Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
— Matthew 5:8 KJV
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The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.
— Psalm 11:5 KJV
For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.
— Psalm 1:6 KJV
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![thepeoplesrecord:
Young, Black and criminalized
The U.S. government’s four-decade-old “war on drugs” has led to the criminalization of a whole generation of Black and Latino youth, writes Eric Ruder.
April 9, 2012
WHILE MILLIONS of people around the country were reacting with horror and outrage to the revelations about Trayvon Martin’s death in Florida, the right-wing media had a different kind of murder in mind [1]: character assassination. When a juicy tidbit from Trayvon’s school records leaked to the press, they thought they had their weapon.
According to reports in the media [2], Trayvon had been staying in Sanford during a suspension from school, after an empty plastic sandwich bag reportedly bearing traces of marijuana was found in his book bag. Trayvon’s school had a so-called “zero tolerance” policy.
When this news of Trayvon’s suspension for “drug possession”—in reality, non-possession—broke, his family angrily denounced the reports and blamed police for leaking the news to discredit their son. “The only comment that I have right now is that they’ve killed my son, and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mom, told a swarm of reporters gathered to report on the latest “revelation.”
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly struggled to contain himself. In a March 27 show with Jasmine Rand [3], an attorney representing Trayvon’s family, O’Reilly deployed the usual interview-as-accusation style that he reserves for guests he wants to discredit. “Basically, it’s emerging that Trayvon had some problems,” said O’Reilly. “And the family does object to that.”
“Trayvon was any normal kid in America,” Rand replied, adding that Trayvon’s mother was correct to insist that the grounds for Travyon’s suspension bear absolutely no relevance to his murder. But O’Reilly wasn’t satisfied: “In a case of this magnitude, shouldn’t the public know the history of Trayvon?”
But the only newsworthy aspect of Trayvon’s suspension for non-possession of marijuana is that every mainstream news outlet considered it newsworthy.
If trying marijuana in high school in some way contributed to Trayvon’s death, then millions of American teenagers are at risk—not to mention all the years during which their parents and other post-high-school-age adults should have been deemed “suspicious.”
Nearly 40 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds—about 3.4 million—have used marijuana at least once in their lives, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [4]. Nearly two-thirds of adults between ages 21 and 54 have also tried marijuana at least once. Statistics also show that people of all races use drugs in similar proportions to their numbers in the general population.
Actually, the truly newsworthy outrage—one that escaped the media’s attention—was that a teenager would be suspended for two full weeks, not for possessing marijuana, but for possessing a sandwich bag with alleged traces of marijuana.
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WHAT REALLY deserves attention is the abject failure of the U.S. government’s four-decade-long “war on drugs” in every way but two. Its successes? The demonization of an entire generation of young, Black men—and increasingly Black women, and Latinos as well—and the waste of enormous amounts of society’s resources on building prisons and warehousing prisoners.
Even some high-profile conservative figures are drawing such conclusions, too.
Gary Johnson, the Republican governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, advocates legalization of marijuana and the decriminalization of harder drugs, citing the benefits of decriminalization of heroin in Portugal and Switzerland as models to be emulated. “Over the last 10 years, Portugal has documented a 50 percent decrease in heroin use as a result of having decriminalized heroin,” said Johnson [5].
Even televangelist and media mogul Pat Robertson has since 2010 advocated for the decriminalization of marijuana, returning to the topic on his The 700 Club show on multiple occasions. During a show in early March [6], he said, “California is spending more money on prisons than it’s spending on schools. There’s something wrong about that equation…I think we need to scrub the federal and state codes and take away these criminal penalties…[P]utting people in jail at a huge expense to the population is insanity.”
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