A few months ago when the ongoing urban war in Chicago hit the headlines, I reached out to a Facebook friend and asked her if there would ever be a solution to the problem. I said, why couldn’t the governor declare a state of emergency, send in the National Guard and declare martial law, until security could be established. My Facebook friend pointed out that even if that happened, it was not a permanent solution. The National Guard can’t stay there forever, and when they left, the gang bangers would return, she said.
She pointed out that the government has tried several ideas to solve the problem of urban violence. For example, they tore down the notorious, crime-ridden public housing projects and shipped gang leaders off to jail. But that just made the problem worse. Instead of having gangs, which largely controlled projects and had unwritten agreements about territory, now gang members were dispersed to different neighborhoods and took their violent ways with them. Also, since many of the veteran gang leaders were sent away to the big house, you now had a generation of young gangsters, who grew up with no senior figures to reign in their violent tendencies. Now many of these youngsters will shoot you for just looking at them the wrong way.
It was depressing that she implied there was no solution. Humans tend to look to political leaders, and even columnists like me, for solutions to society’s problems, but there are often no easy answers to complex issues. Some problems are always going to be with us. Committees will be formed, laws will be enacted, TV pundits will pontificate and thousands of words will be written, but nothing will change. The politicians know this, and they will pass laws designed to look like they are doing something, but the problems won’t go away.
One of these intractable problems is illegal drugs. Like most kids growing up in the 1980s, I heard about the War on Drugs, even though I wasn’t in America at the time. We heard President Ronald Reagan talk about Just Say No, we saw the United States spend trillions fighting the war at home and overseas and we saw the war dramatized in movies and television shows, where action heroes, like Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal, battled evil drug lords. And after all that, illegal drugs are easier to get than cigarettes. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure. The only thing it has done is lock up of thousands of mainly black and brown men and waste trillions of tax money. The NAACP’s website states that from 1980 to 2008, the United States’ incarceration numbers jumped from 500,000 to 2.3 million. And although Blacks and Latinos are about a quarter of the U.S. population, they make up more than 50 percent of the jail population.
According to Drug Sense, a non profit that advocates drug policy reform, the federal government spent more than $15 billion on the War on Drugs in 2010. This works out to be about $500 per second. (The figures were provided by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.) The stark truth is that unless society has a radical change about how we handle the problem of illegal drugs, our grandchildren will be battling the same problem with the same failed policies.
I found this issue staring me in the face when I read “Freeway,” Rick Ross’ book, “Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography.” “Freeway Rick Ross” is the real Rick Ross, unlike the former prison guard turned rapper, who stole his name. In the 1980s, he was one of the biggest drug dealers in America. He spent 20 years in jail and is now an entrepreneur, who speaks to high school and college students. He also has a documentary out called “Crack in the System.”
In his book Ross, describes going from being an illiterate high school dropout to a drug baron, who was making $1 million a day. Ross says at one point he turns on the TV and laughs when he realizes that he was making more than basketball star Magic Johnson. Ross says he probably generated more than a billion dollars during his career. A 2013 Esquire magazine article estimates that in today’s money, that would be between $2.5 billion gross and $850 million in profit.
I used to think that black people should simply not sell drugs, because the criminal justice system is always going to target them for harsh punishment. But, when you look at the money to be made that is unrealistic. If people are given a choice between working like a dog at a minimum wage job or making a $1,000 a day pushing dope, a lot of people are going to take the easy route. In a phone interview, Ross says that as long as poor people don’t have access to training and well-paying jobs, they are going to turn to illegal means. His book suggests that in many cases, poor black people turn to drug dealing to get the things that middle class and upper-class Americans take for granted, nice cars, homes and vacations.
The drug trade is a business, just like any other, with consumers, retailers, wholesalers and suppliers. If the government wanted to really end illegal drugs, it would have to approach the situation as an economic problem, not a military/criminal problem. The War on Drugs essentially targets low-level street dealers, but they are just retailers. That would be like trying to shut down Wal-Mart by arresting the people who work the register. If you want to shut down the narcotics business, you would have to attack all aspects, demand, production, retail and supply. Of course, that is darn near impossible.
So what are the solutions? Ross said it’s time to look at alternatives to prohibition, which has been a dismal failure. Portugal has decriminalized drugs, essentially they have admitted defeat in the War on Drugs. People who are found with small amounts of even hard drugs are given fines instead of jail sentences. They are also ordered to go to drug counselling. (Portugal has a universal health care system, so everyone has access to rehabilitation services.) Drugs are seen as a health problem, not a criminal problem. The policy has had mixed results, but it does seem to be working. German magazine, Der Spiegel, wrote, “The data show, among other things, that the number of adults in Portugal who have at some point taken illegal drugs is rising. At the same time, though, the number of teenagers who have at some point taken illegal drugs is falling. The number of drug addicts who have undergone rehab has also increased dramatically, while the number of drug addicts who have become infected with HIV has fallen significantly.”
While Ross suggests legalization, I don’t see that ever happening in the closed-minded United States. There are a handful of politicians who might suggest this legislation, but I can’t see it working it’s way through Congress. So, instead America will continue to go the prohibition route and lock up thousands of drug offenders. Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.
