Sermon on Drug Policy
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by John Chase
A sermon preached Sunday, July 6, 2003
Unitarian Universalists Clearwater, FL

This morning I will try to explain a complicated, uncomfortable subject... the drug war.

First, let me introduce myself. Very briefly...... I grew up as a Protestant engineer... I am now a UU retiree. I have grandchildren and I am still married to their grandmother. We were married during the Cold War while I was in the Navy in the Pacific. Then I spent 32 years at Honeywell here in Pinellas County. I’ve been UU for just over 2 years.

Now I’m active in the movement to reform antidrug policy and the criminal justice system. One of the things I do is answer email sent to The November Coalition, the organization of the families of drug prisoners. That email gives me a glimpse into a world that I never knew existed....... the world of families blindsided by our anti-drug laws.

I’d had a vague discomfort with our antidrug policies since the mid-90s when my brother told me Milton Friedman was using the word ‘prohibition’ to describe the drug war. In early-98 I decided to go look at it. The more I looked, the more I understood that there are really TWO drug wars. One of them is not really a war... Rather, it is forced treatment, and programs to teach kids to be afraid of drugs. The teachers rarely mention the drug war...... I think they are ashamed of it.

We are told the drug war is waged to “protect our kids by taking drugs off the street”, but its effect is exactly the opposite. It sustains a street market so lucrative that dealers compete violently for market share, and will push drugs on ANYONE .... including kids.

Most UUs understand this. But some UUs subconsciously make a “drug exception” to our 7 UU Principles, just as many in the legal community speak of a “drug exception” to the Constitution. For them the drug war is the price we pay to hold drugs in check..... and anyone who thinks legalization will help must also believe that water flows uphill. ... THAT, I think, is why our Statement of Conscience “Alternatives to the Drug War” barely got its required 2/3 vote at General Assembly last summer.

UUs are now leading other communities of faith to help dig the country out of the hole it has dug for itself. UUs were prominent at a conference of religious leaders in Nashville last December, and last month Bill Sinkford spoke at a conference entitled “Breaking the Chains: Communities of Color and the War on Drugs”

I attended the Nashville conference and listened to a minister who’d spent 36 years at Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Greenwich Village.... Rev. Howard Moody” Let me quote from his talk:

“The reality is that we are in the midst of a monumental epidemic of HIV/AIDS, and thousands of our young adults - mostly African-Americans and Latinos - are dying for lack of attention and clean needles. The reality is that most users and abusers in the United States are white. But the ones getting persecuted, prosecuted and put away are the impoverished minorities. White collar workers on Wall Street can order cocaine in the office. Search and seizure happens in Harlem. We are living with the 21st century version of jim crow. If you don’t know this, you should. That’s what it is ... the warehousing of these minorities in our prisons.

The reality (is) that we demonize and dehumanize illegal drug users so that punishment is all they deserve. In Vietman at least we got out when the protests became loud; the body count unbearable and the price too costly. We haven’t done that in the war on drugs.”

I think the public has come to accept two beliefs that are not true:
(1) The danger of an illegal drug lies in its pharmacology........... and
(2) The net damage of potentially dangerous drugs is reduced by vigorous enforcement.

Let’s take these two one at a time.

First, the belief that the danger of an illegal drug lies in its pharmacology.
Before Prohibition we had legal alcohol and a saloon culture, with much alcohol abuse. When Prohibition began, the saloons shut, and alcohol use and abuse declined sharply.

But gradually an illegal market developed, speakeasies opened, and drinking shifted from beer and wine toward distilled liquor. Drinking leveled out, then began to increase.

We had official corruption, gang violence ..... Disrespect for the law. We also had blindness and death from adulterated alcohol.. a culture where young men carried a flask to offer to friends.... and many more young women began to drink.

My grandparents’ generation learned that Prohibition made alcohol more dangerous, not less.

Let me read from the resolution of the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform at their first convention in April 1930.........

“. . . . . We are convinced that National Prohibition, wrong in principle, has been disastrous in consequences in the hypocrisy, the corruption, the tragic loss of life and the appalling increase of crime which have attended the abortive attempt to enforce it; in the shocking effect it has had upon the youth of the nation; and in the impairment of constitutional guarantees of individual rights...’

Such a statement by women would have been heresy in 1920, but by 1930 it had become a unanimous resolution. Those women had learned that life with alcohol was better than life with Prohibition. It had been only ten years, so they could remember.

And they made a difference. By 1932 when Prohibition died in the election of FDR, their organization had over 1 million members. Compared to the U.S. population at the time, that was almost 10x as large as the ACLU is today, and it reached that size in just 3 years.

When illegality was added to the drug, alcohol, its danger increased. I believe that lesson can be applied generally. Some of you may not agree with me because you know first hand what some of these drugs can do. But the drug’s inherent danger is not the question. The question is “What effect does its legal status HAVE on that danger?”

We have our answer - for one drug at least - from the women who lived it both ways.

This brings me to the related belief, that The net damage of potentially dangerous drugs is reduced by vigorous enforcement.

Let’s consider another drug: Tobacco. It is as addictive as any drug -- legal or illegal -- and, when used as intended, will shorten the expected life it its user.

If Congress were to outlaw tobacco, they would also fund annual surveys to monitor the wisdom of their decision. Early reports would show dramatic reductions in tobacco use.

Most smokers WOULD quit. But millions would not, and they would become desperate as tobacco stocks declined and pharmacies ran out of nicotine patches.

A street market would take shape, providing opportunities for entrepreneurs, who would settle disputes with gunfire, since the civil courts would no longer be open to them.

Congress would spend billions of taxpayer dollars to get tough on tobacco, and local law enforcement would enrich their budgets by seizing the property of tobacco suspects.

Helicoptors would begin to look for the hot spots typical of indoor tobacco grows,
and satellite cameras would scan for tobacco plots on the slopes of the Appalachians.

As eradication became more effective, tobacco growing would migrate to South America, and we would begin to “fumigate” small farms there in a new Plan Colombia. By then tobacco would retail for the price of gold, attracting even more tobacco pushers.

The annual surveys now would show tobacco use declining more slowly than at first. Congress would increase federal penalties and states would pile on to ‘fight tobacco’.

Police would teach kids the dangers of tobacco in a new program known as TARE (Tobacco Awareness and Resistance Education).

A few kids would even turn in their own parents for wearing patches or growing tobacco.

Swat teams would break open the homes of tobacco suspects at night to arrest the “bad guys” and parade them, in shackles, in front of TV news cameras.

Tobacco offenders would go to treatment if they had money or political connections.

Others could hope for leniency only if they’d snitch - betray friends, family members.

Wives and girlfriends would be charged with tobacco conspiracy unless they’d testify against their men, then be convicted on just the word of a snitch hoping for leniency.

The annual surveys would show tobacco use leveling out, and Congress would become so desperate to show progress, they would: Take away federal parole... Deny a student loan to any student with a tobacco conviction... Evict whole families from subsidized housing if any member of the family got caught smoking or selling patches.

We’d spend tax revenue to defeat citizens’ initiatives for treatment in lieu of prison.

To help offset the cost of the tobacco war, Congress would contract-out prisons to private corporations to run as prison industries... and they’d pay tobacco felons pennies per hour to compete with workers in the private sector.

All that is the reality of today’s war on drugs. It has taken us a long time to get here. It is a war that will never end, because a market cannot be destroyed by making it more profitable. But we fight on.

You might say, “That sounds bad, but at least tobacco addiction would decrease, right?”

Well, yes it would, just as alcoholism declined in the 1920s.... But would it be worth it?

The women who signed that 1930 resolution didn’t think so, and they should know.
History has added two dimensions since 1930...... two things related to drugs but not to drug pharmacology... The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Vietnam War, especially the social turmoil associated with that period.

In 1969, President Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary:
“[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.”

Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971. There was a period of quiet after Watergate, but with the Reagan landslide of 1980, the modern drug war began. We now send ten times as many drug felons to prison each year as we did in 1980, and most of them are Black.

This fact has persuaded most Americans ... probably not UUs .... that Afro-Americans use more drugs. But it’s not true, not according to official government surveys.

Imagine a fisherman catching drug users with a castnet. If he casts it in the White community and pulls in 100 people, he will find 6 or 7 drug users.

If he casts it in the Black community, the same. Out of 100 people... 6 or 7 drug users. But if he casts it mostly in the black community, as he does, he gets mostly Black drug users.

In a typical year we make 0.18 drug arrests per Black drug user, but only 0.06 drug arrests per White drug user. So we are casting our net 3 times as often in the Black community.

This bias against Black drug offenders extends through every step of the criminal justice system. Nationally, Blacks make up 12% of users, 37% of drug arrestees and 53% of drug felons sent to prison. Since they receive longer sentences, they make up 58% of imprisoned drug offender population today. That is a five to one bias relative to the two respective populations. Those percentages btw are the most conservative I could find.

Most Americans think that disparity exists because trafficking carries higher penalties, and more Blacks traffic in drugs. Well, if so, it would not be the first time unskilled, young men got into drug dealing. It happened in the 1920s when newly-arrived immigrants got into bootlegging. First the Germans, then the Irish, then the Italians. We did not arrest the drinkers, we only the bootleggers. Never mind the moral implications of that.

Good pot today retails for about $240/oz. - that is 60 times what it would bring if it were legal. Cocaine and methamphetamine bring over $2000 per ounce, and heroin is beyond belief. That lucrative market was enabled - and is sustained - by U.S. antidrug policy.

That wealth is the attractant... it’s the bait.....that draws young, unskilled men into the illegal market to set them up for arrest. It is, in its effect, institutionalized entrapment.

Law enforcement denies it. They say those men decided on their own to step across the line. Besides, LE says, they would go on to commit real crime if not incarcerated on a drug charge. Now I agree that the shooters and extortionists should go to prison, but not the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent opportunists. These men may not be choirboys, but why destroy the life of a man - and his family - because he’s not a choirboy? And what of the 36,000 female drug prisoners, almost all nonviolent, and their 22,000 minor children?

So what can we do about this .. 32 years after Nixon declared the drug war?

Above all, we UUs must refuse to make a “drug exception” to our seven Principles.

We must embrace every proposal for reform when we hear it. For instance, ......

Fund sterile needle exchanges and Methadone maintenance clinics,
Require police cars to carry Narcan to revive kids from a heroin overdose,
Allow arrestees to choose treatment in lieu of prison,
Fund more treatment, open-ended, free upon request,
End the 100:1 racist disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine,
End mandatory sentencing laws to restore the balance of power in courtrooms,
End property forfeiture laws,
Ease the drug conspiracy laws against minor participants,
Bring back parole for federal prisoners. Some
Decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana,
Stop federal prosecutions of marijuana activity if legal under state law, and
Start telling the kids the truth about drugs so they can protect themselves.

I am a traditional conservative, so I prefer gradual change.
But I am conflicted on these small increments. Even if they were all done together they would not do what is needed most, and that is to take out the profit. The longer we sustain a market that artificially inflates the price of a commodity sixty-fold, the more the damage those women spoke of in 1930: ... the hypocrisy; the corruption; the tragic loss of life; appalling increase of crime; the abortive attempt to enforce it; the shocking effect it has had upon the youth of the nation; the impairment of constitutional guarantees of individual rights....

That could almost have been our statement of conscience on the drug war.

We are digging ourselves into a hole so deep, so fast, it would be almost a victory just to stop digging.

................. break for hymn ..........
Closing Words -
Let me close with another part of Rev Moody’s talk in Nashville last December:
“Our churches, synagogues, and mosques have an important and, I believe, God-given role to play in this complex, tragic situation, created by false and wrongful solutions. I think people of faith can be caregivers offering relief of pain, and rehabilitation of lives of people who abuse drugs. We are at our best and most faithful when we are assuaging, with our resources and our passion, the suffering of these people.

But is not, my friends, enough simply to heal their addiction. It is the sacred obligation of our religious institutions to help redress the grievances, correct the injustices, and reform the laws that are unmercifically harsh, and racially discriminatory. Communities of faith need to clear the atmosphere of futility and resignation that has been fostered by politicians and government bureaucrats whose moral imagination is so truncated as to believe that the only answer to using and abusing drugs is persecution and punishment.”