Editorial:
Two significant developments occurred this week that will affect the War on Drugs from this point forward.
The most significant development was on Monday when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that minor drug dealers would be spared the mandatory minimum sentences that have previously locked up many for a decade or more.
The U.S. drug policy has had an unequal, discriminatory impact on communities of color. It has been found that rates of drug dealing and using are comparable across racial groups, yet African-American and Latino men are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated for drug law violations then whites.
The racial disparity in drug law enforcement is reflected on the U.S. inmate population: Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, yet they make up more than 31 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and more than 50 percent of those imprisoned in state prison for the same offenses. One in nine young black men aged 20-34 are behind bars at this moment. One-third of those in federal prison are Latino and 44 percent were black as of 2010, according to the Department of Justice. In 2010, 3,074 out of 100,000 U.S. black male residents were in prison—an incarceration rate nearly seven times higher than that of white-non Hispanic males whose ratio is 459 per 100,000—while 1,258 out of 100,000 Latinos have been imprisoned—nearly three times higher than white men.
The United States leads the world in prison population with 1.5 million people in prison, over half there on drug charges. Not only has this lead to prison overcrowding but a cottage industry of private prisons has sprung up across the county. In California the problem of overcrowding is so acute that the courts have ordered that the state reduce the prison population by 9,600 inmates by year’s end.
The second significant announcement was made by CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who at one time was rumored to be tapped as President Obama’s Surgeon General. Gupta announced that he was reversing his opinion on marijuana’s health benefits.
After spending a year working on a documentary about marijuana, traveling the world and reading scientific research, Gupta has come to the conclusion that medical marijuana has legitimate medical applications.
This announcement signals a shift in attitude and conversation and opens the door a bit more to the acceptable use of marijuana, at least at the medical level.
The War on Drugs has been a decades’ long failure that has lead to prison overpopulation, bloody wars with cartels, and a billion dollar drug trafficking industry that shows no sign of slowing down. There needs to be a change in the way we address the issue of drug use. We have to, because the way we have been addressing has been a total failure.