U.S. incarceration rates are among the highest in the world, although crime is down. Want to know why? I've been working to overturn our drug laws for over 20 years. Substance use is a Mental Health issue, not criminal.
Felicia Alongi Cowden is a first-term County Councilmember on the island of Kaua'i. She is a compassionate and caring legislator. She demonstrates potential for outstanding leadership. I hope this brief summary of our history compels her to act passionately and powerfully. We've destroyed the lives of millions of our own citizens and their families in this racist and failed War on Drugs.
Lee Williams: Felicia Alongi Cowden, about 20% of federal prisoners are in for marijuana-related crimes. Another 50% are in for Other Drug offenses. Only about 30% are in for non drug-related crimes. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world higher than China North Korea or Russia. And America calls itself a free country hypocrisy!
InfoImagination director, Scott Goold, agrees with the figures from Lee Williams: 20% cannabis; 50% other drugs. As a PhD student, he compiled similar research for the State of New Mexico in the 1990s: "Who's In NM Prisons?" Libertarian Republican Gov. Gary Johnson used this research in part when he called, as the first governor in the nation, for the legalization of cannabis in 2000.
A friend of Goold's, Darren White, was Johnson's director of Public Safety. He resigned in protest due to the "irresponsible" leadership of the governor. White serves today on a number of Medical Cannabis dispensaries in Albuquerque.
These are Mental Health issues, not criminal.
Take 70% of prisoners from our prisons and jails and we would not be in this predicament. Illicit drug markets also add guns and violence to our communities.
Those apprehended, arrested and/or convicted cannot gain productive employment and spend much of their life in and out of the criminal justice system. The cost to them is immoral. The cost to society is incalculable.
Overall, the War on Drugs is second only to slavery as the Greatest Sin in our nation's history.
Overall, the War on Drugs is second only to slavery as the Greatest Sin in our nation's history. We faced and failed a similar battle in the prohibition of alcohol. We had wars on our streets. As the dominate culture of pale-faced citizens wanted to drink alcohol, the government capitulated. We manage alcohol much differently today.
As the War on Drugs affects minority communities the greatest, the majority continues this unjust criminalization of some of our poorest, most disadvantaged and least protected populations.
This creates massive poverty and despair. It fuels the Private Prison Complex, funnels wasteful tax dollars to law enforcement departments and serves the racist and inhumane agenda of some of America's most despicable "leaders."
Harry Anslinger, 1937, coined the term marihuana for cannabis sativa to demonize brown skinned refugees fleeing to America from Mexico. They called it mota.
The paranoid and power-abusive President Richard Nixon, although his special commission to study cannabis in 1972 recommended legalization or decriminalization, needed pathways into the anti-war hippie community and rising Black movement.[1]
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people."
"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."
The Shafer Commission had concluded that while public sentiment tended to view cannabis users as dangerous, research showed they were actually more timid, drowsy and passive. Formally known as the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, the researchers concluded cannabis did not present a significant threat to society.
The commission recommended using social measures other than criminalization to discourage use. They compared consumption of cannabis to that of alcohol.
As primarily "white," older and straight-laced law enforcement officials had great difficulty infiltrating these emerging two social groups, Nixon placed cannabis sativa in the highest classification of the FDA Controlled Substances Act, Schedule I.[2] This prevented any further research and officials needed only to say they "smelled" the drug to bash down doors and conduct illegal searches.
Not since the first millennial, referred to as the Dark Ages when the Church blocked science, has government instituted and furthered such an insidious intrusion into the constitutional rights of a FREE people.
Sadly, our ignorance and preconceived biases allow this War on People Who Use Substances to continue. We have failed to remember our history and the cost to taxpayers and millions of American families will never be recovered.
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SOURCE
[1] The Shafer Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, was appointed by U.S. President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. Its chairman was former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond P. Shafer. The commission issued a report on its findings in 1972 that called for the decriminalization of cannabis possession in the United States. The report was ignored by the White House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafer_Commission
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[NYDailyNews.com]