The Record
Aaron: Drug laws and minorites

Original article

Aaron: Drug laws and minorites

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

By LAWRENCE AARON
RECORD COLUMNIST

THE FAILURE of the war on drugs has been known for many years, but the impact that it causes in poor, urban black and Latino communities is an issue that deserves urgent attention.

The Justice Policy Institute says in a new report that the United States has 19.5 million users of illegal drugs. About 1.5 million of them were arrested for a drug-related offense, and 175,000 people went to prison in connection with a drug offense. More than half of those sent to prison were African-American.

In Bergen County, African-Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 19 times the rate of whites, the institute's report says. The discrepancy is the same in Passaic County.

You can't separate drug policy from the drugs themselves when you're talking about destruction of black communities.

"The exponential removal of people of color who have substance-abuse problems from their communities and into prisons undermines and destabilizes neighborhoods; it does not make them safer," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance's national organization. "Drug addiction doesn't discriminate, but our drug policies do."


Researching the relationship between race, poverty, geographic location and drug convictions, the Justice Policy Institute study documented disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in drug cases in 97 percent of the nearly 200 counties studied.

The report's release comes in advance of the 2007 International Drug Policy Reform Conference, set to begin in New Orleans this week. While African-Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African-Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses, it says.

Although African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population in the United States, they accounted for 53 percent of drug offenders sentenced to state prisons in 2003, according to the report. Significantly, the researchers point out that while previous studies have shown black and white drug use being about equal, African-American kids' cases go to court more than the cases of white youths committing the same offenses.

Plenty of drugs come into the United States. A United Nations report this summer noted that the poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased by an astounding 38 percent over the previous year. While we're fighting for Afghanistan's stability, much of the country's illicit export crop comes to the United States in the form of heroin. But why does such a high proportion of it always end up in the black community?

Drugs are still pouring in

In spite of a 25-year war on drugs, the drugs are still flowing in, and young people see drug distribution as a way of becoming neighborhood entrepreneurs.

New Jersey for a long time has reported drug offenders as the highest percentage of people in its general prison population.

An earlier Justice Policy Institute survey, comparing 50 state corrections departments, found New Jersey leading the nation with 36 percent of its prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses five years ago. Nationally, drug offenders made up only 20 percent of the prison population.

But despite all the documentation of this devastating phenomenon and the horror expressed by well-meaning people, the only attempts to reverse the trend are moving at a glacial pace.

"Basically, we're making these people social lepers," says Roseanne Scotti, the director of the New Jersey office of the Drug Policy Alliance. "You have this huge proportion of African-American men and, increasingly, African-American women taken away from their families, taken away from their communities and returned to those same places much worse off than they were before."

How can communities like that be expected to move forward or recover any semblance of normalcy and productivity?

The remedies are obvious, but destined to be effective only after many decades. The damage is already nearly irreversible.