The war in Iraq has cost $300 billion. But that’s only a third of what Americans have spent on another war they’ve been waging at home for nearly 40 years.

In 1970, when the War on Drugs began, approximately 1.3 percent of the U.S. population used drugs. Today, sociologist Katherine Beckett says, the ratio of drug use remains the same and is spread fairly evenly across the races.

But the arrests and prison sentences aren’t. Across the nation, a vast number of African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned each year compared with whites. In progressive-minded Seattle, for instance, the rate of arrest for blacks per capita is 10.7 times higher than the arrest rate among whites — a rate, Beckett says, far above U.S. cities such as Boston (at 5 to 1) or San Francisco (at 7 to 1).

“That’s a disparity of over 1,000 percent,” says Beckett, a professor at the University of Washington. “It’s off the chart.”

That’s how Seattle’s Black leaders see it. Last week, the Racial Disparity Project, the American Friends Service Committee and Village of Hope hosted a forum in which Beckett and three other speakers -- including former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper and County Councilmember Larry Gossett -- shared other grim statistics in a joint call to end the War on Drugs.

Of the 2,500 people in King County Jail today, Gossett told an audience at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center, about one third are there for drug-related crimes. But 40 percent of them, he said, are African-American – in a county where Blacks make up just 5.4 percent of the population.

Nearly all of them, he said, “had less than $50 worth of drugs on their person when they were arrested, but the average every one of them is facing is somewhere between three and five years.”

Of the people doing time for drug-related offenses statewide, Gossett said, 25 to 30 percent are African-American in a state that’s only 3 percent Black. Across the country, 450,000 African-Americans are serving prison terms for non-violent drug crimes.

“We have now spent $1 trillion on an unwinnable and, from my point of view, an utterly immoral war,” said former Police Chief Norm Stamper. “It was not a war on drugs that was declared in 1970 — it was a war on people. It was a war on young people, on the poor, on people of color.”

Beckett said that’s inherent in the drug war: Officers tend to gravitate to streets and open-air markets “where the arrests are the easiest and where people fit the stereotype of who uses and who sells drugs” — when 74 percent of drug users and sellers are actually white, Gossett said.

“There’s very little evidence,” Beckett added, “that waging a war on drugs reduces drug use or reduces the harm associated with drugs. By contrast, there’s a lot of evidence that making affordable, culturally appropriate drug treatment available can be very effective.”

Stamper advocates legalizing drugs altogether. It’s a goal he works on through Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, a national group of 5,000 current and retired police officers. “We need to replace prohibition with a regulatory model predicated on a public health system,” he said. “Those who are addicted to drugs — any drug, including alcohol — are in need of help… not a jail cell.”

Rich O’Neil, president of the Seattle Police Guild, agrees that arrests do little to stop drug use. But he responds that it’s not up to police to solve the problem.

“Their efforts would be better served by focusing on the why it is that people use drugs — is it an economic thing? is it a social thing? — and what can be done to prevent it,” O’Neil says, “rather than insinuate that because more African-Americans get arrested, there’s some kind of bigotry going on.”

[Resources]
You can see a 12-minute video on the War on Drugs at LEAP’s website (www.leap.cc) or visit Common Sense for Drug Policy at www.csdp.org.