Hey Progressives: Why Don't you Care About the "Drug War" Like You Care About Other Issues?

By Ethan Nadelmann, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2009.

Don't imagine that some early version of the National Academy of Sciences made a serious study 80 years ago and concluded that alcohol and cigarettes were safe enough to be legal but that marijuana, hallucinogens, cocaine and heroin and others were not. It's not about that.

If you look at why we criminalized some drugs and not others, it had everything to do with who used these drugs. The first anti-opium laws in America were not put in place when the average drug user was a middle-aged American woman taking opium and laudanum to deal with all her aches and pains, no -- it was when the Chinese came.

The first anti-opium laws were in Nevada and California, in the 1870s, and they were directed at the Chinese minorities. The first anti-cocaine laws were in the South, early in the last century, and they were directed at black men -- people were afraid they'd take that white powder up their noses and forget their "proper place in society."

The first anti-marijuana laws were in the Midwest and the Southwest, in the 1910s and '20s, and they were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans who would work those long hours, go back home and smoke those funny-smelling reefer cigarettes.

In every case, good white people feared what those dark-skinned people would do to our women and our children.

Even alcohol Prohibition was to some degree a struggle between the "white" white Americans and the “not-so white" white Americans -- between the people who came from Northern and Western Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries and the hordes of “not-so white” white people who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe with their beer and their vino and their slivovitz.

This cultural struggle, so tied up with race and ethnicity, persists to this day. The fact that the drug war and the drug laws were not just a bipartisan but a biracial movement, the fact that these horrific laws were championed not just by white members of Congress but by black members, too, is no excuse not to dig deeply into this and pull it out by its roots. Because ultimately this issue is not just one of racial justice, or of racial fairness. Ultimately, this is about something else as well.

It's about a couple of words that I also am sorry that I didn't hear once said during this morning's plenary panel, and that I have not heard uttered through entire days of progressive meetings among people I regard as my allies.  What are those words?

Liberty and freedom.

The progressive movement in America cannot abandon those words.

I have the unusual distinction of being one of the few people, if not the only, to have spoken on a plenary panel at both this progressive conference and at the annual meeting of CPAC -- the Conservative Political Action Conference.

And what I can tell you is that support for reforming our nation's drug policies is building from the left, right and center. My own personal values may be at home in this community, but we only succeed if this movement builds upward and forward across the political spectrum.

Our advocacy for fundamental notions of fairness and compassion and science-based policy must always be linked with a commitment to principles of freedom and liberty. I'll tell you -- once we start looking at what young people care about -- those words, liberty and freedom, mean something.

This growing drug-policy-reform movement is a movement for individual freedom and social justice. We see ourselves standing on the shoulders and following in the footsteps of other movements that fought for individual freedom and social justice -- the movements for gay rights, and women's rights, and civil rights, and even the movement to abolish slavery and the slave trade.

In every case, it's about advancing freedom and justice. In every case it's about fighting powerful vested interests in our society.

And in our case, it's specifically about articulating a core principle that underlies much of our work: that no one deserves to be punished -- or discriminated against or amongst -- simply for what we put in our bodies, absent harm to others.

Hold people accountable. Punish those who hurt others or put others at risk by driving under the influence of drugs. But don't subject someone to the criminal law simply because they opt to ingest one substance rather than another.

It's on this basis that we can build a movement for freedom and justice that ends America's exceptional reliance on incarceration and the criminal justice system and that embraces a drug-control policy grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. I hope all of you who care about the Campaign for America's Future will own and embrace this vision and commitment as well.

See more stories tagged with: racism, war on drugs, social justice, criminal justice system, ethan nadelmann, crack-cocaine disparity

Ethan Nadelmann is founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

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