Celebrating Success in the Drug War
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by Reverend Lucy Ijams
A sermon preached on April 10, 2004
Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden, CT

Why is a retired 53 year-old Texas police detective going from LA to NYC, riding his horse? Howard Wooldridge is speaking to the Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, Lions and other groups in the towns he is passing through. He’s also doing radio and newspaper interviews. His topic: legalizing drugs and destroying the black market.

He’s not in favor of drug use. He just wants the 70 billion spent each year to fight the War on Drugs to be spent on serious crimes like murder, rape, drunk driving and other violent crimes. He thinks the medical community should be taking care of drug users instead of police and prisons.

He recently saw six officers from three police cruisers take more than an hour checking out a motor vehicle for drugs. During that time, they could have been stopping drunk drivers and apprehending other criminals.

Howard Wooldridge started his journey on March 4th with his horse, Misty, and expects to arrive in NY in early November. A former lobbyist in the Texas legislature, he is media director for a group called L.E.A.P. which means Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. [Man with a mission travels through town; Former police detective wants an end to war on drugs. By Joanne Winer QUARTZSITE (AZ)TIMES, March 24, 2005]

Why would a man endure considerable hardship-- “blisters on blisters” as he writes--Misty losing her horseshoes and not feeling safe enough to lie down and sleep at night, and encounters with rattlesnakes along the side of the road during the heat of mid-day? Because the war on drugs is a failure and is causing more harm than good.

You have the Q and A produced by L.E.A.P. I think it makes a credible and persuasive argument.

What does this have to do with being a Unitarian Universalist and why bring it up during a church service? As I mentioned before, our second principle affirms our support of justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Current policies around illegal drugs show a distinct lack of those qualities. Justice and equity: It is well known that the heaviest toll of the war on drugs is felt among people of color and the poor. Where is the compassion for the children who lose their parents to the prison system, when community treatment centers would allow families to stay together?

Some of you may know that five UUA General Assemblies since 1961 have passed resolutions and statements of conscience regarding drug penalties. It doesn’t mean that every UU agrees that drugs should be decriminalized. Those that do have that belief are allied with the platform of the Libertarian Party, so this is not a Democratic or Republican issue.

The heart of the matter is that as human beings we are connected to each other in ways we often don’t consciously feel. Deep down, we care deeply about basic fairness. As religious people, this seems to be a given—our caring for others. How that concern shows up in our lives is as individual as each of us here.

In our day to day lives, our own personal and family concerns naturally come first. For some here, the issue of illegal drug use is a personal and family concern. One of my first cousins is a drug addict. He has been estranged from the family after robbing his mother to support his habit. It is not a surprise that he has addiction problems, coming from a family with many alcoholics, including both his mother and father. I haven’t seen Tabb, who is two years younger than I am, since January, 1994 at a reunion of the Ijams cousins. His sister hasn’t seen him either. I don’t know what involvement he has had with the criminal justice system, but as far as I know he is not incarcerated.

I don’t think about my lost cousin very often. Perhaps it is too painful to care. I do think about his sister, whose husband became addicted to crack about 10 years ago. Here was a bright guy, a graduate of Wharton Business School, successfully employed, living in Wilton, CT. He spent every penny they had and lost his career in financial services. My mother and brothers supported my cousin and her three young children financially while her husband was in treatment at the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. His treatment was successful and the family was reunited in Minnesota, where they still live.

My family members have been lucky because there were financial resources in the family to help them. The situation my cousins have been in were horror stories for them, but nothing compared to what has happened to others.

So why do I care about people I don’t know who are caught up in the criminal system because of drug use and abuse? I just think it is bad public policy and that my tax dollars would be better spent on treatment and education. I have never wanted my tax dollars spent on violence. So my attitude about the drug war is because of my wallet? Well, not entirely.

It really is about my affirmation of our second principle. There is a basic unfairness in who pays and who profits from the current policies on drug offenses. Let’s look at who pays. Who are the casualties of the war on drugs? Some of them are people like me and my cousin, middle class people from “respectable” neighborhoods.
First, a true story from a colleague’s sermon. The story is about our recently deceased colleague, Barbara Edgecombe, minister of the congregation in East Lansing:

In December of 1996 Barbara's townhouse was stormed by six police officers before breakfast. She had just recently moved into the town-house. She was being treated for breast cancer with chemotherapy. She told the police she had never heard of the man they were looking for. Assuming she was protecting him, an officer ordered her to get down and he pushed on her back to make her lie on the floor. "Please close the door, I'm in chemo and I'm terribly cold." He pushed her face into the carpet and did not close the door. After concluding the man they sought was not there, they continued to question her and she explained that she had no idea who he was.

After they left she was treated at the hospital for a sprained back that had many bruises on it. The Head of the Narcotics Unit returned later that morning to assess property damages and to apologize for the unfortunate mistake. He said the element of surprise is critical to drug busts, and that though they try to take every precaution, from time to time something like this happens. [From a sermon "The Drug Wars - Domination, Delusion, Decriminalization" by Rev. Cheryl Jack, Sunday, February 18, 2001]

A fictional story next: In the movie Traffic from the year 2000, the daughter of a judge who becomes a federal czar in the war on drugs, Caroline Wakefield, becomes addicted to cocaine. One of her friends, while partying at her house, has a drug overdose, but the kids are too scared to call an ambulance to the house and the young man dies after his friends take him to the hospital. Caroline’s parents get her into a drug rehab center, but she escapes and goes directly to her dealer to get high. She prostitutes herself so she can keep getting high. If drug use was not a criminal matter, Caroline’s friend would not have died and she would not have had to sell her body to get drugs.

In the real world, there have been hundreds of young people whose parents sent them to “boot camp” type treatment programs. Many of them operated under the name Straight, Inc. From an article on FoxNewsOnline by Radley Balko comes the following account:

Samantha Monroe was 12 years old in 1981 when her parents enrolled her in the Sarasota, Fla., branch of Straight Inc., an aggressive drub rehab center for teens. Barely a teen, Samantha also had no history of drug abuse. But she spent the next two years of her life surviving Straight.

She was beaten, starved and denied toilet privileges for days on end. She describes her "humble pants," a punishment that forced her to wear the same pants for six weeks at a time. Because she was allowed just one shower a week, the pants often filled with feces, urine and menstrual blood. Often she was confined to her closet for days. She gnawed through her jaw during those "timeout" sessions, hoping she'd bleed to death.

She says that after she was raped by a male counselor, "the wonderful state of Florida paid for and forced me to have an abortion."

There are hundreds of Straight stories like Samantha's. Wes Fager enrolled his son in a Springfield, Va., chapter of Straight on the advice of a high school guidance counselor. Fager didn't see his son again until three months later — after he'd escaped and developed severe mental illness.
...
They are stories of suicides and attempted suicides, rapes, forced abortions, molestations, physical abuse, lawsuits, court testimonies, and extensive documentation of profound psychological abuse at Straight chapters all
over the country.

Many of the children who were tricked by their parents into being held captive in these programs were not serious drug users at all. They may have been caught drinking once.

There have been enough lawsuits against Straight, Inc. and similar programs modeled on the cult-like synanon program of brain washing that Straight has been shut down.

Another group which pays for the war on drugs, in addition to all us taxpayers, are people who are denied federal financial aid for college because of drug convictions. Even though higher education is a good preventative to recidivism, the Higher Education Act became law in 1998, and has denied financial aid to an estimated 160,000 people. There is no telling how many young people have not even bothered to apply for financial aid because guidance counselors have informed them on the law. An article published in the NewStandard News illustrates the problem.

Even Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who wrote the embattled measure, concedes that it has had unintended consequences. "This provision was clearly meant to apply only to students convicted of drug crimes while receiving financial aid, not to applicants who may have had drug convictions in years past," Souder has told the press.

But the anti-drug provision has penalized thousands of students, many who are poor and from minority populations, especially with arrests for nonviolent marijuana possession on the rise. According to the FBI, law enforcement agencies arrested a record 755,186 people in 2003 for marijuana related offenses, nearly 662,886 of them for possession.

Marisa Garcia is one of those statistics. In 2000, one day before her 19th birthday, police arrested Garcia for possession of a pipe containing marijuana residue. "It was the first time I was in trouble and I didn’t know what to do," Garcia recalled. "I plead guilty and paid a $400 fine."
. . . .
Garcia had applied for financial aid, but a couple of months after her conviction, the application form was returned. "My mom had filled out the form, and she didn’t answer one question: do you have a drug conviction?" Garcia recalled. "I called the [Department of Education] and learned that I couldn’t get aid because of my prior drug conviction. I feel that I’ve paid twice for my mistake."

Today, Garcia is a junior and sociology major at the University of California at Fullerton. "The person who wrote the law was trying to show how tough he was on drugs, but it’s poorly written," Garcia said. "It doesn’t deter someone from taking drugs, but it does deter thousands of people from getting an education.’
[“National Campaign to Repeal College Aid Drug Law Picks Up Steam”
by Ron Chepesiuk at http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=1599 ]

Chris Mulligan, with the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform, adds:

This law is counterproductive to both the purpose of the Higher Education Act, which is to provide under privileged students educational opportunities, and the goal of the criminal justice system to reduce rates of recidivism and addiction.

Drug treatment experts agree that educational opportunities are one of the most successful paths to recovery. Denying financial aid to students who have already been sentenced by the criminal justice system punishes them a second time for the same offense and simultaneously perpetuates the cycle of addiction such students are trying to leave behind.

You have heard some stories about who pays for the war on drugs, but a related question is who profits? Who are the beneficiaries? Federal and state governments spend 70 billion dollars of our taxes each year on the war against drugs. Most of it is on military activities. Maybe a billion or so is spent on treatment each year.

Foreign governments are beneficiaries of our drug interdiction programs. So are certain Pentagon and Drug Enforcement Administration budgets. And local law enforcement budgets benefit.

Other big beneficiaries are the people who build prisons and the new privately operated prisons that are growing like mushrooms around the country.

The people who create abstinence-only drug awareness programs like DARE, which has highly questionable efficacy, are profiting from the war on drugs. Then there are the people who run boot camps for wayward teens.

Drug Free America Foundation is the new name used by of the former organizers of Straight, Inc. of which I spoke earlier. Its principals, Mel and Betty Sembler, who got rich in commercial real estate in Florida, and their friends, doctors who were involved in the “treatment” at Straight centers, are large contributors to Republican politicians, notably the Bushes. Mel Sembler was awarded for his generosity with an ambassador-ship to Australia under Bush the First. And George W. made Mel ambassador to Italy, even though he doesn’t speak any Italian. He was recently involved in a scandal over having a building named for him in Rome.

It’s pretty clear that “just say no” doesn’t work in discouraging teens from drinking and smoking pot, any more than it discourages them from having sex. If even the current drug war czar, John Walters, admits that Plan Colombia has not worked to suppress the cocaine trade, ie. that demand is up and the price is down, how can we say that our money is being well-spent in the failed war on drugs? The war started over 20 years ago. That’s a lot of money spent with little success, if any, to show for it.

So, even if you aren’t particularly concerned about families ripped apart, even if you don’t know anyone affected by drive by shootings in drug turf battles that kill innocent children, even if your child has not been denied federal financial aid for college, think about your wallet. It would be just as effective to have your hard earned tax dollars put in a hole in the ground for all the good the war on drugs has done. The heroin trade supplies Al Qaeda with some of its revenue. Who pays and who benefits from our current drug policies?

You may not agree that de-criminalization is a policy with more merit. You may believe that drug abstinence education programs are actually helping to keep enough kids from smoking pot that they are worth it. You may believe that locking up people with drug habits who have committed a property crime is the way to go. Again, look at who pays and who benefits and ask if this is an equitable, just and compassionate policy.

I suggest that our caring for others needs to include the poor and the drug addicted. So what can we do to put our second principle into action? How can we make them more than just nice words expressing a noble sentiment in church? We can act to remedy one injustice.

The Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform or CHEAR is working to repeal the punitive situation for drug offenders who’ve fulfilled their sentences and who want to go to college. Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank submitted legislation in the US House of Representatives last month, which has about 50 co-sponsors. The bill is called RISE, Removing Impediments to Students’ Education. I have received action alerts from UUDPR asking me to contact Senators Dodd and Lieberman about companion legislation for the Senate, which I have done. I will also send Nancy Johnson an e-mail asking for her support of HR 1184.

I encourage you to do the same. The web address is on the top of today’s handout. If you don’t have access to the internet, let me know and I will get you the correct information so that you can write our Senators and your Representative.

If writing to Congress is not your thing, I hope you will be generous to the recipient of this month’s offering donations, UUDPR. As you heard in Charles Thomas’s letter, we are making a difference by upholding our principles. That is certainly something to celebrate.

Living our faith adds meaning and depth to our lives. Not all of us are called to travel on foot and horseback across the country to spread the message of drug policy reform, like Howard Wooldridge. But when we take even seemingly small acts for the good of others, there is an effect. It’s like dropping a pebble in a pond. The ripples extend far out to others whom we will never know, but whom we can care about just the same. So may it ever be. Amen.