do know something happened in Soderberghs career around 1998. After making a splash at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he built a reputation as a cerebral, experimental writer/director but never made anything resembling a popular movie until Out of Sight. That began a string of five wildly entertaining titles in a three-year span, including The Limey, Brockovich, Traffic and his biggest hit, the glittering remake of Oceans 11.

Although those movies vary in tone, ranging from the grit of Traffic to the larkiness of Oceans, they all share an element Soderbergh often returns to: the caper. His characters are usually trying to get away with something illegal and Soderbergh likes to let us in on the planning, so we can see where it goes right or, more often, wrong.

One of my favorites of his is the noirish caper The Underneath, starring Elisabeth Shue, but I cant find it streaming anywhere. The following seven, fortunately, are easy to find. (Out of Sight is not on the list because I included it on my list of best Steve Zahn movies a couple of weeks ago.)

Erin Brockovich (2000)

Not for the first time, I think the Oscars got it wrong with Soderbergh because Brockovich is better than Traffic. Probably the most conventional movie the prolific director has made a fish-out-of-water, little-guy-fights-city-hall biopic its a crowd-pleaser that doesnt make you feel stupid for loving it. A #MeToo movie before that movement launched, its also a showcase for Roberts, who won an Oscar for her weary, cut-the-crap performance.

The Informant! (2009)

Ive never understood why this comedy, written by Golden Valley native Scott Z. Burns (also the screenwriter of the next two movies on this list) wasnt a hit. It stars Matt Damon, at the peak of his popularity, as a moron whom the FBI enlists as a mole in an investigation of corporate malfeasance. (One benefit of working frequently with the same actors is that they trust Soderbergh to cast them in a variety of roles, and respond with the kind of vanity-free work Damon does here.) Its hilarious and, with its theme of government and business incompetence, troubling.

Side Effects (2013)

Soderbergh, also the cinematographer and editor of Side Effects, may have been born three decades too late. Hollywood loved twisty, clever thrillers in the 70s and 80s but had given up on them by the time this one hit theaters. Fans of The Usual Suspects will eat up the murder mystery, which, like quite a few Soderbergh titles, has nasty things to say about Big Pharma. Besides Channing Tatum, Rooney Mara, Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones, the cast includes St. Paul native Laila Robins (thats her warning, Its gonna follow you around forever, in the trailer).

Contagion (2011)

Did she mention seeing anyone who was sick? is not a phrase any of us wants to hear in the era of contact tracing, but this melodrama about a pandemic feels creepily prescient. Partly set in the Twin Cities but shot outside of Chicago, it features yet another all-star cast (Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard) and yet another Minnesota native (Alexandrias John Hawkes).

Logan Lucky (2017)

The most gleefully silly of all of Soderberghs caper comedies, its another throwback, reminiscent of (but much better than) Smokey and the Bandit. The heist takes place at a NASCAR race, Daniel Craig plays a Southern safecracker named Joe Bang who turns incarcerated into five separate words, Adam Driver keeps losing his prosthetic arm and, eventually, all of that makes sense.

Traffic (2000)

Soderbergh probably won his Oscar for Traffic instead of Brockovich because Traffic (for which he also was the cinematographer) is a flashier demonstration of his skills. Juggling multiple story lines and settings, the drama about the war on drugs remains as potent today as it was 20 years ago.

The Limey (1999)

Soderbergh looks back again, this time to stylized 60s British crime dramas that starred people such as Michael Caine and Terence Stamp. Wittily, Stamp stars in this one, too. Hes a mobster seeking revenge in Los Angeles, and a big part of the movies efficient (less than 90 minutes) fun is how Soderbergh keeps us guessing with tricky editing and visuals.

More here:

7 of the best Steven Soderbergh films to watch right now, from crime dramas to caper comedies - Minneapolis Star Tribune

The establishment of the terrorist groups al-Shabab and the Islamic State with claims to establish the Islamic Law, the corporate interests of the oil industry and the lobby of Erik Prince, a former operative of the American military elite, now at the head of a private business proposal to pacify Cabo Delgado, are considered so far by academics, press and the civil society as the motivations explaining the armed insurgency in the potentially richest province of Mozambique.

By far, heavy drug trafficking and the illegal extraction of resources are framed in the equation. However, as documented by international reports and frequent police seizures, the coast of Cabo Delgado has been an important drug corridor in East Africa since the 1990s, a position recently expanded after Tanzania and Kenya repressed the trafficking networks, pushing them into Mozambican waters.

One of the largest drug seizures in the countrys history occurred in that province in 1997, when 12 tons of hashish were seized, part of it on the beach and another container on the way to Nacala. In December last year, in the middle of the insurgent war, two ships carrying two tons of heroin were intercepted by the Navy and the Defense and Security Forces after being stranded at sea, resulting in the detention of 25 foreigners.

Cabo Delgado, on its more than thirty islands, is a transit point, but also uses cabotage and land transport system to drain drugs to Nampula, the distribution hub for strategic destinations.

The Mozambique Financial Information Office (GIFIM) uses independent research calculations estimating that the drug that passes through Mozambique is worth US$600 million per year, an economy higher than the amount disbursed by the cooperation partners, as well as the revenues from some of the main export commodities. Of this amount, $100 million is left on the web of corruption in Mozambique, composed of influential politicians linked to Frelimo, local drug lords and state officials assigned to the Police, Migration and Customs.

More than religious fundamentalism and the dispute of oil multinationals, it is quite obvious that today drug cartels are the ones who profit most from the war in Cabo Delgado, as the already weak sea surveillance has become practically non- -existent, with all the forces focused on halting the increasingly concerted and regular advance of the Islamic state and al-Shabab terrorists.

For several years now, the Navy, for lack of means, has been the branch of the armed forces with more men on land than at sea. That is why, for three years, armed gangs have been entering the sea, destroying and plundering the districts along the coast of the province, with the state unable to stop them.

While trying to resolve the war on the battlefield, the area of the Indian Ocean along Cabo Delgado has strengthened its role as a viaduct for the smuggling of narcotics and the consequent illicit enrichment of mafia elites and networks of traffickers. In addition to drugs, the war has diverted attention from the illegal extraction of natural resources, a criminal practice associated with illegal immigration in the north of the country.

Smuggling paradise

Cabo Delgado province is located in the northern region of Mozambique and corresponds to 10.34% of the national surface with about 4,760 km of inland waters. Its limits are, to the north, the Rovuma River which serves as the natural border with the United Republic of Tanzania, with a territorial extension of about 250 Km; to the south the Lrio River; to the west the Lugenda, Luambeze, Ruaca and Mewo Rivers separate it from Niassa Province and to the east it has the Indian Ocean, which bathes its entire eastern coast with a length of 430 km.

The border with Tanzania is the gateway for illegal immigrants from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, who are attracted by the illegal extraction of timber and precious stones, especially gold and ruby. The illegal mining network enters Cabo Delgado from the Inamoto area, in the administrative post of Quionga, in Palma district, a depopulated piece of land, with several entry and exit areas that are uncontrolled by Migration and Customs authorities.

Illegal immigrants cross the Rovuma River by small boats. On land, they take public transport or rent cars, predominantly Toyota Land Cruiser, and go to Palma-sede, a distance of about 45 kilometers. From here the groups split according to interests, going mainly to Montepuez and Nampula, areas with valuable gemstones and informal commerce respectively.

Another window of entry into Mozambique from Tanzania is the historic district of Mueda, but poor access roads, the long distance from the mining areas, and the tight control at the border discourage illegal immigration, placing Inamoto as the favourite route for foreigners seeking easy wealth.

Used by networks that facilitate the transport of foreigners fleeing war and famine on their land in search of security and work, Cabo Delgado province is also a gateway to South Africa. Migration authorities often neutralize groups of illegal immigrants, and it is estimated that more than six thousand were expelled last year in Cabo Delgado alone.

Military instability in the province has made the entry of illegal immigrants and the illegal extraction of natural resources easier, as the attention of the authorities, press and society in general is focused on armed conflict. The United Nations estimates that the war has displaced 211 000 persons and there are reports of insurgents and illegal immigrants camouflaged as victims of the war.

The Indian Ocean: The drug viaduct

If in the fresh waters of the Rovuma River the entrances to Mozambique are marked, even if the infiltration of immigrants is not controlled, the same cannot be said of the dozens of access points that the Indian Ocean gives to the province of Cabo Delgado. These access points have been transformed by drug cartels into warehouses that link the producer to the consumer.

The province is divided into seventeen districts Ancuabe, Balama, Chire, Ibo, Macomia, Mecfi, Meluco, Metuge, Mocmboa da Praia, Montepuez, Mueda, Muidumbe, Namuno, Nangade, Palma, Pemba and Quissanga. Part of these districts is crossed by the sea, making up the Quirimbas archipelago with more than thirty islands, which serve as areas of call and ports of cabotage taking the drug to land.

The coastal area of Cabo Delgado is long and has no state control. The beaches are calm and are crossed by dunes, which allows drugs to be hidden and drained by small boats. The biggest seizures occur on the island of Ibo, at the beaches of Quissanga and in Pemba, but the inability to monitor does not allow to measure whether seized drug is more than that which passes in disguise.

The port of Nacala is pointed out as one of the outflow centres, with heroin being the main drug in Mozambique, coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Typically, the drug travels in containers mixed with other goods.

The southern route of the drug produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan seems a very long and expensive diversion, but 10 kilos of heroin can cost five dollars at production sites and yield up to 20 000 dollars when sold in a modern world capital.

The drug is also taken to South Africa, from where it leaves to the destinations of consumption, namely Europe and the United States of America. Over and over again, South African authorities make seizures at their border after the drug passes through the Ressano Garcia border post in Maputo.

One of the major seizures was in May 2019, when three Mozambicans were arrested on the N4 road in Kaapmuiden, near Nelspruit, the capital of Mpumalanga. They possessed heroin valued at R60 million, about four million US dollars.

In June this year, two Mozambican truck drivers who had passed the Ressano Garcia border were intercepted soon afterwards on the South African side with more than 200 kilograms of heroin.

The regularity with which the seizures occur is indicative that drug trafficking is a routine business in Mozambique, but often finds no protection in the neighboring country.

Nampula: The habitat of drug lords

Various publications on drug trafficking note that from Cabo Delgado the goods follow, by small boats or vehicles, to the province of Nampula, the real centre of the heavy drug business in Mozambique and home to drug lords and drug traffickers.

The United States of America and England, according to GIFIM, have drawn the attention of the Mozambican authorities to the distortions of the economy in the north of the country, mainly in Pemba and Nampula, mentioning that organized crime introduces dirty money into the national financial system.

The hustle and bustle at Pemba Airport, the connections to rich districts such as Montepuez and Palma and the dynamics in Nacala and Nampula City seem to find no justification in their basic economic structures, namely agriculture, fishing and trade.

Mozambique is not a market for heavy drug consumption, as it is a low-income country. The Annual Drug Report, published last week by the United Nations, highlights that heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are consumed in developed, high-income countries with purchasing capacity.

Drugs and the insurgency

Mozambiques influence on organized crime and drug trafficking led the United Nations to open its office dealing with the problem in Maputo in 2019 at the request of the Mozambican government. Csar Guedes, a Peruvian-Canadian with 20 years of work experience at the United Nations, was made head of the office in Maputo. He had headed the office in Pakistan and Bolivia, two major unions for the industrial production of heroin and hashish.

The opening of the United Nations Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Mozambique is a sign that the dynamics of drug trafficking, institutional promiscuity and money laundering are significant and lack a more structural and international approach.

This office confirms the view that heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe is one of the main reasons for the conflict in Cabo Delgado. Information obtained by the organization indicates that drug production has practically tripled in the last ten years, and Mozambique fits into one of the trafficking corridors that passes through the east coast of Africa.

Lets look at recent statements to the Lusa Agency from the UN Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking in Mozambique: Here, they apparently find a country that has a unique strategic location to facilitate drug trafficking. What these countries offer is ease of passage. Its not a sophisticated thing, but they have huge borders and the authorities are not at every point. And the traffickers know this Its an outside situation with undercover groups that want to do harm to countries that have always lived together peacefully. They have a dangerous agenda, not in line with the reality of the countries; it is a criminal and illegal agenda to do their own business in a difficult situation. It is in times of crisis that traffickers and those who are connected to the illegal economy are best prepared to develop their illegal businesses. Ships large and small, outside the cyclone season, arrive little by little. It is a long but safe journey where a lot of money is made.

Uncontrolled borders

The statements of the representative of the UN Office on Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking show weaknesses in controlling Mozambique sea space, a situation that makes it (sea space) permeable not only to drug trafficking, but also to the development of piracy actions and plunder of its sea resources.

There are many situations that show the vacuum that the coast of Cabo Delgado is in. In 2010, a national flagship vessel called Vega 5 was hijacked at the bank of Sofala, six hundred miles off the coast of Inhassouro in Inhambane province, and for days it sailed the Mozambican waters undisturbed towards Somalia with no State means to stop it. The vessel was refitted but recovered by the Indian military authorities a year after it was taken over by the pirates.

Domestic and international illegal fishing is another factor revealing lack of surveillance capacity. The Ministry of Fisheries estimates that illegal fishing on the Mozambican coast causes an annual loss of US$ 60 million to the public purse. There are often reports of international vessels invading Mozambican waters for fishing and waste disposal.

Major sea surveillance has been carried out irregularly through joint military missions with several partner countries, but the flimsiness of the action does not allow an intervention capable of containing the disorder in Mozambican waters.

The seizures that have occurred are fortuitous, resulting from inadvertent traces along the drug value chain in Mozambique. For example, the two boats seized in December last year ran aground at sea in Pemba a situation that awakened the authorities. In Nampula, there are cases of drugs found in homes and with local fishermen.

This points to lack of responses capable of identifying traffic routes at their origin, which would allow more effective combat and dismantling of groups that facilitate the movement of drugs.

Covid-19 transfers drugs to Cabo Delgado

The Annual Drug Report warns that Covid-19 has increased the use of sea transport for heroin trafficking as the countries restriction measures to prevent the disease have included the suspension of flights and closure of land borders, as well as tightening up on migration control.

These factors have shifted drugs from air and land to sea, with the sea taking on the role of a bridge between areas of production, passage and consumption. As a result of the pandemic, more farmers in Pakistan and Afghanistan have adopted illicit cultivation, either because state authorities may be less able to exercise control or because more people may have to resort to illegal activities due to the economic crisis.

The UN document points out the southern route and the Indian Ocean that passes through Mozambique, as areas to which drug cartels have turned. The trafficking route is defined according to the porousness of the borders and the inability of the countrys authorities to monitor them.

This change may mean that drug trafficking flows along the coast of Cabo Delgado may have increased, which is evidenced in part by the two seizures in a span of one week in December last year of two vessels containing two tonnes of hashish.

Conclusion

Lack of means for sea surveillance, as described above, leaves an important part of the Mozambican coast bare, which is used as a highway by drug trafficking networks. Coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan, drug bypasses the countries with the tightest control and searches for empty routes even if the distances are long.

This is an established pattern in the Mozambican coastal area, which has made it a drug corridor since the 1990s. It is a public concern that there is not a strategic intervention to prevent and fight sea and land border fragilities.

With the intensification of the war in Cabo Delgado, which took on the appearance of guerrilla warfare and became more difficult to contain, migration and border control and surveillance became more fragile. This opened space for traffickers to bolster their action, all the more so because Covid-19 led to the disruption of air transport and restricted the movement of people, pushing drug onto sea routes.

Just like drugs, illegal extraction of natural resources, i.e. precious stones and wood, is now carried out unhampered, encouraging illegal immigration and the deterioration of State power in the country.

Drug business in Mozambique only works because there is a State sheltering power, which orders free passage and has no interest in consolidating the institutions of defense and security.

Republished with permission from the Centro para Democracie e Desenvolvimento (CDD). The original article can be found here.

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The hidden face of the war in Cabo Delgado - defenceWeb