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Given who is actually being targeted in the war on drugs, it's not terribly surprising that a UN report today dubbed the global anti-drug campaign a comprehensive failure with "devastating consequences for individuals and societies." Suggesting a significant review of anti-drug strategy, the UN's Global Commission on Drug Policy pushed political leaders to "have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem." As Chris Cassidy noted yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder took a shot at dismantling one such regressive strategy. Last year, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act to change a quarter-century old law that mandated harsher prison terms for crack cocaine users versus powder cocaine users by 100-to-1. Enacted during "a wave of racially-tinged media hysteria" in 1968, the previous law disproportionately targeted minorities and exacerbated racial disparities in the federal prison system. As Cassidy noted, the new law reduces that disparity to 20-to-1 -- "a move that improves, but does not [e]radicate" the problem. Yesterday, Holder urged retroactive application of the new law because "there is simply no just or logical reason why [crack-cocaine users'] punishments should be dramatically more severe than those of other cocaine offenders." Such a logical conclusion based on empirical evidence should by no real measure count as courage. But this is 2011 -- only 146 years since slavery was abolished and 47 years since racial segregation was outlawed (officially). In this day and age, we still have political leaders who view parity in sentencing as a threat. Political leaders like Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) still view the idea of minority criminals being released a little less later than white criminals as a danger to "the safety of our communities":
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he was "disappointed by the Obama administration's position" on early releases for drug offenders and indicated he might push Congress to intervene if the U.S. Sentencing Commission votes to make the changes this month that would take effect Nov. 1. "It shows they are more concerned with the well-being of criminals than with the safety of our communities."Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it was a "bad idea" and that "I strongly disagree" with Holder's recommendations.I should note that Smith was the lone public dissenter of the Fair Sentencing Act last year. "Why would we want to reduce the penalties for crack cocaine trafficking and invite a return to ta time when cocaine ravaged our communities, especially minority communities," he said on the House floor. But as Leadership Conference on Civil Rights President Wade Henderson explained, minority communities aren't "ravaged" because they commit more drug crimes than white Americans, but because they are arrested at a higher rate and sentenced to more severe punishments than their white counterparts. Ultimately, the prism through which many political leaders like Smith view the war on drugs is still very much driven by racial stereotypes. Through this perspective, any attempt to give a black criminal and a white criminal a slightly more equal sentence for the same crime appears to be a dangerous shift towards "political correctness" rather than parity. Thus however logical Holder's position may be, if those like Smith continue to drive the debate, his will continue to represent courage and a casualty in the war on drugs.
