Whites, Blacks and Illicit Drugs

I find it very unfortunate you left out the fact prisons have become nothing but big businesses. Were it not for the never ending stream of predominately young black males being incarcerated many small communities that depend on the local prison for employment and are allowed to use the prison population to qualify for certain types of government funding would suffer near economic collapse. You could have listed companies such as Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut, Securitas and then the people who supply the prisons and touched a little bit about how the stock of these companies are traded on the NYSE. You could have listed several instances of where poorly trained guards have been arrested themselves for crimes committed behind the walls of these prisons against the very inmates they were guarding. Several guards employed by Wackenhut were arrested in a sex scandal involving male juveniles in Louisiana. The person who called in a bogus call to a McDonalds that led to a little girl who worked their being tortured on film by an obviously dimmed witted manager was employed by Corrections Corporation of America. That goes to show just how effective their screening process is when they look for employees. But with profit as the bottom line they got what they paid for. It is also sad you did not mention where in many cities when the arrest of drugs suspects and the crime rate drops the police back off to let it rise again so their jobs and overtime can be justified. You were correct. A non-black student who is studying medicine or nursing or computer science will not have a drug arrest hanging over his head for the rest of his life. A black student studying the same knows from the time the cuffs are slapped on he is now job security for the people who work in the criminal justice system.

Besides the sustainability of the criminal justice through arrests of whatever race, the very act of criminilasing the use of drugs is a crime against individuals and their choice. This breeds 'official' criminals off black kids. By decriminalising and formalising the drugs market we might end up with an equitable distribution of drug profits, and lower public spending supporting only prejudices against informal drug uses. Which (un)fortunately may also lead to Mr Austin's having to reconfigure his research focus. Maybe research into promoting healthy ways on how to use drugs. Just like in safer sex research in the face of hiv.

de-criminalize it all, which does not mean legalize them. remove the criminal incentive. ridiculous that you can buy as much alcohol as you want, or nicotine, or many other drugs, but not marijuana or cocaine. would not be my choice to buy cocaine, but it's also not my choice to buy fried foods, alcohol, nicotine, saturated fats, etc...

As sensible as it sounds too much money is being made to decriminalize it. We are talking billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Drug testing centers, drug treatment centers, prison guards, the price of the stock of the companies in the private controlled prisons and the companies who supply prisons, counselors, probation officers, public defenders, so forth and so on. And don't forget other things connected to where and how these people who will find themselves out of work spend their paychecks (supermarkets, car dealerships, real estate, etc). Too much is at stake now for common sense to prevail.

The drugs market is big, so big profits will always be made. I dont worry as much about how the direct and indirect profits from secondary market are shared but more about the removal of criminal records which stigmatize kids especially black ones.

I agree %100 percent. However when new recruits are not as readily available you need a system that will guaranteed a supply of experienced repeats to return to keep things flowing. The removal of this foolishness (drug convictions) from criminal records will take the revolving door and the profits it generates away.

Algernon, another very good article. As always, I much enjoy reading you. Also as always, I have some personal opinions to toss out which some may deem not politically correct. I do question if this disparity between minority groups and whites, this clear bias to jailing minority members more often than whites is truly a racial issue. My opinion is this goes far beyond just skin color. Those of impoverished urban centers would inherently suffer a lesser quality of legal defense. Typically, poor people charged with crime are represented by public defenders offices which are overburdened and unable to spend as much time nor as much money on criminal defense. Equally typical, public defender office lawyers are young and inexperienced along with typically being less effective at plea bargaining. Sadly, poor people of urban centers are typically minority members. This would be an issue of money rather than a racial issue. Yes, the root cause of poverty in urban centers is historically based in past racism, but this is a lingering socioeconomic effect of racism of many years past, many decades past. A cure for this would be to have our justice system randomly assign pro bono legal defense from a pool of well experienced lawyers rather than our current pool of inexperienced lawyers fresh out of law school and just starting out. Most effective cure, though, is to cure poverty. I spent an hour or so looking over your cited "National Survey on Drug Use and Health" statistics. My readings lead me to note a good number of oddities. Correct, use of cocaine amongst whites and blacks does reflect higher usage amongst whites than blacks, yet more blacks (and other minorities) are incarcerated. Again, this "might" be related to quality of legal defense along with lingering racial issues. Of more interest is this very high usage of marijuana and by-products. I would think marijuana is much harder to smuggle into our country simply because of bulk of physical size. Of course, a lot of marijuana is locally grown here in America but would still be harder to hide during transportation, and harder to hide during cultivation. This suggests to me marijuana usage is more socially acceptable and, therefore, more people admit to marijuana usage. We could reduce our American expense of imprisonment and expense of the "war on drugs" by simply making usage of marijuana legal. I think we should make marijuana cultivation and usage legal, then tax marijuana just like we tax alcohol and tobacco. This would certainly bring in billions of dollars in tax revenue which is money we could use very effectively to improve the lives of many which, in turn, would reduce our crime rate. Many will argue the benefits of and detriments of legalizing marijuana, but these are issues beyond the scope of my intent in writing. Another interesting trend I find in those national survey statistics is hallucinogens and abuse of prescription drugs seem not related to level of education nor related to level of employment. Both types of drugs are highly popular and highly abused. I would not propose we legalize hallucinogens but would propose greater restrictions on prescribed medications such as limiting prescriptions to a seven day supply rather than a thirty day supply. I do note a television campaign to teach people to be more careful about preventing access to prescription drugs by young people. All of us do note pharmaceutical companies are a major industry and this industry is given financial advantage by our government and by politics. More succinct, Americans are drug addicts through mass media advertisement. A cure for pharmaceutical profiteering is simply to adopt policies of other countries; no public advertisements, no lobbying doctors to prescribe drugs when not needed and encouragement of treatment of the root causes of ailments rather than treating symptoms with drugs. Our drug industry needs to be moved away from bottom line profits and moved into cures. A good cure for most diseases is too teach our peoples how to live more healthy and to remove disease causing agents from our environment. I have to laugh. A major cause of disease is simply Americans are fat and lazy. Other note of interest from those statistics is the more physically harmful is a drug, the less is the usage. Heroin is a good example. Heroin is easy to smuggle, readily available but usage is very low compared to other drugs. Some of this is perception of which drugs are "cool" and which are not. However, more important, drugs like heroin and methamphetamine cause extreme physical damage, especially to a human brain. I suspect this statistic of low usage of hard drugs which cause physical damage is simply a result of so much physical damage being inflicted, a person simply becomes unable to support his habit; disabled or dead. Cocaine is considered "cool" by so many. Nonetheless, cocaine is almost as damaging as heroin and other hard drugs. Physical symptoms are more subtle but the physical damage is equal, especially to a human heart and blood circulatory system. Cocaine also impairs mental functioning. Have you ever met a "smart" cocaine user? Marijuana users become really stupid but recover. Cocaine users never recover. A cure for this is a campaign to teach our public cocaine is dangerous, will make you stupid and will kill you. Cocaine is not cool. To close, our war on drugs could be significantly more effective by legalizing marijuana to generate billions in tax revenue, remove this extreme profit incentive from our pharmaceutical industry, then use this money to help cure poverty, hunger and our educational lacking. Our drug abuse problems are based in socioeconomic issues, not racial issues. Okpulot Taha Choctaw Nation

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