America, Intoxicated: Conference Tackles Disasters of the Drug War

By Silja J.A. Talvi, AlterNet. Posted December 11, 2007.

Kathryn Johnston paid the ultimate price in the name of our country's perversely titled "war on drugs." She wasn't a soldier, but she was most certainly another innocent casualty on domestic soil.

It's quite likely that her murder would have gone with little, if any, notice had it not been for the fact that she was a 92-year-old black woman shot to death when Atlanta narcotics officers burst through her door using a "no-knock warrant." The officers had the wrong house. When Johnston scrambled for an old gun stashed in her house to try to save her life from people she assumed were trying to rob or hurt her, she fired one shot and missed. The plain clothed officers fired back, over and over again. Johnston died in the blast of gunfire, in which several officers were wounded in what is euphemistically referred by the U.S. military as "friendly fire."

Johnston's death at the hands of overzealous narcotics officers shocked Atlanta and then made national headlines when the officers involved were exposed for having planted drugs in her house in an outrageous attempt to try to cover up their deadly blunder.

Last month, on the anniversary of Johnston's death, Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington proudly announced that his department now had "the best-trained narcotics unit in the Southeast," having doubled its ranks and instituted new rules. No-knock warrants were still acceptable but only if they were "approved by a major" and if officers wore uniforms.

Akin to the expansion of the Atlanta narcotics unit in the wake of a disgrace like this one, the drug war keeps expanding its reach. As of year-end 2006, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that American jails and prisons held a record-breaking 2,258,983 men and women, and that one in 31 adults are now under some form of correctional supervision. Analysis of the report, released last week by The Sentencing Project revealed that, since 1980, there has been a 1,200 percent increase in the number of people incarcerated for the possession or sale of illicit substances, from 41,100 to at least 532,400 today. At nearly double the rate of men, the number of women in prison has increased by 812 percent in that same time period. In October, the Marijuana Policy Project also reported that marijuana arrests exceeded nearly 830,000 in the same year, resulting in one pot-related arrest every 38 seconds.

What mainstream news coverage of the record-setting incarceration rates existed all but faded within a few days after the BJS report, but at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference, held last week in New Orleans, the numbers remained front-and-center. Organized by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the conference brought 1,200 participants together from across the world to discuss the international ripple effects of relentlessly aggressive drug policies.

AlterNet was honored with an Edward M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism for its coverage on drug war policies in the United States and other parts of the world. Accepting the award on behalf of AlterNet was executive director Don Hazen, who noted that individual, drug war-related stories are attracting upwards of 100,000 readers.

Among dozens of other topics on the worldwide social and economic repercussions of the drug war, panelists addressed President Bush's latest proposed funding package of $1.4 billion in drug war "aid" to Mexico, now awaiting congressional approval. Panelists and attendees arrived in New Orleans from across the United States, the Netherlands, Poland, Columbia, Bolivia, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, but the gravity of police abuse and corruption related to racism and the drug war brought in local reformers as well. From needle exchange to the bleak history of Louisiana's jails, prisons and juvenile detention facilities, participants emphasized that New Orleans, and the state as a whole, has consistently grown more regressive in policing and drug-related arrests of low-income residents.

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Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008) and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

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