Supreme Court off Mark on Drug War

 

The infamous “war on drugs”  received some strong support from the United States Supreme Court when it ruled recently that the “zero tolerance” rules concerning drugs in public housing was appropriate (“Court backs hard line on drug use,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 3/27/02).  The rule is that in federally subsidized housing if any family member or a guest is involved in the use or distribution of drugs in any way, then the entire family can be evicted.  This includes cases where there is suspected drug use somewhere other than on public housing property and even if no one in the family knew about such use.  Chief Justice William Rehnquist, quoting a Congressional ruling, wrote that “with drugs leading to murders, muggings, and other forms of violence against tenants,” then this sort of policy is “reasonable” and would end the “reign of terror” within public housing projects. 

The case involved four senior citizens in California who were evicted because either relatives or caregivers used drugs.  And the policy is, in effect, “one strike and you=re out.”  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and Congress are just plain wrong about this.  It is not drugs per se that lead to violence; rather it is the drug laws.  This is borne out in several studies, most notably a detailed study of drug-related homicides in New York funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.  Their findings completely contradicted popular media images of drugs and violence, which have shaped views of Congress and members of the Supreme Court.

To start with, the authors of the study noted that there are three main models of drug-related homicides. One is the psychopharmacological model, which suggests that after taking a certain drug a person “may become excitable and/or irrational and may act out in a violent fashion.”  The second model is called the economic compulsion model, which maintains that some addicts, because of the craving of certain drugs, will commit crimes to help purchase drugs.  Some of these crimes are violent, such as robbery and sometimes the result is a homicide.  The third model is known as the systemic model, which argues that “violence arises from the exigencies of working or doing business in an illicit market.”  Systemic violence includes disputes between rival dealers, homicides resulting from enforcing rules about drug-dealing operations, eliminating informers, punishment for selling bogus drugs, etc.

A detailed analysis of 414 homicides found that, first of all, almost half (47%) had nothing to do with drugs at all. Of those that related to drugs (218), only 14% were caused by the psychopharmacological qualities of the drugs (and most of these, it should be noted, were alcohol).  Only 8 were due to economic compulsion (4%).  Fully 74% of the homicides were committed because the drugs were illegal and hence stemmed from doing business in the illegal drug market.  The remainder (8%) were a combination of two or more of the three models.

I am not at all certain if members of the Supreme Court know about this and numerous other studies documenting the same thing.  One would think that, given several research assistants and plenty of funding, the highest court in the land would check out the causes of violence in public housing projects and elsewhere.  Further research and reflection would have led the Court to consider one of the major drug-related causes of homicides and other forms of violence, namely, alcohol.  Indeed, alcohol has been found to be associated with well over half of the violent crimes committed during the past century!  Thus, to make a really serious attempt to reduce such violence, the use of alcohol should be prohibited in public housing projects.  But that won=t happen since it is a legal drug (which happens to be responsible for well over 100,000 deaths each year, compared to no more than 5,000 deaths attributed to heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs) produced by huge corporations who have lobbyists all over Washington.

There is a much larger question that needs to be addressed and that is the drug war itself and the targets of this war.  It has been documented hundreds of times in research reports, books and articles that the drugs that we have made illegal have consistently (going back over 100 years) directed at the most powerless segments of society and most often racial minorities.  It is no accident that while whites are more likely to consume drugs like cocaine, heroin, marijuana, etc., blacks and other minorities constitute the vast majority of those arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison.  The only accomplishment that this Awar@ can claim is the highest incarceration rate in the world, with over 2 million locked up, mostly for non-violent offenses, including simple possession of illegal drugs.  Moreover, the incarceration rate for African-Americans is around 8 times greater than whites.  We need not mention the obvious fact that the war targets the poor in general, which is why arrest rates in public housing projects are so high, compared to college dormitories and the white suburbs, where the rates of consumption of these illegal drugs are much higher.

And I suppose it does not matter to the Supreme Court that the illegal drug business is a $400 billion per year industry worldwide and that attempts to reduce the supply of drugs have failed miserably, and that passing draconian laws like “Three Strikes and You=re Out” have also failed.  But such legal repression has been very successful in locking up the poor and racial minorities in increasing numbers, so that today an estimated one-third of all black males in their 20's is somewhere in the criminal justice system - in jail or prison, on probation or parole.  And with this recent ruling, we make it much harder for deserving poor people to find housing.