drug prohibition and race in the US

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Ottawa Citizen Thursday 14 September 2000

Drug prohibition has become the successor system to Jim Crow in the U.S.

Following is an excerpt from remarks by Ira Glasser, executive director of
the American Civil Liberties Union, at the May, 2000 conference of the
Drug Policy Foundation in Washington D.C.:

A couple of months ago, on the streets of New York, a man named
Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian, was approached by a seedy looking fellow
who turned out to be an undercover cop.
He asked Mr. Dorismond, who was with a few friends waiting for a
cab to go home at the end of the day in midtown Manhattan -- he asked
him for some marijuana. Dorismond told him to get lost. He persisted.
There was a scuffle and in the end, Dorismond was shot and killed
by the police.
This is where we are now. Police who were supposed to protect us
approach people waiting to go home at the end of the day asking for
drugs and when they say no, they shoot them.
This would be horrible enough if it happened to anybody, but it was
no accident that it happened to a Haitian. It was no accident and it was
not the product of a rogue cop.
It was the product of a rogue policy; it was the product of rogue
politics; and it was the product of rogue leadership.
What happened to Patrick Dorismond was the inevitable result of the
pattern of drug prohibition enforcement in (the United States); a pattern
which cannot be ignored and must be central to any strategy to end drug
prohibition.
On the streets of New York, cops regularly stop people and frisk
them, looking for drugs.
According to police records in a single period two years ago, 45,000
stops were made. Eight out of nine of them turned out to be fruitless.
Now, you cannot be stopping people on the basis of evidence or
even reasonable suspicion or probable cause if eight out of nine of them
are mistakes. You can't. But two-thirds of the people stopped were not
white.
And the State Attorney General investigating this concluded on the
basis of extensive interviews with police that there were hundreds of
thousands of such stops that were not recorded.
Of course, by definition, the ones that were not recorded were also
100-per-cent fruitless.
So you basically have hundreds of thousands of stops and frisks in
the street predominantly of people of colour; ostensibly looking for drugs;
finding very, very few needles in a very, very large haystack.
This would be an outrageous conduct for police against citizens if it
were race-neutral. It is doubly outrageous and it is one of the reasons
why it is tolerated that it is only happening or predominantly happening
to people of colour.
The cops could have a better recovery rate of illegal drugs if they
went into any random apartment building on the west side of Manhattan
and went into every apartment. I guarantee it.
But they don't do that, and they don't do that because if they did it on
Monday, it would be finished on Tuesday. They don't do it because who
the victims are matters in this country.
And what is happening on the streets is also, of course, happening
on the highways. You have all heard about the "driving while Black and
Brown" problem, but on a stretch outside of Baltimore, 80 per cent of the
drivers are white and 80 per cent of the people pulled over are not.
On a stretch in Florida, people of colour are 76 times more likely to
be stopped and have their car searched and dismantled than people
who are white.
Despite the fact that in the very few instances when they find drugs,
whites are as often found in possession as blacks.
And the rationale which leads to that does not stop there. In the
airports, 51,000 people were picked out last year and taken to a room
and strip-searched and body-searched.
Ninety six per cent of those people, they found nothing.
Two-thirds of them were black and Latino, most of them black
women because somebody in the Customs bureau believes that black
women are being used to carry drugs.
So a black woman coming home from Jamaica, no matter who she is
and how accomplished she is and how she looks, is targeted because of
the colour of her skin because somebody believes that she is more likely
to be carrying drugs than I am.
It leads beyond harassment and stopping innocent people.
According to the government's own statistics, 13 per cent of all
monthly drug users are black, but 35 per cent are arrested for nonviolent
drug offences, 54 per cent are convicted, and 74 per cent are
incarcerated. The incarcerated population, as you all know, has
exploded in the last 20 years from a few hundred thousand to two
million.
The single largest factor in that explosion is nonviolent drug offences
and the disproportionate number of people who are in prison that are not
white.
As a result, one out of three black men between the ages of 20 and
29 in this country is under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system
now.
And here in the District of Columbia, it is one out of two.
Drug prohibition has become the successor system to Jim Crow in
this country. It separates blacks out, it subjugates them, it incarcerates
them. I will tell you the degree to which that works. All but four states in
this country bar from voting people who have been convicted of felonies.
All but four states.
As a result of that and primarily because of this trend of nonviolent
drug offences targeted at blacks ... 14 per cent of all African-American
men in this country are disenfranchised, barred from voting, as a result
of felony convictions but both of which have been for nonviolent drug
offences.
In the states of the south, it is 30 per cent.
So it is fair to say and important to say that it is no longer possible --
if indeed it ever was -- to talk about drug prohibition without also talking
about race.
And perhaps more importantly, it is no longer possible to talk about
the persistent problem of race in this country without confronting the
problem of drug prohibition.