What's Your Anti-Drug?

By Steven Wishnia, In These Times. Posted April 3, 2001.

In his first interviews as attorney general, John Ashcroft pledged to "reinvigorate," "renew," "refresh" and "re-launch" the war on drugs, arguing that the Clinton administration had been lax in fighting narcotics.

It's difficult to imagine how Bill Clinton could have been much harsher, short of public executions of drug dealers. Under his administration, federal prisons opened at a rate of almost one a month, confining a population that is now 58 percent drug offenders -- almost three times the percentage in state prisons, according to figures from the Washington-based Sentencing Project. The Clinton administration also refused to fund needle-exchange programs, prosecuted medical-marijuana patients, and began to take sides in the Colombian civil war in the name of fighting cocaine.

A devout prohibitionist, Ashcroft is now the top-ranking federal official dealing with drugs. As of early March, President George W. Bush had not yet appointed anyone to head the White House drug-policy office. (Candidates mentioned include former Florida Rep. Bill McCollum, a militant prohibitionist, and Elizabeth Dole, who has backed both more drug treatment and more drug testing.) "Ashcroft is the only person in the country who thinks that drug treatment doesn't make sense," says Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project.

Yet, facing a diverse and growing movement to ameliorate or end prohibition, Bush's drug policy may turn out to be less fanatically hardline than his father's. "He's made some good noises in some good directions," says Jerry Epstein, president of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas. Last year, Bush suggested that medical marijuana was a states' rights issue. More recently, he has dropped hints about increasing spending for drug treatment and reducing the 100-to-1 disparity between federal sentences for crack and powder cocaine. (For his part, Ashcroft has advocated reducing the crack/coke sentencing disparity by increasing penalties for powder cocaine.)

Whether Bush means it is another story. After a Bush aide met with medical- marijuana patient Tiffany Landreth in Austin last September, his office issued a statement that "current federal law bans all marijuana use, and the governor does not support changing those laws." As governor, Bush signed a law in 1997 increasing the minimum for possession of less than a gram of cocaine -- barely enough for one night of "youthful indiscretion" -- from probation to six months in a state jail. About 3,000 people are now incarcerated under that law. And Bush also "adamantly supported" school districts that wanted to test all students for drugs, according to William Harrell, head of the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We should all collectively shiver," Harrell says. Bush's record, he adds, was one of "total militarized policing and total disregard for constitutional rights."

Harrell points out that in 1999 the Bush administration named undercover cop Tom Coleman "Lawman of the Year." Coleman's accomplishment was setting up the arrests of 43 people in the small Panhandle town of Tulia on cocaine charges. Forty of the people arrested were black, and the ACLU has filed a civil rights lawsuit charging that many of them were framed -- in two separate trials, Coleman testified to being in different places at the same time. Harrell says the drug task force program that assigned Coleman to Tulia was "designed and directed" by Bush's office, and specifically targets users and small-time dealers in areas where convictions are easy to get.

Texas now has more people in prison than any state. According to state figures, its 107 prisons, 17 state jails and nine "substance abuse felony punishment" facilities hold 151,000 inmates. A 2000 study by the Washington-based Criminal Justice Institute found that Texas had 1 percent of its entire population (and 3.9 percent of its black population) in prisons or local jails, the second- highest rate in the nation after Louisiana. One-fifth of them were imprisoned on drug charges. Between 1988 and 1998, according to the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, the state opened 77 new prisons -- but just one new state university campus. "Nothing that he did as governor indicated a willingness to move away from prohibition," Epstein says.

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