Short version? Everyone makes money off the drug war, the cops make money from seizures and get promoted, private prisons make money from jailing the people, dealers make money by keeping their product artificially expensive and veteran dealers make more money from the cops arresting their competition and lastly the politicians gain political capital from fighting the drug war because they know they can never win it or lose it as long as they keep fighting it.GQ wrote:Exclusive: In His Second Term, Obama Will Pivot to the Drug War
By Marc Ambinder
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According to ongoing discussions with Obama aides and associates, if the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery: the four decades of The Drug War.
Don't expect miracles. There is very little the president can do by himself. And pot-smokers shouldn't expect the president to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana. But from his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the Drug War to be a failure, a conflict that has exacerbated the problem of drug abuse, devastated entire communities, changed policing practices for the worse, and has led to a generation of young children, disproportionately black and minority, to grow up in dislocated homes, or in none at all.
It is hard to write about the Drug War without getting preachy, in part because it remains so polarizing. This ought not be so. As a new documentary, The House I Live In, from filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, makes clear, a consensus is emerging among academics, police officers, lawyers, and even some politicians about what not to do.
The film debuted in Los Angeles the last night of the festival, right next to the theatre were the male striptease tentpole Magic Mike was premiering, and so it won't get the attention from the press that it deserves. It did, however, win the Grand Jury citation at Sundance.
The House I Live In doesn't break new ground. But it puts together 40 years of history, politics and sociology in a concise and compelling way. If you're prepared to believe that the cycle of drug abuse that plagued the black community in the 1980s and is currently sweeping across poor white America now is the fault of the low-level dealers and the users themselves, then you won't like Jarecki's point of view. For him, the decision to sell drugs is a starting point.
He wants to know why it has become so common, so uncontroversial, so startlingly consequence-free. His answer is that everyone profits from it. The Drug War is ongoing because it has been successful for everyone but those most affected by it. Politicians have a useful and cyclic scapegoat to prove their crime bona fides. ("If you are a causal drug user, you are an accomplice to murder," Ronald Reagan once said.)
The corrections industry has become a billion dollar business. Through asset forfeiture laws, police departments large and small can buy expensive new toys and keep cops on the street. And Americans have a vehicle to control their exposure to those elements of society that seem to threaten their economic interests the most.
The historian Richard Miller, who usually writes about Abraham Lincoln, describes for viewers how drug laws in American history were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups. When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime. Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans. Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South. The 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine was the most obvious manifestation of how different blacks and whites were treated.
When President Obama recently signed a law reducing the disparity to 18 to 1, it was considered a reform, even though the two forms of cocaine are still pretty much the same goddamned thing.
Jarecki wanted to know why black people have had the roughest go of it, and how drugs and the drug war seem to feed off each other in a sort of deadly symbiosis. David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is happy to provide his answer. There's nothing else there. The prejudicial paternalism of the New Deal ensured that blacks migrating North moved into ghettos that were subsequently redlined, making home ownership a near impossibility. Businesses moved out; the American industrial base collapsed. From door to door, from the stoop of his home to the threshold of his school, a young black man sees only the dealer, who offers him a job. Some kids can escape this reality, and a majority don't become drug dealers, but virtually everyone who lives in an urban black neighborhood is affected by it.
Simon, who speaks in paragraphs in the film, notes that the sentencing guidelines passed by Congress and the pressure on local police departments to get rid of the scourge of drugs created an incentive for officers to make as many arrests as possible. The officers who get promoted quickly are those who make arrests. And it's easy to make a drug arrest—just go to a drug infested neighborhood and "jack someone up," as he puts it. The result was a plethora of amped up police officers in constant confrontation with the black community—and "makes a police department where nobody can solve a fucking crime."
Homicide detectives don't get the stats that narcotics cops do. Pull a father from his daughter and put him in jail for life, and you all but guarantee that she won't make it out the ghetto. Break apart a family over a few ounces of cocaine, and the victims multiply. And everyone admits (from the beat cop to the prosecutor) that nothing really is getting better. Ground zero for violence in the drug war is now Mexico. Gangs there fight with each other and with the Mexican and American governments with such fervor precisely because the demand from Middle America for drugs is so high. (This is something that Hillary Clinton admitted recently, to her credit. The U.S. is a functional cause of Mexico's drug violence.)
Race, however is not the primary soldering force of the Drug War. Class is. Poor whites are now (if you can believe the rhetoric) being devastated by the meth epidemic, breaking up previously intact families throughout Appalachia and the Midwest. The same language was used to describe the dangers of the marijuana culture during the 40s and the cocaine culture during the '80s is now used to cast meth users as social deviants, and slowly, the incarnation rate of white people is inching up.
So what to do: Jarecki has no answers, other than to stop doing what we're doing now.
But here are some points of departure. Watch out for returning veterans. They are uniquely vulnerable to drug abuse of all types, and narcotics traffickers have set up camp around military bases, particularly those housing infantry and special operations forces, for a reason. That generation cannot be lost to drugs.
Second, recognize what Mike Carpenter, a jowly Oklahoman who runs a prison there, is comfortable telling Jarecki: Non-violent drug offenders really don't belong in prisons. Where they go is a political question, because drug abuse is something that does require a governmental response. But prison just basically ends their lives.
They can't vote when they're released; thanks to President Clinton, most can't move back into public housing; they're stigmatized, in many ways, like child molesters. Reintegrating drug users back into society is as important (if not more important) than punishing them in the first place.
And the next time a celebrity makes it seem like legalizing marijuana is the be all and end all of drug law reform, slap him in the face. (Metaphorically, unless you want to get your time on TMZ). Legalizing pot is the least of it. Getting politicians to understand how their actions contributed to the problem is a lot harder and requires more effort, but will ultimately pay off. If mandatory minimum sentences are reduced, for example, judges will be in a much better position to consider family structure when pronouncing a sentence. This local discretion could mean the difference between an intact family and a broken one.
Beyond that, since the United Ststes isn't about to legalize or regulate the illegal narcotics markets, the best thing a president can do may be what Obama winds up doing if he gets re-elected: using the bully pulpit to draw attention to the issue.
But he won't do so before November.
And last the writer is kind of hilarious
When President Obama recently signed a law reducing the disparity to 18 to 1, it was considered a reform, even though the two forms of cocaine are still pretty much the same goddamned thing.
