You and Your Crystal Meth

At first sight, these numbers about changes in the racial makeup of who is getting sentenced for drug crimes seemed promising:

The D.C.-based Sentencing Project reported that the number of black inmates in state prisons for drug offenses had fallen from 145,000 in 1999 to 113,500 in 2005, a 22 percent decline. In that period, the number of white drug offenders rose steadily, from about 50,000 to more than 72,000, a 43 percent increase. The number of Latino drug offenders was virtually unchanged at about 51,000.

A second glance though is much more depressing. While the War on Drugs has maybe begun to move beyond its "let's use this phrase as a euphemism for arresting black and brown people" phase, there hasn't been any drop off in the numbers of people sentenced for drugs. We still are seeing about 250,000 people a year sent to prison, 95% of whom have done no harm. And what these racial changes reflect is the rise in crystal meth which is popular with whites.

Plus, even these significant changes in the racial makeup still leave us with African-Americans, who make up 12% of the population, with far more in prison than whites, who make up about 70% of the population. This is not good. When progress still sucks, you know things are really screwed up.

Can we please just end the drug wars for christ's sake?

The War on Drugs and the National Psychology of Post-1960s America

This morning I finished reading Dan Baum's 1996 book Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure. As a long time student of American history, I rarely feel much outrage. I shake my head. I sigh. I wonder why Americans make terrible decisions. Sometimes I laugh to keep from crying. But I don't feel true outrage very often.

Reading about the war on drugs outraged me.

While reading Baum's book, I kept thinking about issues of national psychology. What causes Americans to make policy decisions based upon a widespread belief/fear/outrage over some issue, despite the fact of any evidence to back up the scaremongering? Why do we feel the need to demonize groups of people for some reason?

I don't have any answers for these questions, but the war on drugs tapped into the national crisis surrounding the 1960s. The war on drugs is basically a front in the larger culture war. The rebellion of the 1960s, the counterculture, civil rights, feminism, and the anti-Vietnam protests scared a huge number of Americans. The culture wars that I think are finally winding down are still battles over the legacy of the 1960s. Conservatives reacted to the 1960s by fighting a decades long war to punish the transgressors.

Baum does a great job of building this context, particularly concerning race. The war on drugs was really a war against black people. It was more than that of course, but politicians combined with the media to whip up scares about "crime" and "deviancy," that was really about black people. Perhaps the waning of the culture wars partially reflects the aging and dying of the whites who were so offended by civil rights.

Nonetheless, looking at these issues in the context of larger problems in America by no means tampered my outrage. The sheer stupidity of the politicians pushing the war on the drugs, the mendacity of its leaders, and the greed of the agencies involved is shocking. The number of evil people who show up in this story was quite surprising: everyone from Antonin Scalia to Rudy Giuliani to Al From. No one comes across worse than Bill Bennett, that hypocritical gasbag and self-proclaimed moral compass of America who never met an empty moral platitude he didn't like. RICO and civil forfeiture laws meant that law agencies created funding opportunities for themselves by seizing property of even innocent people without the slightest fear of exposure or censor. Courts were set up to process young black people into jail. Democrats caved to fears of being soft on crime; Joe Biden looks especially bad, for he used the supposed spectre of drugs to give him a campaign issue, make him seem tough, and advance his political career.

Meanwhile, the white public of the United States cheered this on every step of the way. The few voices of reason who tried to compile and present evidence about the actual effects of drugs on society were ignored and marginalized. I'm wondering if, along with civil rights, the key to understanding these events is the reaction to Vietnam. One of the most interesting points Baum makes is that as soon as we fight the first Gulf War, coverage of the war on drugs declines precipitously. George H.W. Bush viewed that war as America finally overcoming Vietnam. While I've always thought this was absurd, maybe Bush was onto something he didn't quite understand. Maybe the war on drugs was a way to fight and win against undesirable people here at home. Frustrated with Vietnam, we turned on the hippies and the black people here at home, people we thought deserved the blame for our foreign policy failures. With an actual military victory over an obscure nation of brown people, did Americans no longer see the need to fight against domestic enemies with such vigor?

Of course, the victory in Kuwait did not end the culture wars. While the war on drugs lost its momentum, it still has the institutional power to continue its policies without abatement. The nation then turned to other grave threats, like gays and immigrants.... And then of course terrorism, the wet dream of Republicans who want to eviscerate the Constitution.

With the repudiation of Republican policies and much of the culture war, I wonder what the future is for all aspects of that war--immigration policy, the gay rights movement, and most certainly the war on drugs. I've been talking recently about the new space for real discussions of decriminalization; for the first time since the Carter administration, politicians can talk about these issues without sacrificing their political careers. The rise of social libertarianism among young people and their growing acceptance of marijuana across the political spectrum places the future of the war on drugs in doubt. Even if my optimism is justified though, the work we need to do to roll back the drug war's damage is massive. We'll face major resistance, particularly from police departments and pieces of the federal government that rely on civil forfeiture money to fund its operations. If the DEA can't fight marijuana, what is the purpose of their existence and their huge budget?

I'd be happy to go into a lot more detail on particular issues if people are interested, for I could go on a long time about the incredibly stupid and damaging drug policies the American people have bought into over the last 40 years. But I'll stop for now.

Brazil's Drug War Also Targeting Privileged

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about the growing ecstasy drug trade among middle- and upper-class kids in Rio de Janeiro. At the time, I was relatively pleased to see the cops were moving beyond just targeting the poor in the favelas in their "drug war," though I had my doubts that such a war on middle- and upper-class drugs would continue in Brazil.

Apparently, my doubts were misplaced:

Drug trafficking in Brazil has become increasingly demonized in the eyes of the law — to the point where drug financiers can now receive stiffer prison sentences than murderers — and the country’s elite is not being spared.

Just last week, federal police officers arrested 55 people, many of them in Rio de Janeiro, in a nationwide investigation focused on upper-middle-class youths who the police said were smuggling Ecstasy, LSD and other synthetic drugs into Brazil from Europe.

This does strike me as good news overall in terms of realities in Brazil right now. For years, the police have launched extremely repressive measures to fight the drug trade in the favelas, using military occupations and indiscriminate killings (as well as entering militias to control the drug trade and gain profits for themselves), all while middle- and upper-class drug usage has been relatively untouched. Unfortunately, as with corruption among police in the drug wars in the favelas, the ecstasy cases are also rife for police corruption:

Ecstasy’s emergence as the drug of Brazil’s wealthy has opened the door even wider for corrupt police officers to seize upon users and their families. Now that Brazil has eliminated prison sentences for drug users, sending them to treatment or community service instead, the police are extracting sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for not charging those caught with Ecstasy as drug dealers, according to defense lawyers and three convicted drug dealers now out of prison.

This is both unfortunate and unsurprising. But again, within the realities of the drug trade and law in Brazil, at least the same attitudes and mechanisms are increasingly being applied relatively equally across the social spectrum.

Of course, many of the middle- and upper-class youths who have been busted for dealing ecstasy feel they are being treated horribly unfairly and extremely. However, it's hard for me to feel too much sympathy for people like Lucas, a middle-class kid busted for bringing drugs into the country, when he complains “I was treated like a hardcore criminal and put in jail together with killers, kidnappers, you name it.” Two-and-a-half years may seem severe for what many might consider a "youthful mistake," but Lucas deserves no better treatment than the drug dealers caught in the favelas. Indeed, he might think he was dealt with brutally, but at least he was arrested at the airport when he tried to smuggle drugs into the country, rather than having the police come into his neighborhood with guns blazing, leaving a couple dozen dead in their wake. After all, the Brazilian "war on drugs" may be levelling the field somewhat by going after the non-poor sectors of dealers, too, but even then, the poor in the favelas still face more adverse conditions than Lucas did. And at least he lived to go to jail, rather than ending up another one of the dead traficantes on the streets of a favela.

That said, regardless of whether you are in favor or against increasing the efforts to combat drug use in any country, it's really encouraging to see Brazil going after drug production, dealing, and usage regardless of the drug or the socio-economic classes with which a particular drug is associated. And the fact that the story is based in São Paulo (and not Rio) indicates that the drug war is no longer something just for Rio's favelas, even if the gap in treatment of wealthier drug users and dealers and the poorer dealers and users still exists.

Bolivia and Brazil Joining Forces in Combatting Drug Trade

This is a few weeks old (I apologize for the light blogging - I currently have two grant proposals, a conference paper, a dissertation chapter, and a part-time job on my plate, and things have actually calmed a bit from the first 4 weeks of the year), but I wanted to point out that Bolivia and Brazil have joined forces in combatting the cocaine trade along their border in the wake of the expulsion of the DEA. It's a fascinating agreement that serves both wonderfully - Brazil is making an effort to implement some national drug policy efforts rather than letting police blaze their way into favelas, and Bolivia is making a strong effort to make clear that while coca leaf production is non-offensive and important to its economy, it has little tolerance for the cocaine trade. Additionally, Bolivia gets more infrastructural agreement as part of the deal, and Brazil strengthens its role as a regional leader in lending and development projects for its neighbors. Boz reminds us also that combatting the drug trade behooves more nations than the U.S., and that fighting it doesn't always have to involve the U.S.

But there is another major aspect worth mentioning here, too. Although the U.S. under Bush constantly chastized Morales for Bolivia's coca production (leading to occasionally humorous interactions between the two countries), Morales has always made it clear that the coca leaf itself is not a drug, and that he's against the proliferation of cocaine production. The distinction is important and relatively easy to understand, but one that the United States has never bothered to grasp. This request to Brazil just further evidence both of that fact, and of fact that U.S. really has gone about in the "war on drugs" in the Andes in the totally wrong way.