Opinions - The Forgotten War on Drugs and Election ’08

[enquirewithin]

The Forgotten War on Drugs and Election ’08

http://www.truthdig.com/interview/it...gs_election08/



Venezuelan army helicopters fly over the Sierra de Perija national park, where poppy and marijuana plants are often discovered.

James Harris and Josh Scheer interview Dr. Troy Duster, sociologist, talking about the relationship between the war on drugs and unemployment in poor and minority communities.

Tony Duster: People often get trapped into the immediacy of the drug war. They believe that the police are the bad guys; they’re profiling blacks and Latinos, and that’s the end of the story. So you don’t get a sense of big economic political context to the drug war. You know if you even go back to the Opium War in the middle of the 19th century you can see it was never about opium. It was about power, control, the British, and the Japanese. That’s what it was all about. But in a very similar way, the drug war that we’ve experienced in the last 30 years is to be set in some sort of larger historical context. And that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. As a sociologist, I don’t just talk about drugs. I talk about the context. About 30 years ago, a little bit longer, there was a book written by Sidney Willhelm. The title was provocative. It was called “Who Needs the Negro?” Now, it was a book that people thought was just outrageous. It was actually in the ’60s that I think it was published. They still called black people Negroes in those years, as you can tell from the title. And here was Willhelm’s thesis: He said, you’re going back to slavery, and you had great need for black labor. It was obvious, that’s what slavery was all about. And then he said, we move into an industrial world, blacks were leaving the South for Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York. And that period, World War I breaks out, and you need black labor to either strike-break, for what’s happening with whites who were getting a little bit militant with the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World], or, when whites leave and go to WWI and WWII, you got this black labor supply. Then he says that what happens in the postwar era, when whites come back from the wars, you don’t need the Negro anymore for that kind of industrial labor. The work that’s being done in the South in the cotton fields is pretty much mechanized now. And he said “who needs the Negro?”

Harris: .....So you’ve got this well-documented case for the unneeded Negro. But how in the world does this tie back into the war on drugs?

Duster: When he said this he then implied that there would be a development in the next 10 to 20 years that would crystallize his idea. He didn’t say what it was going to be, but he said, you watch, there’s going to happen something in this country that going to sharpen this whole issue about the redundancy ... of black employment. And sure enough, in 1954, in the age group 16 to 20, black unemployment is equal to white unemployment. ...

Harris: This is 1954?

Duster: 1954. Thirty years later, black unemployment in this age group is three and a half to four times that of white unemployment. But here are the figures. [In]1954 it’s about 12 percent each unemployment figures. In 1984, in most urban jurisdictions, blacks are about 42 percent unemployed in this age group; whites about 16 percent. Now what happened? How would you explain that industrialization which was not so bad for black people in terms of the employment in the first part of the century? Suddenly with postindustrialization you get this extraordinary rate of black unemployment among youth. And what we learned is that in the tertiary sector of the economy, blacks are not necessarily needed, and this was Willhelm’s point. So what you’re getting when you’re getting into banking, restauranting, and all of those activities that are not either industrial or rural. Employers are making decisions about who they want to be in these shops, selling goods, or who they want in the restaurants, waiting on tables, who they want in hotels, in these service occupations. And there you have systematic discrimination. He said by 1984 what you’re seeing is extraordinarily high rates of black unemployment. Enter the drug war. What happens between 1980 and 2000 is the most massive building of prisons in all of U.S history. In California [in]1982, I was looking at some figures; we were spending more on higher education than on prisons. We had nine campuses on the University of California; we had about 16 state colleges. In the next period, the next 20 years, we built not a single campus, but we built, however ... we went from 11 prisons to 27 prisons. And the incarceration rate skyrockets. Now here’s the part where we get into the issue of race and incarceration. You go back to 1925 and the black rate of incarceration is about twice that of whites. By 1990 it’s eight times the rate of whites. So what’s happening here is this extraordinary acceleration in the incarceration of black people and the single most important factor is the drug war.

Harris: ... The statistics are certainly there: Black males who don’t graduate from high school are unemployed almost to a rate to 72 percent. I tell them they have to beat these numbers. What responsibility falls on the actual man or woman who is not employed or who is breaking the law?

Duster: ....We as a nation have a policy. It was developed in 1987 by the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]. It was called Operation Pipeline. And the pipeline was to train 27,500 law enforcement people to look on the streets of the United States to find and to profile particular “kinds of people who would be engaged in drug dealing.” Now that’s not individual decision, that’s not individual cop. That’s 27,000 people who are trained by the government; that’s a policy....if you are talking about the collective, talk about in fact that there are over 35 million black people and unemployment rates are extraordinarily high, now the question changes. What is the country as a whole going to do to increase the employment rate of this part of the population? And my answer is counterintuitive. People are always saying thing likes “you have to look at the market, you have to look at the market.” Well, it’s the market that got us here. Again, in ’54 you had unemployment rates among blacks are about equal to whites. The market, not individual black youth, spoke and we have a rate of unemployment by 1984 that’s about four times as great.... I think that we could have an extraordinarily successful program of reducing the unemployment rate among blacks and whites if we move to the public sector. Let’s take the example of all the billions of dollars spent into the Iraq black hole. Let’s take about 12 billion of that and revamp the New York and Boston subways. All of a sudden we’d have employment at about 98 percent. Why? Because lots of jobs flow. Let’s take another 12 to 15 billion. You could then put in the homes of most Americans a computer. And you could then have people who were trained, as a public policy issue, to fix computers. Computers break down. I mean, I could go on with this, but the point is you could have a fast rail system between New York, Washington and Boston. It’s a joke you get on the [inaudible]. First of all it breaks down often, but here are the French and here are the Japanese with bullet trains going between Kyoto and Tokyo at extraordinary speeds. Here we are in the United States and we can’t get a planned train from Boston to New York in less than about four and a half hours. And we’re spending all this money in Iraq and that’s a direct function of the political decision-making in Washington....

[The war on drugs is] a failed policy only in the sense if you have the big picture. If you’re a politician and you want to get reelected, it’s a great policy. I have a colleague who has written a wonderful piece it’s called “World Prohibition,” Harry Levine, and what he says, no matter what the government is, left, right or center, a theocratic or secular, it doesn’t matter. Every government in the world has an anti-drug policy, and he says the reason is that an anti-drug policy is good to get reelected. It’s good for policy, it’s good or whoever you are in power. You can claim you’re against this thing about mind-altering substances, but he says, you know, when the left, right and center agree on something, be careful. But I want to go back to this question of public policy, because in the short term, it does look like the drug war is a failure. But, however, take a look at what you described earlier. It’s easier to be a law enforcement person; it’s easier to get reelected.

[Bajeda]

I have a colleague who has written a wonderful piece it’s called “World Prohibition,” Harry Levine, and what he says, no matter what the government is, left, right or center, a theocratic or secular, it doesn’t matter. Every government in the world has an anti-drug policy, and he says the reason is that an anti-drug policy is good to get reelected.

I think he is referring to Global Drug Prohibition: Its Uses and Crises, an article in the archive by Harry Levine. Its a good read.


Abstract below,

In the 20th century, political leaders and governments throughout the world supported drug prohibition and constructed a global drug prohibition system. They did so because of the influence of the USA and its allies and the UN. This article suggests they also did so because drug prohibition, drug demonisation and anti-drug campaigns were very useful*/especially to politicians, the police, the military, and the media. Now in the 21st century, global drug prohibition is facing several overlapping crises. The growth of the harm reduction movement has increasingly pushed drug policies in many countries from the more criminalized end of the drug prohibition continuum to the more regulated and tolerant end. Further, a serious, reputable and ever growing opposition to punitive drug policies has begun to challenge global drug prohibition itself. Finally, drug prohibition appears to be unable to prevent the increasing cultivation, use, and normalization of cannabis throughout the world. Because of these currently unstoppable developments, global drug prohibition is losing some of its invisibility and political invulnerability

[enquirewithin]

I'm sure he is referring to that article. It's a good read. Politicians like to use fear of drugs as a means to an end. The UN has had a shameful part in drug prohibition and criminalization. The UN didn't invent the criminalization of drugs-- oppressive moralists have punished people for using drugs for centuries-- but it is not a positive influence at all.