HUFFINGTON POST Column: For 42 years, we have waged war against our own people that we have disguised as the “War on Drugs.” Forty-two years of failure that has cost the American taxpayers $1 trillion dollars, resulted in 45 million drug arrests, and overfilled America’s prisons while failing to reduce the availability, sale, or use of drugs in the United States. Instead, it destroyed the fabric of communities of color, where diseased, innocent people in need of drug rehabilitation were trained in violent criminal behavior and became lifetime consumers of the prison industrial complex. All the while, it led America to become the world’s leading jailer, with 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, more than any country on earth. Tomorrow, we will begin a “cyber march” on Washington to stop this five-decade-long misery and devastation of humanity, that has resulted in one in every 15 African-American men in prison.
It is a despicable disgrace that drug-addicted, diseased members of entire generations of African-Americans and Latinos were massively thrown into horrific prisons that mainly exposed them to the vices of violent criminal practices. Then these victims of brutal long periods of unjust incarceration were dumped back into communities without any hope or chance for gainful employment, which only resulted in the downward spiral of self-destruction, youth gun violence, poverty and the rise of a cold-hearted prison culture that rules most of streets today across the nation. But all of this can be challenged and changed. Yet it is with a renewed sense of urgency that we must speak out and build an effective movement. The lives of millions of people are at stake… (more)
