War on Drugs

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  July, 2001  by Jule Klotter

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According to a YES! article by Carol Estes, a lot of money is being made in the US drug trade. Traffickers make an estimated $450 billion a year; corporations and financial institutions launder an estimated $250 billion in drug money; and the $40 billion/year prison industry offers prison inmates as cheap labor to corporations. Close examination of the US 'war on drugs' raises some very ugly questions about the disproportionately high numbers of black people jailed for drug violations and about the federal government's involvement in the crack cocaine trade. "Only 11% of the nation's drug users are black," Estes writes, "but blacks constitute 37% of those arrested for drug violations, 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations, and 60% of those in state prisons for drug felonies."

In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported in the San Jose Mercury that the CIA had known about and had even protected crack traffickers in order to provide funds for the Contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Faced with government denials, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and some Los Angeles attorneys looked into the story and concluded that "The CIA, DEA, DIA, and FBI knew about drug trafficking in south Central Los Angeles. They were either part of the trafficking or turned a blind eye to it, in an effort to fund the Contra war." The information has resulted in a class action lawsuit on behalf of two African-American communities in California and a community in Florida. Naming the CIA, the Department of Justice, and others as defendants, the lawsuit accuses the CIA of permitting the delivery and sale of huge amounts of crack, an "intensely addictive form of cocaine," into these communities. Carol Estes states that, according to the lawsuit, "The amount of cocaine involved was enough to put 3 million doses of crack on LA's streets every seven days...resulting in 'the death of men, women and children, the collapse of businesses, and the destruction of whole neighborhoods.'"

Poor African-Americans are further targeted in the US drug war in that mandatory sentencing policies for crack cocaine (which is more common in low-income areas because it's cheaper) are more severe than for the powder form. Also, drug law enforcement is concentrated in inner-city areas, whose populations are often predominantly people of color. Estes quotes former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert as saying: "There is no war on drugs and there never will be...because the so-called war on drugs is not about drugs. It's about money. It's also about power. And it's about race." Ruppert is now an anti-drug-war activist.

"War Games" by Carol Estes. YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, #15 (Fall 2000).

COPYRIGHT 2001 The Townsend Letter Group
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