Sometimes writing these essays are a chore and seem demanding, then there are other times when they seem to write themselves, this is one of the latter. I have written extensively about America’s war on drugs and all the ills and problems that it has caused. First of all let me state that I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe that racism is involved in every aspect of life in America, at least it hasn’t been in my life. However, there are times when it plays a major role in how we interact with one another. The war on drugs and the death penalty are probably two of the most egregious ways in which racism does play a role in America. The recent results of a couple of studies highlight the disparity in our criminal justice system that can not be explained by any other means.
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.[1]
Ok, here is the short course of racism in America. Drug addiction has no respect of person, it affects blacks and whites in similar numbers. It is not a black issue or a white issue. The difference is in how it is prosecuted in both communities. The drug war has always been depicted by the politicians and the media as a black inner-city issue, as if there were no drug problems in white suburbia. So if we are using drugs at roughly the same numbers then how can one explain that more than 50% of all persons sent to prison for drug crimes are black? These are not traffickers and distributors, these are mostly possession cases.
Here is how you devastate a community and destroy its future. You begin by arresting its young men for minor drug offenses in a depressed economy. Once arrested you prosecute them for felony convictions. Once they have been convicted or have pled guilty then you have sentenced that young person to a life of hopelessness. That young person has forfeited all rights to achieve any semblance of legitimate success. Once they have received a felony conviction they are no longer eligible for education grants, most government programs that target the poor, or be able to participate in the most basic form of citizenship by voting. One simple arrest by outside observation has actually removed this young person from competing in our society in any meaningful way in the future.
Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. National data are not collected on ethnicity, and arrests of Hispanics may be in either category.
“The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of its report.
“If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” Ms. Fellner said.
Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.[2]
By prosecuting the drug war in the way we are doing it, we are providing cover for racism to continue. We are spending 70% of our resources targeting inner-city and rural white neighborhoods as if these are the people importing the drugs from the foreign capitals and making the billions in profits. The people we are targeting for the most part are such major players in the drug trade most can’t even afford attorneys at trial. So where are all these drug profits going? I can tell you they are not being spent in my neighborhood, the occasional new pair of Jordan sneakers or chrome rims can hardly be presented as some large criminal enterprise.
Are drugs devastating our inner-city neighborhoods? Of course they are, but the solution is not to destroy the village to save it. Many in the black community are tired of the drug trade with its inherent crime and violence, but the way it is being combated today only creates more strife. We must develop alternatives to incarceration and the ruining of lives. The drug war has decimated the black community and has created an atmosphere of fear and distrust of those who are paid to protect us. All of us make mistakes especially during our youth, we mustn’t compound those mistakes by ruining their lives with felony convictions. While whites are offered diversionary programs to avoid felony records blacks are continually being placed in the system. We want crime reduced, but not at the expense of our future.
Where does it all begin and how does the ball get rolling. I read a story recently on the numbers of street stops being made by the NY city police and the numbers are staggering. There are similar numbers for traffic stops in communities across America. If we continue to target only one community then naturally the crime statistics are going to be skewed towards that group. The war on drugs has allowed this country to choose what group to prosecute and what communities to devastate under the cover of law and order. No one can argue the legality of what is being done, but what about the morality of it?
Street stops have gradually increased, to 508,540 in 2006 from 97,296 in 2002, according to departmental statistics. Because more than half of those stopped were black, the increases led some police critics to suggest that minorities were being unfairly singled out, though the police reject such claims.
“The numbers are troubling both because of the number of people stopped and because blacks continue to be, overwhelmingly, the ones who are stopped,” Mr. Dunn said. “Someone outside the Police Department, like the mayor’s office, the City Council or the Justice Department has now got to step in and demand a public accounting of the department’s stop-and-frisk practices.”[3]
The issue isn’t that blacks are committing more crimes despite the constant images being displayed on the nightly local news. The issue is that blacks are more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. If the police were to use the same tactics in the suburbs as they use in the inner-city I guarantee you the number of whites arrested would increase. And if they were sentenced in the same manner as blacks there would be a national outcry. Imagine if 50% of young white males were given a felony conviction in their early teens and were rendered useless from that point on. The war on drugs has allowed those with racist attitudes to institute those beliefs under the cover of legitimate crime fighting.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=drug+reports&st=nyt&oref=slogin
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=drug+reports&st=nyt&oref=slogin
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/nyregion/06frisk.html?scp=1&sq=police+stops&st=nyt
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Drug Wars VIII
Monday, January 28, 2008
War On Drugs VII
The thing that makes the war on drugs so insidious to me as a black man is not the fact that it has increased the number black felons or that it has turned our neighborhoods into war zones. No to me the one factor that has caused the most damage to us as a people is how it has removed us from the process of democracy. I think that this was its original intent and it has not failed to deliver. The United States is the only democracy in the world that does not allow its citizens the right to vote after they have served their sentences. In America, it is once a criminal always a criminal. To understand the racist nature of these laws all one has to do is to examine their historic beginnings.
Felon disenfranchisement was sometimes used as a tool by the states to disenfranchise blacks. Some Southern states passed laws disenfranchising those convicted of what were considered to be "black" crimes, while those convicted of "white" crimes did not lose their right to vote. For example, South Carolina disenfranchised criminals convicted of "thievery, adultery, arson, wife beating, housebreaking, and attempted rape," but not those convicted of murder or fighting. Mississippi modified its broad, earlier law--which disenfranchised convicts of "any crime"--to specifically target "black" crimes.[1]
The laws allowing for the disenfranchisement of criminals can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and first appeared in America as early as the 1600’s. So for anyone looking to disenfranchise a group of citizens the groundwork was already laid. If felons forfeited their constitutional rights all one would have to do is to construct and create laws to make more felons and then through a bias application of the laws exclude the majority population while ensnaring the targeted group. This of course is a broad statement and on its own proves nothing. In order to verify its validity there would have to be a statistical anomaly between the number of people in the criminal justice system from the targeted group and the percentage of that group in the national populace that cannot be explained by happenchance. Is there such an anomaly?
Although the incidence of crimes committed by blacks has not increased, the number of black prisoners has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13% of black males have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions, or around 1.4 million persons (Sentencing Project, 2000). The primary theoretical tool used to explain LFD legislation is the racial threat thesis (Behrens et al., 2003). The idea is that the presence of a high proportion of African Americans creates a threat that can be temporarily reduced by sentencing a large number of blacks to prison...Yet we will demonstrate that through policies that have been explicitly and are now "implicitly racial, state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life" (Omi and Winant, 1986: 77).[2]
I would say a tripling of black inmates is such an anomaly. Are we to believe that the increased number of black inmates is due to better police tactics or that more blacks are committing more crimes? No, there has been a concerted effort to marginalize black men and exclude them from the democratic process. In a democracy people must have free access to its instruments to affect effective change in their lives and in the lives of their children. The black man has never been given full access to those instruments. The results of that denial of access can be seen in the deterioration of the black community. If you can’t vote, you have no voice in the direction of your community or its resources. If you can’t vote you can’t elect people who are accountable to your interests. You in effect become invisible. And that is what we have in America millions of invisible black men, who are only seen when their faces are flashed on the television screens on the nightly news. They are never heard from, they have no voices.
I believe that the rise in hip-hop and “gangsta-rap” is a direct consequence of that loss of voice. If your voice is not heard through traditional methods, if your concerns are ignored then you are left with few choices. We have millions of young black men who have never voted and never will vote, ever. They have no concept of the democratic process because it does not apply to them. They have seen no improvements through traditional methods. The violence of the past to acquire the right to vote has no influence on them, they could care less. They don’t care because for many it is a “right” they will never get to exercise.
The following is a representation of Florida, multiply these numbers across the country and you begin to see the pattern.
Recent interest in LFD laws springs in great part from the experience in Florida (Johnson v. Bush). Florida's disenfranchisement law kept in excess of 600,000 citizens with felony convictions from voting in 2000 (Rapoport, 2003), of whom one-third were black (Wagner, 2001). Thus, Uggen and Manza (2002) argue that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as well as of several other presidential elections and U.S. Senate elections, would have had different outcomes if disenfranchised ex-felons would have had the vote. Florida's part in the 2000 presidential election has become infamous since the Supreme Court proclaimed George W. Bush as president. Before the election, state officials waged a $4.3 million campaign to purge Florida's felons from the voter rolls (Palm Beach Post, 2001).[3]
You may have noticed that I have not used the “C” word or mentioned Republicans, because it isn’t just them. Unfortunately, there are some Democrats who allow these injustices to take place. It not only helps the Republicans to disenfranchise so many blacks, it also helps some white Democrats as well. If you live in a city with a substantial black population and you are a white politician it would be in your interest to suppress the black vote regardless of your Party affiliation. Remember, all politics are local and in local elections it isn’t always good to have a large bloc of voting blacks, especially if they are independently minded. We all know that these laws are disenfranchising millions of black voters, so why have they not been repealed? This is the question that the Dems have to answer as well as the Republicans.
[1] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5199005/Felon-disenfranchisement-law-history-policy.html
[2] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5923399/Lifetime-felony-disenfranchisement-in-Florida.html
[3] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5923399/Lifetime-felony-disenfranchisement-in-Florida.html
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Drug Wars VI
The politicians in this country have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in the war on drugs. In an effort to cover the budgetary shortfalls in the State of New York, Democratic Governor Elliot Spitzer has included in his new budget a provision requiring taxes to be paid on illegal drugs sold in the state. Now while this tactic is nothing new and is currently being used by 29 states, it illustrates to me the bankruptcy of our political system and the true nature of the war on drugs. This war has never had anything to do with the health and safety of the public, but has always been a red herring for the politics of racism and for economic gain.
The bill sets a tax stamp rate for marihuana of $3.50 per gram, and of a controlled substance at $200 per gram or fraction thereof, whether pure or dilute. The tax is paid by the dealer, in advance of his or her receipt of the marihuana or controlled substance, through the purchase of tax stamps from the Department of Taxation and Finance (“Department”). Upon receipt of the product, the dealer must affix enough stamps to the packages of marihuana or the controlled substance in order to show the tax has been fully paid.
The Spitzer administration projects that the proposal would raise $13 million in the 2008-9 fiscal year and $17 million each year thereafter. According to the Spitzer administration, 29 other states have already passed laws imposing tax liability for controlled substances: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming.[1]
The problem I have with this law and similar laws in general is that they penalize people for being poor. It’s like the idea of having inmates pay for their own incarceration, it is another way to make people who are already poor take the burden of society as their own. In the process they remove the burden from the society that is supposed to be offended by their behavior, another kick while they’re down. The majority of people caught selling or using drugs are not major distributors or kingpins usually it is someone in a poor neighborhood with few other opportunities trying to survive. While I don’t condone the selling or the taking of drugs, it is not and never has been a criminal issue.
Let’s face it the majority of drug users are adults and while we may not agree with their decision to take drugs, it is still their choice. There are many people who make bad decisions everyday that I don’t agree with, but I don’t consider putting them in jail for them. The problem is that in America everything has political connotations and many times racial as well. The war on drugs has given the law enforcement community unprecedented rights to override the constitutional rights of many Americans and like most laws in America they have been used in a uneven and biased fashion. The war on drugs has allowed the police to declare a war on whole communities with impunity.
The propaganda is that the dealers and users are holding the communities hostage, the truth is that it is the police that are holding the communities hostage by their heavy-handed tactics and selective enforcement of the laws. By using their militaristic tactics the communities have evolved into a siege mentality where the residents are caught in a viscous circle, they have the dealers on the one side threatening their lives and their families and the police on the other side treating everyone as a suspect no matter how ridiculous the circumstances. We need to step away from this war mentality and recognize this issue for what it really is; a public health issue. It should only be a criminal justice issue if the user commits another offence, just like how we treat other people who choose to do unsafe behavior. The war on drugs allows the already bias criminal justice system to target those they consider undesirable and sentence them to a life of almost hopelessness.
Rather than blaming the drug users and dealers for the budget shortfall, maybe the Governor should look a little closer to home. To my knowledge drug users and dealers are not allowed to make state policy or spend state funds, so to try and balance the state budget at their expense is punitive and unfair. I’ve got an idea, why don’t the politicians learn how to spend only as much money as they have in the State treasury then they won’t need to pander to the mob mentality. It amazes me how whenever these politicians run short of funds because they spent too much they attack the easy targets. The ones like smoking, alcohol, and drugs that no one complains about.
Until we take the money out of drugs we will never be able to deal responsibly with the issue. It is not just the illegal money from drug dealers that must be shutdown, but also the legal money that so many states and local communities have become addicted to. The war on drugs has never been about people and today the truth of that is self evident, this war is about money. It is about money to militarize the police forces, it is about money to provide rural communities jobs, and it is about money to fund the political ambitions of politicians. Let’s face it just as the illegal money is a scourge against our economy, so the legal money is a scourge against our citizenry. Instead of addressing this issue as the health issue it is it has been reduced to economics. The war on drugs makes money and as long as it continues to make money it will continue to go on. Laws like these only perpetuate the myths and continue to promote the lies. This isn’t about criminals; it’s about dollars, period.
UPDATE 1/24/08 - ALBANY — Gov. Eliot Spitzer has agreed to a pay raise for legislators, even as he has called for cuts elsewhere to help close a $4.4 billion deficit, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has told Assembly Democrats.[2]
[1] http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/a-200-a-gram-tax-on-cocaine/index.html?hp
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/nyregion/24raise.html
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
War On Terror; Fought By Foreign Mercenaries
I find it interesting that with General/President Musharraf’s government in trouble we are now getting reports that our billions of dollars in military aid to Pakistan is being misappropriated. It seems that for five years we have been contributing about a billion dollars a year to a program known as Coalition Support Funds. This of course is just a fancy name being used for a program that pays the Pakistanis to continue fighting a war they don’t want to fight and the results prove that out. The Coalition Support Funds are designed to reimburse the Pakistani military for conducting missions against the Taliban and al Qaeda in the mountainous border regions of Pakistan. My question is this, if the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the other terrorists are a threat to Pakistan as well as the US as the Bush administration and President Musharraf have stated why do we have to pay them to fight?
Early last week, six years after President Bush first began pouring billions of dollars into Pakistan’s military after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon completed a review that produced a classified plan to help the Pakistani military build an effective counterinsurgency force.[1]
Once again it seems like the only way we can get people to fight alongside of us in this “War on Terror” is to pay them. While this is not surprising it does raise some other interesting issues, such as why is it that now when Mr. Musharraf’s political position seems precarious these allegations are beginning to surface? Are we to believe that for all these years no one noticed that Pakistan was not using the money to buy the military hardware they were supposed to, but instead purchasing advanced systems to compete with India? Where were they purchasing this advanced hardware from with our tax payer dollars?
The Bush administration has kept a blind eye to the human rights abuses, the loss of democracy, and the misappropriation of funds that has been occurring in Pakistan. Why would they be concerned about those small details when they have done likewise here in America? Tyranny knows tyranny. Rather than complete the mission in Afghanistan and actually make the world safer as they claim, they instead choose to expand their war into Iraq. Now as they exit the world stage; we have a war on at least two fronts and we are not “winning” either and we are no safer. But Forgiven, there have been no more attacks in the US while Bush has been in office; we are fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here. Understand one thing, the 9/11 attack was a one-time deal. It was not part of some global plot by al Qaeda to take over the United States or the world, it was designed to scare the hell out of us and it did that. The question now becomes where do we go from here?
Do we continue to pour boatloads of money into a black pit not only in America, but to every little tin-horn dictator who promises results? Unfortunately for Mr. Bush and his Neo-Con clowns, the world is more complex than their rhetoric allows. Just as our system is based on the intra-workings of many parties and agendas, so it is in any country. Every leader has to answer to someone and regardless of what they promise they still have to sell at home. In too many cases this requires cold hard cash to grease the wheels of government, so we expect results but only based on our schema. Other countries of course have their own procedures and they often times to do not emulate ours.
For their part, Pakistani officials angrily accused the United States of refusing to sell Pakistan the advanced helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft, radios and night-vision equipment it needs.
“There have been many aspects of equipment that we’ve been keen on getting,” said Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the Pakistani military’s chief spokesman. “There have been many delays which have hampered this war against extremists.”
But by mid-2007, the $1 billion-a-year figure became public, largely because of the objections of some military officials and defense experts who said that during an ill-fated peace treaty between the military and militants in the tribal areas in 2005 and 2006, the money kept flowing. Pakistan continued to submit receipts for reimbursement, even though Pakistani troops had stopped fighting.[2]
Anytime our “allies” want more money they complain about how we are hampering their efforts to prosecute a war that we in fact started. Money often times used to enrich the dictators and their cronies, while the ones designed to benefit from the aid continue to go without. Do we really believe that the troops in Pakistan see Osama bin Laden as an enemy to their lives in the sense that we do? And it’s not just the “war on terror”, it is also used in the war on drugs. We expect other country’s troops to wage war on our behalf against their countrymen and crops that have been growing for centuries, all in an attempt to keep the drugs from our streets and the world’s biggest market.
We have replaced diplomacy and mutual benefit with bribery and intimidation. Is there any wonder our foreign policy is in shambles? The sad part is that the upcoming election only promises more of the same. It is time we reexamined our priorities as well as our allies and develop a foreign policy that matches the reality of the world and not the false history that we continue to try and hold on to. The world has changed, unfortunately we have not.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/world/asia/24military.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/world/asia/24military.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
Monday, December 17, 2007
Cocaine Sentencing Is Cracked
It is unfortunate that it took the Supreme Court to do what the Congress should have done a long time ago and that is to allow Federal judges to consider the disparity between powder cocaine and crack when sentencing offenders. Rather than showing leadership and courage, the Congress even with a Democratic majority refused to act on the huge disparity in sentencing for crack versus powder cocaine for fear of appearing soft on crime. Once again political expediency outweighed moral conviction and the Congress failed to act. I don’t know about you but the Democratic majority was long on promises and has been short on delivery.
It took the US Sentencing Commission to right a wrong that has sent thousands of blacks to prison for possessing crack for sentences that would require someone with powder to have 100 times as much to receive the same sentence. Needless to say the majority of crack users are black and the majority of powder users are white. Everyone in Washington knew the system was broke and even after years of protests by the ACLU and other civil rights organization, no one in the Congress would show any backbone and right the wrong. What we have in Washington are professional politicians who are more concerned about getting re-elected than they are about doing what is right for the country. I’m sorry but I am having a hard time believing that the answer is electing more of the same, to me having experience in how things are done in Washington is not a real selling point.
In their decision to allow the judge’s discretion in sentencing, the Supreme Court began the process of removing more racial barriers in the criminal justice system. In what has become an almost comical situation, Judge Thomas, the only black on the Court was one of the dissenting votes. And he wonders why he gets no love from other blacks. Maybe because he doesn’t represent the black people he was selected to represent. Mr. Thomas you do not have the luxury of saying I am a Supreme Court Justice that just happens to be black, no sir you filled a spot vacated by a man who represented those who did not have a voice in this country. Now for you to come along with that black conservative crap of I want to be just another Justice who happens to be black is ludicrous. Black people need you on the Court to represent their interests, I believe that the whites you want to represent have enough representation, look around you sir when you are in the chambers and count the number of blacks there with you. I can understand his not wanting to be limited to being a color, but until we have equal protection under the law sir, you are representing not just a color but a people, a people who have long been denied and continue to be denied equal protection. The fact that this case even came before the Court should be evidence enough of that fact. Your denying this fact does not make it go away.
Now the Commission has the opportunity to complete the process they have begun when they vote whether to make the sentence reductions retroactive, this would affect some 19,000 inmates who could see their sentences shortened. The commission in the past has made similar reductions in penalties for drugs primarily used by whites and have made those reductions retroactive. It would only be fair to do likewise in this case.
In previous years, the sentencing commission reduced penalties for crimes involving marijuana, LSD and OxyContin, which are primarily committed by whites, and made those decisions retroactive.[1]
True to their script, the Bush administration is opposing making the sentences retroactive, the thought of blacks being released from prison early is obviously scaring the hell out of the wing-nuts. Citing that there would be a rise in violent crime with the early releases, they are once again using the justice system to promote their racial animosity towards blacks. The problem with their logic is that these are not inmates who have committed violent crimes, these are primarily crack users and low-level dealers. Make no mistake if they were violent criminals their original sentence would have been enhanced to reflect that. This was the same logic used when the original sentencing disparity was first passed, because crack users were more violent than powder users they require stiffer penalties. It was false then and it continues to be false today. It isn’t that they are more violent, it is that their skins are darker.
Making the guidelines retroactive is opposed by the Bush administration. A senior Justice Department official warned Tuesday that retroactive guidelines could have a disastrous effect on crime-riddled communities that are not ready to receive crack offenders who could be released early from prison as a result.
"Areas that already are seeing an increase in violent crime -- this is going to affect those areas dramatically," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the commission had not formally acted.[2]
While I applaud the recent movement on this issue, it is still up to Congress to permanently fix this problem, by removing the current sentencing guidelines that provide harsher penalties for one form of a drug versus another form. There is no scientific or rational basis for the disparity, it is racist at its core and must be removed. Senator Joe Biden has introduced legislation to do just that and must be applauded and supported, even though it was his bill that created the Drug Czar.
UPDATE: The Sentencing Commission voted to make the sentencing recommendations retroactive.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/12/11/cocaine.sentencing.ap/index.html
[2] Ibid.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Militarization of America’s Police
One of the most troubling results of the “War on Drugs” in my opinion has been the militarization of our local police forces. Using the usual tactics of fear and race many police organizations and politicians have promoted the false picture that the police are under constant assault and threats and therefore need the same material as the armed forces. They need armored personnel carriers, assault helicopters, assault rifles, and all of the other gadgetry being employed by the military.
The truth of the matter though is somewhat different than what is being presented. While one of the hazards of being a police officer is the possibility of death, the numbers do not bear out the need for such military hardware in civilian life. In 2005, there were 153 police officers killed in the line of duty out of over 800,000 officers, this hardly resembles the full scale assault being touted by the military hardware manufacturers and the police organizations. It is important to remember that many current police officers are ex-military so the thought of using military equipment will always appeal to them and arms makers looking for civilian markets for their military hardware will continue to overhype the threat to police officers.
The next step it appears is to arm the police with military style assault weapons. It seems that our local police do not have enough deadly force at their disposal, so the officers in Miami will now be offered the option to carry assault rifles.
MIAMI, Sept. 16 (AP) — Patrol officers here will have the option of carrying assault rifles as they try to combat the rise in the use of similar weapons by criminals, the city’s police chief said Sunday.
The chief, John F. Timoney, approved the policy last week, before a Miami-Dade police officer was killed on Thursday in a shootout with a man wielding an assault rifle.
Years ago, law enforcement specialists like SWAT teams were the only officers to carry assault weapons, but now even some small town police agencies are arming officers with the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M-16 rifle.
Patrol officers in Danbury, Conn., have been allowed to carry the weapons since 2003. Police departments in Merced, Calif., and Waterloo, Iowa, have put them in all patrol vehicles for several years. In Stillwater, Okla., about 70 miles west of Tulsa, every patrol officer is issued an AR-15.[1]
As we move closer to the time when there will be only two classes in this country, it will be important that the police forces are heavily armed to beat back the hordes of poor people storming the gated communities. There was a time in America when the police actually did policing, where officers knew the people in their patrol areas and actually walked their “beats”. The drug war has replaced community policing with military tactics. We have declared war on our communities and the people living in those communities. Instead of the police being accessible and respondent, today they are disconnected to the communities they are hired to protect and serve.
This disconnection to the communities has led to more violence and less cooperation with law enforcement. Instead of the police and the communities coming together to solve the crime issues, today they appear to be at odds with each other. With many in the community no longer willing to participate in the efforts to prevent crime believing that they can’t count on the police for protection the hoodlums and thugs have taken over entire neighborhoods. The answer is not more powerful guns and hardware, the answer is a return to the style of policing prior to this failed attempt at a war on drugs.
Somewhere it was decided that having the police riding around in their patrol cars would extend their range and reduce crime, I think it is time to rethink this policy. A community must feel connected to those that are assigned to protect them. The citizens in the Black community do not feel this connection. Hence, a lot of crime goes unreported or people refuse to testify for fear of retaliation. It should be incumbent on the community to protect itself, ie vigilantism, but if the police refuse to protect the citizenry something has to be done. Enforcing the laws should be a joint partnership between the police and the community, but this is going to require better communication and more interaction.
The only time most people in the Black community see the police is either while being arrested or after a crime has occurred, this is not an acceptable police policy. No matter how many or how powerful the guns you give the police, there will be no change in the climate until we have a police force that is more responsive to the community. A police force that is willing to interact with the community on regular basis to develop the lines of communication and repair the lack of trust within the community.
Just as our military is limited in its war with Iraq, so will our police force here in our communities, if we continue to stress the hardware and not the software. Our neighborhoods don’t need occupation forces, they need policing that is empathetic to their plight. There was a time when the police lived in the areas they patrol, it gave them a sense of ownership and it gave the locals a connection to the police. Let’s call off the war against our communities and begin to demilitarize our police.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/us/17miami.html
Read more!Sunday, August 19, 2007
Drug Wars V
Another Plan Columbia
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 7 -- The Bush administration is close to sealing a major, multiyear aid deal to combat drug cartels in Mexico that would be the biggest U.S. anti-narcotics effort abroad since a seven-year, $5 billion program in Colombia, according to U.S. lawmakers, congressional aides and Mexican authorities.[1]
After 36 years of the “War on Drugs” and billions of dollars can someone tell me what the purpose of this war is? As much as I try to comprehend its purpose I just don’t get it. The quantity and purity of illegal drugs is higher than they’ve ever been. The price of illegal drugs is the lowest in history and yet this farce continues. The body count on American streets continues to escalate due to the illegal drug trade and we continue to blindly follow an ineffective, punitive policy that has done little to stem the tide of this epidemic.
Now in an effort to help Mexico rein in its drug cartels we are negotiating a deal to send them 5 billion dollars am I the only one that thinks there is something wrong here? I won’t bore you with a laundry list of all the underfunded and admirable programs we could fund with 5 billion dollars. Instead we continue to throw money at a criminal solution to a public health problem.
News Flash- People take drugs because either it makes them feel good or it provides an escape from our screwed up world, no amount of law enforcement can change that. Unless we are willing to lock up every drug user in America, we have to develop another strategy to this issue. I’m sorry does anyone here remember Prohibition and how well that worked? I am not writing these posts because I like or condone the use of drugs. I have seen the ugly side of addiction and continue to see it daily during my volunteer work for my Church. I know firsthand the dangers and pitfalls of drug abuse, but I also know the limits to trying legislate human conduct.
The original Plan Columbia was an idea formulated by President Andres Pastrana of Columbia as an aid package to help revitalize the Columbia economy. He believed that the illicit drug trade in Colombia was a social issue due to the extreme poverty of his countrymen. He surmised that the reason they harvested the illegal drugs was because they couldn’t make a living wage anyway else. Wow, what a novel concept! To show you how this country can take a perfectly good and just cause and twist it to meet our political objectives, the Clinton Administration decided that to win points back home with “get tough on crime crowd” completely rewrote the policy to change it from social development to a law enforcement plan.
The final version of Plan Colombia was seen as considerably different, since its main focuses would deal with drug trafficking and strengthening the military. Ambassador Robert White stated: "If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there's no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels. Quite the contrary. (President Pastrana ) says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians...[Colombia] come and ask for bread and you (America) give them stones." In the final U.S. aid package, 78.12 percent of the funds for 2000 went to the Colombian military and police for counternarcotics and military operations.[2]
The Columbians ask us for bread and we give them guns and bombs. Rather than helping them to reform their economy and help them prepare for the future, we provide them with more ammo to maintain the status quo. I hope the Mexicans are students of history, because this Plan Mexico is appearing a lot like the Plan Columbia. While it will score political points for both the Mexican government and the Americans it will do little to correct the real problems affecting the people of Mexico. The immigrants coming from Mexico are not coming here to escape the druglords; they are coming here to escape the economic poverty that has forced the poor into the arms of the drug smugglers.
Instead of arming these governments to the teeth, maybe we could actually send them some aid to help revitalize their ailing economies. No, that would mean they wouldn’t have to come to America and work for less than minimum wage picking fruit and butchering our cattle. For decades we have undermined the laborers and peasant farmers of these nations, we have supported corrupt dictator after dictator. It is time to provide these people with a true way to stop supporting the drug cartels by providing them with an honest price for their crops and an honest job to work. Until we do this, people will continue to make a living the best way they can.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/07/AR2007080702114.html?hpid=topnews
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia#_note-4
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Are Second Chances Mandatory?
The United States now has more than two million people behind bars, a number that has been rising steadily for decades. But state lawmakers who once would have rushed to build new prisons have begun to see that prison-building is not the best or most cost-effective way to fight crime or protect the public’s safety.
Several states have instead begun to focus on developing community-based programs that deal with low-level, nonviolent offenders without locking them up. And they have begun to look at ways to control recidivism with programs that help newly released people find jobs, housing, drug treatment and mental health care — essential services if they are to live viable lives in a society that has historically shunned them.[1]
As our prison population continues to rise and there doesn’t seem to be any slowdown in sight, we are soon going to have to make show difficult choices. Will we continue to lock people up; forcing states to allocate more resources for prison building, supervision, and support services. We will begin to recognize that the majority of offenders are non-violent and primarily low level drug defendants and change our antiquated drug laws. Or, we will begin to recognize that a large majority of the prison population are offenders who were on probation or parole and have violated some technical stipulation of their release.
I always enjoy writing about this issue, because it gives the law and order crowd a chance to rant about some probation or parole who slaughtered a family in Iowa and how we need to get tough on these godless hordes. The truth of the matter is that there are millions of men and women who are on parole and probation in this country that you never hear about. They try to the best of their ability to live within the guidelines of their release. Even though many of them are struggling under the stigma of being a felon or ex-con, they are trying to uphold the law and make a living. While no one wants to coddle criminals and talking tough on crime is a politician’s best friend, I think we need to take time out and look at who the majority of people we are incarcerating are. The majority of our prison and jail populations are not murderers, rapists, or robbers. Nearly half of these people locked up are a direct result of our current drug policy.[2] This post is not however about those laws; this post is about what we do with these people after they are released from jail and prison.
For those who are unenlightened to probation and parole rules, they are designed for failure. They require the individuals to try to lead a life no adult in the United States could lead. The rules of parole/probation vary from state to state, but most have the same basic concepts. The rules restrict the movement of the individual, so that the individual must report and request permission for any movement outside of the jurisdiction they are in. If the person works in an adjoining state he must receive daily permission to travel to work. The person must agree to have his home and/or person searched at any time by the parole officer. The person must submit to drug testing at anytime and the person cannot drink alcohol or be in a place that serves alcoholic beverages. The person must pay a fee for being on parole, even though he may not be employed. I find it particularly interesting that we want the poor to pay for their own incarceration and release. We now have the poorest of people, many of them incarcerated because they are poor, paying for their own release services. If the fees are not paid they are subject to have their parole revoked. These state legislatures sure know an easy target when they see one; they can pass legislation against the same people who do not have the right to vote against it. I can hardly wait for them to mandate prison industries for inmates to fully compensate the state for their incarceration and maybe allow the state to make a few bucks on the side.
Increasing rate of revocations. There is some evidence that both the number and rate of revocations have increased and these have had a significant impact on prison and jail populations (Parent et al.). For example, in 1988 more than 60 percent of Oregon's prison admissions were due to probation or parole revocations. Furthermore, two-thirds of the prison admissions in Texas in 1989, and 60 percent of California's prison admissions, were violators (Parent et al.).
Parent and colleagues note that while the increase in probation/parole populations alone might account for the increase in revocations, interviews with practitioners reveal that in some states the rate of revocations has increased as well. Increased rates of revocations have been attributed to many factors including: (1) the shift toward control-oriented practices of community supervision; (2) the law-enforcement background of new probation/parole officers (as opposed to the social work background of the past); (3) an increase in the number of conditions of probation; (4) improvement in the methods of monitoring violations; (5) the more serious offender placed on community supervision caseloads; and (6) an increase in probation and parole caseloads (Parent et al.).
Empirical data on technical violations. While data collected over time is not readily available, the largest follow-up study of felony probationers in the United States revealed that a substantial proportion of probationers fail to successfully complete their sentence (Langan and Cunnif). For example, within a three-year follow-up period, 62 percent of a sample of 79,000 felony probationers had been either arrested for another felony or had violated a condition of probation resulting in a disciplinary hearing (Langan and Cunnif). Thirty percent of those had both been arrested and had a disciplinary hearing, 13 percent had only been arrested, and 19 percent had only a disciplinary hearing. Furthermore, 46 percent of the sample were ultimately incarcerated. Of those probationers who were incarcerated, 35 percent were incarcerated for committing only a technical violation (Langan and Cunnif).
In contrast, however, Clear and colleagues' evaluation of 7,501 felony and misdemeanant probationers terminated from six probation agencies revealed that approximately one quarter of the probationers committed violations, half of which were violations of technical conditions of supervision. Further, they found that most violators misbehaved only once. Therefore, the majority of probationers successfully completed their sentence without incident. In short, their study seemed to refute the assumption that due to early release and diversion from prison, the probation population has become increasingly dangerous.[3]
It is time for us to begin to recognize who the majority of our incarcerated are and begin to tailor programs to match that reality. It is time for the politics of fear to end not only in the international arena, but at home as well. Do not get me wrong there a number of dangerous people in our prisons and they should remain there, but the numbers do not support the system we currently have in place. We need to tailor release programs that match the offenders and the crimes. Should we hold the person arrested for a simple drug possession to the same strict standards as the armed robber? Is our goal to rehabilitate these people back into society or to treat them as pariah? If it is the latter, then we will not be able to build enough prisons to keep pace with expansion.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/opinion/02mon1.html
[2] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/drrc.pdf
[3] http://law.jrank.org/pages/1821/Probation-Parole-History-Goals-Decision-Making-Recent-trends.html
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Drug War IV
In my continuing series on the “War on Drugs”, I want to turn our discussion to the doctors who are now under attack by the DEA as drug pushers. It appears that the trust relationship between doctor and patient is now under scrutiny. Are there doctors who prescribe too many and too much prescription medication? Of course there are, but one must be careful when confronting this issue. It is reckless prosecutions that can send chills throughout the medical community and cause needless suffering on the part of legitimate patients. We live in a drug seeking culture, if you are not completely happy then take one of these pills and you will be. The pharmaceutical industry is spending millions on trying to find the perfect feel good remedy for all of us depressed Americans.
It’s a false choice. Virtually everyone who takes opioids will become physically dependent on them, which means that withdrawal symptoms like nausea and sweats can occur if usage ends abruptly. But tapering off gradually allows most people to avoid those symptoms, and physical dependence is not the same thing as addiction. Addiction — which is defined by cravings, loss of control and a psychological compulsion to take a drug even when it is harmful — occurs in patients with a predisposition (biological or otherwise) to become addicted. At the very least, these include just below 10 percent of Americans, the number estimated by the United States Department of Health and Human Services to have active substance-abuse problems. Even a predisposition to addiction, however, doesn’t mean a patient will become addicted to opioids. Vast numbers do not. Pain patients without prior abuse problems most likely run little risk. “Someone who has never abused alcohol or other drugs would be extremely unlikely to become addicted to opioid pain medicines, particularly if he or she is older,” says Russell K. Portenoy, chairman of pain medicine and palliative care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and a leading authority on the treatment of pain.
According to the pharmaceutical research company IMS Health, prescriptions for opioids have risen over the past few years. They are used now more than ever before. Yet study after study has concluded that pain is still radically undertreated. The Stanford University Medical Center survey found that only 50 percent of chronic-pain sufferers who had spoken to a doctor about their pain got sufficient relief. According to the American Pain Society, an advocacy group, fewer than half of cancer patients in pain get adequate pain relief.
Several states are now preparing new opioid-dosing guidelines that may inadvertently worsen undertreatment. This year, the state of Washington advised nonspecialist doctors that daily opioid doses should not exceed the equivalent of 120 milligrams of oral morphine daily — for oxycodone or OxyContin, that’s just 80 milligrams per day — without the patient’s also consulting a pain specialist. Along with the guidelines, officials published a statewide directory of such specialists. It contains 12 names. “There are just not enough pain specialists,” says Scott M. Fishman, chief of pain medicine at the University of California at Davis and a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. And the guidelines may keep nonspecialists from prescribing higher doses. “Many doctors will assume that if the state of Washington suggests this level of care, then it is unacceptable to proceed otherwise,” Fishman says.[1]
Despite popular belief, not everyone that takes drugs become addicts. I know from my own experiences that there are millions of people who take drugs and do not become addicts. The problem is no one can tell by looking who will and who won’t become addicted. But there is also the physiology of drugs and the human body. There are drugs that are physically addicting no matter who takes them (ie opiates such as heroin, morphine, etc.). It is these powerful drugs that are used to manage pain in most cases. Pain is not always a readily identifiable condition; there are sometimes no physical blueprints to follow. What degree of pain a person can tolerate varies greatly with each individual and also whether someone is actually in pain. There are no accurate tests for specific pain. I had a friend that suffered from migraines for years. He would go from doctor to doctor and no one could help him, sometimes they couldn’t even identify the pain that he was suffering. For many years in this country pain management was not part of most doctors practice's or part of any medical school courses. For that reason, many people suffered needlessly from under treatment of their pain symptoms.
But what are we to do with those who are addicted? They appear the same initially as the real pain patient, if anything they may appear more normal. Is the doctor responsible for what a patient does with his medication? Can a doctor accurately monitor a patient’s behavior that he may see once a month? Is it fair to expect that type of scrutiny from our doctors with our 15 minute HMO visits? It is questions like these that will cause many to suffer from pain or lack of treatment for other ailments due to the fear on the part of doctors to be arrested, sued, or even investigated. An investigation can cause a doctor to lose his livelihood.
Will another casualty of the “War on Drugs” be that patients suffer due to fear on the part of their doctors to do their job? There will always be people who abuse the system for their own personal gain, which goes for patients as well as doctors, but we must not allow the government in their zeal to fight this war to intimidate those trained to alleviate pain and suffering. As anyone who has read my writings know, I am not a fan of big pharma, but I am also not a fan of an intrusive government that under the guise of fighting a losing war is causing needless suffering. It is up to the doctors to decide the plan of treatment for their patients, after all that is what they get paid the “big bucks” to do. Let’s keep the government out of the examination rooms and peeking over the doctor’s shoulder. Should we monitor the performance of doctors? Of course we should, but their treatment should not be micro-managed by bureaucrats and drug agents.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17pain-t.html?ref=health
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Imported Drugs
"There is a pricing problem with prescription drugs," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who co-sponsored the amendment with Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine). "The identical drug, FDA-approved, the same pill, put in the same bottle, made by the same company, is set virtually every other place in the world at a lower price. And the American consumer is told, 'You know what, we have a special deal for you: You get to pay the highest price in the world.' "
I beg to disagree with the Senator, we don’t have a pricing problem; we have an ethics problem. We have an industry that is too embedded with our legislators and elected officials. The senate voted to add an amendment to an FDA bill to allow for the importation of prescription drugs from Canada. The cost savings to consumers is estimated to be around 50 billion dollars over 10 years. One of the major instruments driving seniors and the poor deeper into poverty is the high cost of health care, particularly prescription drugs. I applaud the senate for pursuing this issue even in the face of a veto from the President.
There has been talk about the safety of imported drugs for years, but as the Senator stated these are the same drugs made by the same manufacturers. This fear concerning the safety of these drugs is a smoke screen being concocted by the pharmaceutical industry to keep Americans paying the highest cost for drugs in the world. It is a sad commentary when those who we have elected and sent to Washington to represent us must be coerced into doing what we pay them to do. We should not have to justify saving money to these people, they should be looking for ways for us to save money in every area of our economy. Unfortunately those elected officials and their aides have decided that the large corporations need protection more than the consumers. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the pharmaceutical companies have spent in excess of 100 million dollars annually to pay for lobbyist to press their agenda. I can see where they need all the help they can get to protect them from us ungrateful consumers.
Public Citizen has done a report of the unethical goings on between Washington and the big pharmaceutical companies.[1] I would recommend everyone to read this report and see just how much money and influence peddling these companies are doing. It’s no wonder we are paying the highest prescription drug costs in the world.
To show you how we must be living in bizarro land, the war on drugs was supposed to increase the cost of illegal drugs, unfortunately it has had the opposite effect. It has however had the unintended effect of increasing the cost of prescription drugs; can anyone explain this to me?
Unless we begin to take control of our government soon I am afraid democracy will be a concept talked about in history classes. It will no longer be practiced here. This President has already begun to plant the seeds of the “Imperial President” due to 9/11. A President that is no longer accountable to anyone, but his own way of thinking and those of like mind. We must never tire of doing the right thing or be swayed by the propaganda of the wealthy and their apologist.
Our seniors have given a lot to this nation and they deserve our thanks and our support. We must not let them be gouged by the big pharmacy companies, because in the end it is us who will have to pay the bill. They should never have to choose between medicine and food; no American should. If the drug companies don’t want to lower prices, then it is only fair to let our seniors and poor get the medicines they need at the lowest and safest possible cost. This unsafe argument is a red herring; I have yet to hear of any mass deaths in Canada from their prescription drugs. Do they care about their citizens any less than we do? When you live on a fixed income the money saved from the imports can go a long way to allowing you some of the comforts that we take for granted.
Read more!Friday, May 11, 2007
Drug Wars III
In my ongoing discussions of the drug policy in America, I have come across some very disturbing information concerning our children, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. I briefly talked about the relationship in Drug Wars II, but there are reports that doctors on the pharmaceutical payroll are now prescribing drugs for our children that were not tested or designed for the purposes they are being prescribed.
The information is from Minnesota, the only state by the way that forces doctors to disclose where their income is coming from, and shows a correlation between the amounts of money doctors are receiving from the pharmaceutical companies and the number of prescriptions being written by the doctors. The pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to hold “educational” meetings to discuss their products and how to prescribe them, which seems harmless enough. However, the fees charged for these meetings may actually be concealed payments to the doctors from the pharmaceutical companies, which is in violation of the law. It is illegal for pharmaceutical companies to directly pay doctors for prescribing specific products and against Federal rules for the companies to promote unapproved uses for the products.
“From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.
Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.
But studies present strong evidence that financial interests can affect decisions, often without people knowing it.
In Minnesota, psychiatrists collected more money from drug makers from 2000 to 2005 than doctors in any other specialty. Total payments to individual psychiatrists ranged from $51 to more than $689,000, with a median of $1,750. Since the records are incomplete, these figures probably underestimate doctors’ actual incomes.
Such payments could encourage psychiatrists to use drugs in ways that endanger patients’ physical health, said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The growing use of atypicals in children is the most troubling example of this, Dr. Hyman said.
“There’s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don’t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk,” he said.”[1]
It is apparent that money and medicine are creating an atmosphere that is endangering the health and welfare of many of our children. Many times these drugs have not been tested on children in clinical trials so no one really knows what the side-effects or outcomes will be with long term usage. Because so much of medicine is trial and error we are putting these children at grave risk by allowing them to be human guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors. Many of these drugs are being prescribed with little or no empirical or historical data that they even work for symptoms or illnesses they are being prescribed for. So often today people are looking for the magic pill or quick fix for an unruly or aggressive child and these doctors are promising the parents quick answers to what usually are very complex issues.
As a parent, I understand the desire to want your children to be healthy and happy. I couldn’t imagine the pain and suffering that some parents endure with children that have emotional issues, but there is a growing body of evidence that many of our children are being misdiagnosed and drugs are being improperly prescribed. Doctors are free to prescribe medication as they see fit and the majority of doctors do an excellent job, but just as there are those in my field that are looking for easy answers I am sure there are doctors doing the same. Of course it doesn’t hurt to make a little cash on the side either.
“The drug industry and many doctors say that these promotional lectures provide the field with invaluable education. Critics say the payments and lectures, often at expensive restaurants, are disguised kickbacks that encourage potentially dangerous drug uses. The issue is particularly important in psychiatry, because mental problems are not well understood, treatment often involves trial and error, and off-label prescribing is common.
Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said psychiatrists have become too cozy with drug makers. One example of this, he said, involves Lexapro, made by Forest Laboratories, which is now the most widely used antidepressant in the country even though there are cheaper alternatives, including generic versions of Prozac.
“Prozac is just as good if not better, and yet we are migrating to the expensive drug instead of the generics,” Dr. Sharfstein said. “I think it’s the marketing.”
Some psychiatrists who advocate use of atypicals in children acknowledge that the evidence supporting this use is thin. But they say children should not go untreated simply because scientists have failed to confirm what clinicians already know.
“We don’t have time to wait for them to prove us right,” said Dr. Kent G. Brockmann, a psychiatrist from the Twin Cities who made more than $16,000 from 2003 to 2005 doing drug talks and one-on-one sales meetings, and last year was a leading prescriber of atypicals to Medicaid children.”[2]
It is a frightening thing that some doctors feel that it is ok to prescribe these drugs even without scientific evidence of their effectiveness. There have been too many cases and lawsuits where doctors have prescribed medication that had not been thoroughly tested or had been marketed with false test data and promises. We as parents must be vigilant in safeguarding our children’s health. It is ok to question the doctors and do research on the diagnosis they give. It is especially important to find out all the information you can on the drugs being prescribed for your children, being careful to investigate the side-effects and any clinical trial data that you can find. It is a lot of work, but it is becoming evident that if you don’t do it, no one else will.
Read more!Thursday, May 10, 2007
Drug Wars II
Last week, I wrote about how illegal drug usage has skyrocketed. There is another phenomenon taking place simultaneously. We are taking more prescription drugs than ever before. Some would have us believe that it is due to our being better able to diagnose and treat diseases. I am not so sure.
One in ten of our children are taking prescription drugs. Not just for treating diseases, the majority of them are taking a potent cocktail of psychiatric drugs for behavioral problems. For the first time ever spending for behavioral problems outpaced spending for antibiotics and asthma among children. One in twenty of our kids are taking more than three prescription drugs per day. There has been a 369% increase in spending on ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyper Disorder) drugs for kids under five. That’s right, kids under 5! We are setting them up for a lifetime of drug dependency and we do not even know what the long term effects of these drugs are. We are already seeing an increase in suicides and violence in our young people. Not to mention the costs they will incur for a lifetime of drug therapy.
Are there children who have legitimate medical reasons for taking prescription medication? Of course there are, but from the numbers there appears to be a large number of doctors and parents that are using these medications for quick fixes. There are some doctors over prescribing these dangerous drugs and misdiagnosing these children. We are not even letting these children develop personalities before we begin to try to alter them with these psycho drugs, many of which were not even developed for or tested on children. We must be careful and more diligent in this area; the stakes are too high to just casually prescribe these medications.
American consumers spent nearly $100 billion on prescription drugs last year, more than double what the nation spent on drugs in 1990. That number seems astronomical to me, so I have to break it down in a form that I can understand. That would put us number 48 on the worldwide country GNP list. We spent more money on prescription drugs than three-fourths of the world made in GNP. Why do we need to take so many drugs? Are our lives any better with all these drugs? Has our medical care gotten better because of taking all these prescription drugs?
There are a few things that are crystal clear concerning prescription medication in recent years:
1) Most seniors are taking more than one prescription drug, with almost half taking three or more.
2) Children are becoming major consumers of prescription drugs, in some cases on par with their parents, depending on their age.
3) The policy of prescribing multiple drugs simultaneously has become standard practice for most medical doctors and hospitals.
On the one hand we condemn the use of recreational drugs in our society and criminalize it, however we have no problem with drug usage as long as it prescribed and distributed by “Big Pharma”. We go into the schools proclaiming the dangers of drugs at the same time every morning these same kids are standing in line to get their morning dose of “Ritalin” to make them feel better. So, it is okay to use drugs to feel better so long as they are the drugs we give you. Am I the only one who sees the inconsistency here?
Friday, May 4, 2007
The Occupation Of America
America’s urban centers are under siege. They have been for a number of years. They are just as much under siege as any other occupied city in the world. Our cities are war zones complete with their own sectarian violence. There is another war we are losing, but this war no one talks about.
In 1971, a war was declared by then President Richard Nixon. The war was the “War on Drugs”. The goal of this war was “to interfere with the production and distribution of a substance to the extent that the cost to the end user exceeds the value of the product, resulting in a widespread discontinuation of use”. This sounds pretty straight forward and seems a worthy goal. In other words, we want to make using drugs so expensive that few if anyone will want to use them. Every President since Nixon has signed on to the theory that the “abuse of illicit substances is America’s public enemy number one.” We now even have a “Drug Czar” to prosecute this war.
When this war was declared I was in high school and at that time most drugs were either too difficult or too expensive to get save marijuana. The cost of an eighth of an ounce of cocaine (better known as an eight ball) was between $300-$350. Today after 36 years of the “war on drugs” that same eight ball is available on most corners in America for less than $100. Not only has the price gone down, but the purity has gone up. This price phenomenon is true for all the most prevalent drugs being used today, except of course those being sold to Medicaid. No one will admit it, but the war on drugs has had the reverse of its intended effect. So rather than lowering drug usage, it has in fact increased drug usage.
The cost of carrying on this war has been astronomical in terms of financial and human cost. The federal government estimated that the cost in the year 2005 alone was 12 billion dollars to wage this war. This does not include the cost to incarcerate the offenders (which averages about 1 million Americans a year), more than a quarter of whom are for simple marijuana possession at a cost of 30 billion dollars. It also does not include the cost of police protection (9.1 billion), the court costs (4.5 billion), and the cost of federal and state corrections (11 billion). For the year of 1995, the estimated cost was about 45 billion dollars for these other factors.
Then of course there is the human cost. The United States has a higher proportion of its citizens incarcerated than any other country in the world. Think about that for a minute, the country that is to represent freedom and democracy in the world has more people locked up than any other. The majority of whom are for drug arrests and the majority of them are people of color. There have been untold millions of families who have been torn apart or destroyed because of a simple drug possession charge. Many of those arrested are young men of color, who then become convicted felons which will greatly reduce any chance they may have for a productive life. Our current drug policy is creating a permanent underclass. To make matters worse these drug laws are not being written or prosecuted equally across racial lines.
In a war you must have an army to carry out the operations against the enemy. We have militarized our police forces. They no longer police our streets they are now like occupying armies complete with armored vehicles, helicopters, and assault weapons and tactics. As a result there is no longer policing of our neighborhoods; instead we have paramilitary operations aimed at the under-class of our society. We have, due to the feelings of alienation from being occupied and oppressed, people who no longer trust or appreciate those sworn to protect them. We now have young men killing indiscriminately not only one another, but anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire. In an effort to get quick results we have targeted the symptom and not the problems for drug abuse.
Drug usage is a problem in human nature. People have always used drugs and always will; no government at any time or place has ever been able to control human nature. All we have to do is look at alcohol and tobacco consumption and how the government’s efforts to control them have worked. What is the answer to the drug problem? I don’t know, but I know if this were the war in Iraq we would be discussing a redeployment strategy.
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