A recent New York Times editorial described the “war on marijuana” as a tool of racial oppression.[30] It noted that in some U.S. states, African-Americans are eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana offences and in some counties up to thirty times more likely. Police are targeting these communities, largely in response to numerical arrest goals, which encourage petty arrests and illegal stops. Officers are evaluated on the numbers of arrests they make.
Two recent books set out, in stark and damning detail, the history of continuing oppression of the African-American community through drug laws. Dr. Carl Hart is a neuropsychopharmacologist who demolishes many of the myths surrounding illegal drugs and the generally accepted ideas about who is using them.[31] And civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander has written a flaming indictment of how the prosecution of illegal drugs has marginalized and disenfranchised millions of African-Americans.[32] She maintains in her book The New Jim Crow that mass incarceration is the new tool of social control, replacing slavery, and that the most effective part of that tool is the War on Drugs.
Political philosopher Noam Chomsky has placed his considerable weight behind this argument, speaking of the reinstitution of criminalization of the African-American population in the late 1970s.[33] He calls it a race war, and says, “It’s not based on crime. The device that was used to recriminalize the black population was drugs. The drug wars are fraud — a total fraud. They have nothing to do with drugs; the price of drugs doesn’t change. What the drug war has succeeded in doing is to criminalize the poor. And the poor in the United States happen to be overwhelmingly black and Latino.”
Then he explains how this selective criminalization was accomplished: “Almost entirely, from the first moment, the orders given to the police as to how to deal with drugs were, ‘You don’t go into the suburbs and arrest the white stockbroker sniffing coke in the evening, but you do go into the ghettos, and if a kid has a joint in his pocket, you put him in jail.’”
Western countries have recently banned another substance that is used traditionally by a specific ethnic community, even though no science exists to justify the prohibition. Qat, a traditional herb chewed in parts of Africa and in some Arab countries for its mild stimulus, was outlawed by the United States in 1993 and by Canada in 1998. Twenty years went by before the United Kingdom followed the U.S. example. Its decision to ban qat in 2013, despite the recommendation of the ACMD, was highly controversial.[34] David Nutt said the decision “shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the ACMD, and most of all, indifference to the welfare and rights of the communities in which qat is used.” He claimed that the U.K. had bowed to persistent pressure from the United States.
The ACMD had found that there was insufficient evidence that chewing qat caused health or other problems. It also found no evidence that qat was linked to organized crime, or used to fund the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab Islamist group, as was alleged by some. On the other hand, the ban risks criminalizing as many as ninety thousand members of the Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian communities in Britain who chew qat as part of their social lives. The racism implicit in the decision to ban qat is clear.
Qat is still legal in many east African countries, and can be imported under licence in Australia. Only fourteen European countries have banned the substance. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2006 blocked the scheduling of qat under United Nations international controls — so under WHO rules, it is still legal.[35] However, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which was set up by the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, persists in trying to overturn this decision.
In addition to the racist element, there has always been a prejudice along socio-economic lines affecting the prosecution of the War on Drugs. For example, among organized crime hierarchies, it is most often street-level dealers and consumers of drugs who are caught by law enforcement and punished.[36] High-end dealers and financiers largely remain untouched and continue in the trade.
A quick survey of the socio-economic status of prison inmates in Canada today shows that it is still mainly the poor and marginalized, particularly Native people, who are successfully prosecuted and incarcerated. This is as true for drug offences as for violent, anti-social behaviour.[37] It is rare for a well-to-do cocaine or heroin user to spend time in prison.
Case in point: Keith Richards, famed guitarist with the Rolling Stones, was arrested in Toronto in 1977 and charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking of twenty-two grams of high-grade heroin.[38] The maximum sentence for this offence at the time was life in prison. Two things then happened. The prosecutor reduced the charge to simple possession and asked for a sentence of six months to one year. And the judge sentenced Richards to probation, on the condition that his band would give a free concert performance in aid of the blind within six months. In view of the fact that Richards had a record of five drug charges over the previous ten years, this was a result that left others convicted of heroin offences speechless. One law for the rich; one for the poor. One for the famous; one for the rest.
Over time, a trend has been established of banning substances used by ethnic minorities, marginalized people, and immigrants, and then of treating preferentially those in the prosperous mainstream who choose to indulge. Substances like alcohol and tobacco that have long been accepted by the dominant community continue to be legal.
Despite the fact that most illegal drugs were outlawed some time ago, the orgy of prosecution and imprisonment that we are familiar with today did not really begin until the 1960s. Both the international community and individual nations became part of an historic effort to eliminate the use of particular drugs. They chose to tackle the problem, not through education and treatment, but by punishing drug offenders with prison sentences, even where offences were victimless and non-violent. A dependency on drugs was not treated as a public health issue. Instead, it was prosecuted as evidence of an individual’s moral failure.
The Role of International Institutions
The international community stepped into the game in 1961. In that year, under pressure from the United States, the United Nations passed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which enshrined the prohibition of selected drugs in domestic law across the globe. This and subsequent conventions signed in 1971 (and its 1972 Protocol) and 1988 had the effect of ensuring a regime of outright prohibition of certain drugs virtually everywhere in the world.
A close reading of the conventions shows that they did allow for a more flexible approach with respect to some minor drug infractions. However, over the years they became a hammer, enforcing a strict criminal justice model and preventing individual nations from adopting public health approaches (or any other alternative approaches).[39] The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), set up by the 1961 convention, has always taken a particularly hard line, endorsing repressive drug policies. The Global Commission on Drug Policy says that “the U.N. drug control system continues to act largely as a straitjacket…. For most of the last century, it has been the U.S. government that has led calls for the development and maintenance of repressive drug policies.”[40] The commission goes on to say that there is “strong institutional resistance” to new ideas within the United Nations.
Only very recently has the international community, represented by the United Nations, started to soften its tone. This is partly because it has begun to admit that the science does not support its punitive approach. For years its representatives tried to massage the message to support its law-and-order stance. For example, in 2002, a scandal erupted at the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP). The executive director had edited the World Drug Report 2000 to make it appear as if the ODCCP’s policy of suppression by law enforcement was successfully driving illegal drug use down. Research showed that this was not the case. The Global Commission on Drug Policy has said that public leaders need to admit what they know privately: “That the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”[41]
Yet in 2012, the United Nations report on drugs and crime (World Drug Report