Incarceration Won’t Solve Drug Problem

How long are we going to pretend that the United States is not one of the major violators of human rights in the world? There are 400,000 people in America’s prisons simply because the government claims it must save them from themselves.

What will it take for Americans to give a damn that so many people who pose little or no threat to society are nonetheless languishing in prison due to an out-of-control “drug war” that has irrationally defined their vices as socially more dangerous than others that are equally destructive? Even driving drunk is punished far less severely than the mere possession of crack cocaine.

We lock up a higher percentage of our citizens than any country in the world except for Russia, and we do so in a pursuit of a policy that is frighteningly irrational in design and extremely racist in its consequences. In a chilling story Sunday, the New York Times reported cases of young mothers torn from their children for sentences as long as life simply for possession of the wrong drug. The article reported this astonishing fact about California, which has added 21 prisons since 1984: “Five black men are behind bars for each one in a state university.”

But it is an old story repeatedly documented ever since our draconian drug policy was launched in 1986 by a Congress that had held not one single hearing on the subject. Since that time, the number of people in prison for drugs has increased by 400%--twice the growth rate as for violent criminals.

The initial impulse for ratcheting up drug penalties was shock over the 1986 death of promising college basketball player Len Bias, which was at first attributed by the media to an overdose of crack cocaine. Simple chemistry would have recognized the basic sameness of the crack and powdered forms of cocaine and that the abuse of either should be treated as a medical problem rather than a crime. At least that was the conclusion of a seminal article in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. in 1996. “Cocaine is cocaine,” reported Dr. Marian W. Fischman, a co-author of the article. “Regardless of whether you shoot it up or smoke it or snort it, it has the same stimulant effect.”

Yet the federal penalty for possession of crack, marketed basically to minorities in the inner city, is 100 times greater than for powdered cocaine, preferred by a customer base that is three times larger than that for crack but also wealthier and whiter. Inspired by the leadership of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who has done so much to make the world safe for tobacco, crack came to be legislated against as if it were the devil’s own candy invested with supernatural powers to possess the minds of men and turn their actions wild.

Ironically, a year after his death, it was revealed that Len Bias had in fact consumed powdered cocaine and not crack, but the damage to the principle of equal application of the law had been done. Thanks to the perversion of the law as constructed, a dealer caught in possession of 499 grams of powdered cocaine would be treated lightly compared to someone who purchased five grams of the powder from that same dealer, mixed it with water and baking soda and cooked it into crack in a microwave oven.

The result has been a distorted policing of the black community that has left one in four young black males entrapped in what is euphemistically called the criminal justice system. In the name of saving their lives, the police power of the state has been abused to permanently scar a generation. But the policy has failed miserably to curtail the supply of drugs, which are ever more plentiful on the very streets that have been policed as if they were a war zone.

It was also inevitable that the war metaphor be extended to those who lived lives far removed from the inner city. The ravages of drug abuse have been compounded by an emphasis on law enforcement over treatment. As a result, entire families of varying races and income are destroyed not by the drug as much as the state’s efforts to ostensibly stem its abuse. Take the example recounted in the New York Times of Gloria L. Van Winkle, a 39-year-old mother of two young children who is serving a life sentence in Kansas under a third-strike conviction resulting from her purchase of $40 worth of cocaine.

Even drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey, the four-star general who entered the drug war with gusto, now sees that there is here, as in Vietnam, where he served, no light at the end of the tunnel. “We have a failed social policy, and it has to be reevaluated,” he told the New York Times. “Otherwise, we’re going to bankrupt ourselves. Because we can’t incarcerate ourselves out of this problem.”

Lord knows we have tried. It costs $150,000 to build a prison cell and $20,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in one, but we have spent on prisons with an abandon unprecedented for any domestic program. Nationally, the drug war costs a minimum of $35 billion annually, and it has bought us nothing but social chaos and much individual and family pain.