War on drugs: a war on minorities, a war on the poor

INTERVIEW/Deborah Peterson Small

Most people who are behind bars in various countries around the world are in jail because their offenses are associated with the drug trade, they are poor and they belong to ethnic minorities. The most significant example of this is the United States, where African Americans, 13% of the population of the country, add up to 56% of the population incarcerated for such offenses according to data from the Drug Policy Alliance.

Civil Rights Activist Deborah Peterson Small, former director of the Civil Liberties Union of the City of New York has been studying the phenomenon for years and has come to the conclusion that the so-called ‘war on drugs’ offers governments the perfect excuse to exert social control over certain sectors of the population: the poor, ethnic minorities, youth, and immigrants to cite a few.

Small founded Break the Chains, based in New York, and through her organization Small and her team work for fairer and more humane drug policy, by empowering vulnerable communities and advocating for legal reform. One such proposition is an end to the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine possession. A disparity that disproportionately affects African Americans in the US.

But the problem is not limited to the United States. According to Deborah who has visited Brazil, Colombia and a number of countries in the Caribbean and Africa, the criminalization of Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and the poor and youths is common to many societies.
Comunidad Segura interviewed Small, a lawyer from Harvard who has recently received the Robert C. Randall Award for Achievement in the Field of Citizen Action, dedicated to citizens who contributed to make democracy work in the area of drug law and policy reform.

Why do you think that the war on drugs is a form of discrimination?

In São Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro, in West Africa, in Europe, Argentina, the Caribbean, Colombia, practically everywhere I have been I have seen the same thing: those arrested for drug related crimes are always poor. In some places they belong to racial minorities and even religious minorities. But it is always the poorest and the most marginalized, which leads me to believe that this has to do less with drugs and more with control. If the war on drugs policy were really a way to control drugs, authorities would control all places in which drugs show up, not only in poor areas.

The poor generally don’t even use the majority of drugs because they cannot afford them. But the war against drugs has become a tool for used by governments to control segments of the population that is economically unfeasible or politically problematic. Drug policy is also used to control youth when there is no place for them in the workforce. Thus, criminalization is one of the tools that governments use to manage their economies; if they need to find a reason to criminalize people, drugs provide an excellent excuse to do so.

Why are drugs such an effective excuse in place of others?

Because the topic is associated to all sorts of moral issues; people do not question governments when the decision to prosecute people is based on the fact ‘they use drugs’ instead of saying ‘because they are poor’ or ‘because they are a minority’ or ‘because they are young and may become rebellious’. The war on drugs provides an excellent alibi that fits a number of different agendas.

But what is the upside of controlling these minorities? That is to say, how do states benefit from this criminalization of the poor if we know that when people go to prison they will probably become further involved in criminal activities?

It depends. If we look at the experience of the United States, what I can say is that there is a relation between the civil rights movement (that racial minorities used to champion their rights to the same opportunities offered others) and the arrival of the war against drugs because the war on drugs has allowed our government to ignore those demands and criminalize the people. Prior to the civil rights movement, if you were a black person in the US,  you could be arrested for addressing a white person, or for looking at a white woman, the wrong way, or even for being in places one should not be. The civil rights movement made this impossible: it was no longer possible to criminalize people for being black. So, with the war on drugs we could say that they are criminal and can be persecuted, and fulfill the same goals.

And what is the result?

Drugs are present everywhere in society, and this was what took me a little more time to understand: it costs more money and effort to give people decent housing, education and economic opportunities than it costs to simply lock them behind bars. And if, as a politician, you are looking to put in the least effort possible, then putting great quantities of people in jail means you can avoid the problem. That is how governments excuse themselves when they say: “the problem is not poverty but criminality, and look at the amounts of people in jail, the crime problem is great and we must incarcerate”. And soon they argue that people who are in this situation are poor because they are related to criminals, in place of recognizing that they are poor because they live in a social and structural structure that locks them in poverty. My conclusion is that many governments are willing to spend more money and energy incarcerating people for drug use and other such offenses than to spend in improving their living conditions.

Has there been any research into the costs of social investment as compared with the war on drugs, and if so, what were the findings?

Yes we have a number of studies that look at the impact of the war on drugs in poor black communities. The cost of incarceration is high: ranging from 15 to 20 thousand dollars a year per detainee, but it would be more costly to offer these people education and decent housing. Definitively to invest in people implies in an initial expense that is higher, but in the long term there would be higher returns because people start to pay their taxes and pay back to society, instead of sitting in prison. Unfortunately politicians have short term vision, they don’t ask where society is going in 15 to 20 years, but limit themselves to their own election cycles. That is why they sell voters ideas based on reducing crime by jailing people in the immediate future. Long term ideas are harder to take credit for.

But it is not only a question of racial discrimination…

No, because if you have money in the United States you can use drugs, no matter the color of your skin. The issue here is who will pay the price of our drug policy: the people who will pay this prices are mostly young people, most of them are black and Hispanic… and we go on using the excuse that if we do it because we want to protect them, because we don’t want them to end up turning into addicts. Personally I have a problem with the idea of sacrificing generation after generation of Blacks and Hispanics to maintain the idea that we are protecting white youth. This is not the country that we want. There is a reason why there aren’t any more white people in prison, and that is not only how the police act, and it is because the community would not tolerate it. It has to do with how we interact with each other in the community and how we raise our children. We are tolerant with respect to this type of punishment given to our children, while other communities won’t tolerate this kind of punishment being given to their children.

Some recent studies show that in Brazil poor and black people are punished more harshly by the law in drug related offenses, do you believe this is a trend the world over?

I have been in Rio and in Salvador and what I saw was, first of all, it is a myth that Brazil is not racist and that it is full of opportunities for blacks. It is a racist country. In second place, I saw that the poorest people are involved in the drug market due to lack of economic opportunities, but also that the majority of people who buy them drugs are not the poor but those who are economically able. I saw the same thing in Colombia. I also realized that black and native populations (in Brazil and in Colombia) are also the main targets in the war on drugs, although they do not represent the group that uses drugs the most. All this works as a form of social control and the police is instructed to use the law accordingly.

What would a post-proibition scenario look like in drug producing countries?

I’ve been to Colombia recently and it worries me what happens to producing countries because, frankly, the situation in these countries in a post-proibition scenario would be very similar to the situation of urban communities where a great number of people survive based on the sale of drugs. If the law is changed but we don’t give these people an option for survival, there will simply be more suffering in these communities. Colombia has not always produced cocaine. Colombia produces cocaine today because of the US policies and a domestic situation in which the actors in the conflict finance themselves with drug sales. It is also a way in which the Colombian government can evade its responsibility to foster economic development. It can easily claim certain areas cannot be developed because they are engaged in producing cocaine, and can send North American planes to fumigate the area and cause displacements of people who will end up in shantytowns in the periphery of urban centers. This land that is cleared in anti-coca actions eventually is used by agro-businesses to create great plantations of bio-fuels that make a lot of money but which bring little benefit to people, and again, it leads to more crime in cities. In my view, it all comes down to how to use resources in a better and fairer way.

The situation in Africa is just as dismal…

What happens in Latin America looks like what is beginning to happen in Western Africa, especially in weaker economies like Nigeria or Guinea Bissau. The money generated by drugs is a source of income for many people who are desperate to get money any way they can, and this includes violence and addiction. But no one pays attention to the problem because Africa is considered a continent of ills, and this topic is considered just another ill, on top of HIV, hunger and war. In my opinion all this comes under the same notion: that is how the “north” imposes policies in the global “south”… policies that are adverse to democracy and development.

It would seem that the Obama administration would bring about some change. Hillary Clinton recently recognized in Mexico, that the US has responsibility in the drug business…

That only amounts to saying the truth. The question is, beyond words, what are they prepared to do? I don’t know. Will they send in more troops and money to fight the cartels as they do in Plan Colombia? Or are they willing to reduce the number of guns entering Mexico and reduce drug use in the US?

Read Further:

"The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007 PDF"

Photo: Break the Chains

Translated by Lis Horta Moriconi