The Other Civil War

by Keith Preston
by Keith Preston

Despite the ongoing decline in quality of American education, most Americans are fortunately still aware that a civil war transpired in the United States between 1861 and 1865. What is unfortunately less widely recognized is the fact that another civil war has been going on in this country for roughly the last forty years. I'm talking, of course, about the War on Drugs. For some, the "drug war" is seen as a metaphor or a symbolic war as opposed to a "real" war. I disagree. The War on Drugs involves people with guns, it involves killing and it involves taking prisoners. Consider the following facts:

At the end of 2006, 1 in 31 of all American adults were either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Source: Glaze, Lauren E., and Bonczar, Thomas P., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Probation and Parole in the United States 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2007), NCJ220218, p. 2.
Of the 9.25 million people currently being held in penal institutions throughout the world, 2.19 million of these are incarcerated in American jail and prisons. China, a nation with roughly six times the population of the US, comes in a distant second with 1.55 million prisoners. Source: Walmsley, Roy, "World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)" (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p. 1; US Census Bureau, Population Division.
The U.S. nonviolent prisoner population is larger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska. Source: John Irwin, Ph.D., Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, America's One Million Nonviolent Prisoners (Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute, 1999), pg. 4.
At the end of 2004, twenty percent of all inmates in state prisons were imprisoned for drug "offenses" alone. Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, Couture, Heather, and Harrison, Paige M., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2007), NCJ219416, p. 24, Appendix Table 9.
As of September 30, 2006, fifty-three percent of all federal prisoners were incarcerated for drug "offenses" alone. Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, Couture, Heather, and Harrison, Paige M., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2007), NCJ219416, p. 26, Appendix Table 13.
At yearend 2006 correctional facilities in the United States held an estimated 2,385,213 inmates in custody, including inmates in Federal and State prisons, territorial prisons, local jails, facilities operated by or exclusively for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), military facilities, jails in Indian country, and youth in juvenile facilities. During 2006 the total incarcerated population increased by 2.8%, or 64,579 inmates. Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, Couture, Heather, and Harrison, Paige M., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, December 2007), NCJ219416, p. 3.
There are now 1.9 million arrests of non-violent drug "offenders" annually in the United States, a larger number than the entire population of New Mexico. Forty-three percent of these are marijuana arrests and eighty-eight percent of marijuana arrests are for simple possession. Source: Cole, Jack. End Prohibition Now, p. 5.
In 1914, when the first set of drug laws, the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act, was passed, 1.3 percent of the US population was addicted to drugs. In 1970, when drug enforcement was intensified by President Nixon, 1.3 percent of the US population was addicted to drugs. Today, after roughly a trillion dollars has been spent on drug enforcement and 38 million arrests of non-violent drug "offenders" have been made, 1.3 percent of the US population is still addicted to drugs. Nothing, I repeat, nothing has been achieved so far as curbing drug abuse in the process of this war that has generated such exorbitant human and economic costs! Source: Cole, p. 9
5.7 times as many black men are currently imprisoned in the United States as there were in South Africa under the former apartheid regime. Source: Cole, p. 12
There are currently more black men in US prisons than there were black male slaves in 1840. Source: Cole, p.12

Thus far, I have discussed only financial and incarceration costs associated with the civil war known as the War on Drugs. The other costs involve the drastic increase in violent crime resulting from prohibition, the robberies, burglaries and thefts committed to finance drug habits at black market prices, innocent persons killed in turf wars and police raids, overdoses and severe health problems caused by adulterated drug products, addiction problems fueled by closing of the market for softer drugs (like coca-based beverages and smokable opium) by prohibition in favor of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, the neglect of children exacerbated by the forcing of addicts into an underground lifestyle by prohibition, the huge numbers of children with one or both parents in prison, the numbers of people rendered unemployable by felony drug convictions, the militarization of law enforcement as a permanent occupational army under the drug war, the eradication of vital civil liberties such as those supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, the growth of drug enforcement and prison construction as self-perpetuating industries with a vast array of political and economic interest groups, and other costs too numerous to mention.

It is of the utmost importance to recognize that the drug war is indeed a civil war. Many other nations have at times fallen into civil war over matters of race or ethnicity, religion, social class, territorial claims or political ideology. I submit that the drug war is a civil war over the matter of culture. There is a dominant culture whose drugs of choice are alcohol, nicotine, Prozac, caffeine, Valium, Viagra, Xanax and Ritalin. These drugs are just as likely to be used for hedonic as for medical purposes and their heavy or prolonged use can be deadly. It is these cultures of drug users who are in control of the state. There is another culture, or set of cultures, whose members primarily include young people, the poor, cultural dissidents, racial minorities, religious minorities and others who are otherwise mainstream except for their particular drug of choice. It is these cultures of drug users who are under attack by the state. Richard Lawrence Miller, a Jewish writer, the son of an investigator for the prosecution at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and a recognized expert on Nazi law, has documented in meticulous detail identical parallels between the persecution of German Jews under the Nuremberg racial laws and the persecution of American drug users under drug laws. Miller has compiled his research in his magisterial but horrifying work, Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. If the Nazi analogy sounds extreme, please, I invite you to check out Miller's book.

For American drug users, people who are in every way just like everyone else except that their drug of choice is different from that of the majority, the US government is an enemy occupational regime. Law enforcement is an enemy occupational army. The millions of drug users arrested annually are prisoners of war. And the armed, violent drug dealing gangs who have taken over entire sections of US cities are no different from the armed insurgent groups that emerge in any war, whether in Iraq or in Colombia or in the streets of American cities. The television series The Wire has been described as the most realistic portrayal of the drug war of any crime show on television. Recently, the program's writers issued the following statement:

"What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians – Democrat or Republican – willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy – the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do – and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will – to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty – no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional. " (Source: Time, March 25, 2008)

April 2, 2008

Keith Preston [send him mail] is a long-time radical writer and activist from Richmond, Virginia. See his website.

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