The black and white story of America's war on drugs

Legal marijuana growing in a grow house.

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WASHINGTON — De Marcus Sanders lives in the small city of Waterloo, smack in the middle of Iowa farm country. Several years ago, he was driving his car through town playing his music a little too loud, so a police officer pulled him over.

“My music was up,” he later told a researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union. “So I didn’t argue with him.”

The officer said he smelled marijuana and searched Sanders’ car. When he found one marijuana seed on the floor, he arrested him. Sanders pleaded guilty to possession and got 30 days in jail.

But that was only the beginning of his punishment. He lost his job as a janitor and also lost the credits he was taking in college. He ended up owing the state $2,346 in fines, court and prison costs. He also lost his driver’s licence. Waterloo is not pedestrian friendly. Without a licence, he said, he couldn’t find work because he had no transportation.

Sanders is black and his story is repeated with shocking frequency in communities of every size and shape throughout the United States.

The issue is vividly illustrated in a study released this week by the ACLU of marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010 by the ACLU.



“Just as with the larger drug war, the War on Marijuana has, quite simply, served as a vehicle for police to target communities of color,” the report states.

Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU’s criminal law-reform project and lead author of the study, said he was stunned by its findings.

“I think that what I was really struck by was that the disparity existed everywhere,” he said in an interview. “We looked at hundreds and hundreds of counties in this country and in virtually every one, blacks were more likely to be arrested. In some places it was five, 10,15, 20 times more likely. In some places, it’s breathtaking.”


Why are there such racial disparities and why are they getting worse?

“I think one of the things is that police are still fighting this war on drugs,” Edwards said. “They get money from the federal government to do a lot of heavy-handed drug enforcement. They measure their productivity by the number of arrests they make. And so they go to the places … where they can easily find marijuana by stopping and frisking people with little political risk. Maybe cops are falling into this thing where whites are allowed to do this (smoke dope) but blacks aren’t. It’s hard to know.”

In other words, frisk a white guy coming out of a bar and watch his community go nuts and your career die. Stop a black guy and chances are nobody cares.

While the racial aspects of marijuana arrests are the most disturbing finding in this report, it is also significant that U.S. police are still spending massive amounts of time and resources chasing after simple pot possession. The study shows the number of marijuana arrests continues to rise, as does the racial disparity.

In Canada in 2010, there were 58,000 arrests for marijuana possession, an increase of 14 per cent over the previous year. Pot activists blamed the Harper government’s tough-on-crime policies for the sudden increase. But hardly anybody gets jail time. It’s just a fine or a caution.

That same year the U.S. arrested 784,021 people for marijuana possession, of whom 20,000 were jailed solely for that reason. Sanders was one of them.

Pot arrests have climbed steadily since 2002 to the point where they now account for almost half of all drug arrests in the U.S.

The dollar costs are enormous – about $3.6 billion annually to state treasuries. A CATO study claimed the U.S. would pocket $8.7 billion annually in tax revenue if marijuana were legalized.

The human costs are much greater. Jail time.  Family separation. A criminal record. Loss of job and job prospects.

“If you get a marijuana conviction you can lose eligibility for housing, student financial aid, lose your job and jeopardize future employment,” Edwards said.

Is America winning the war on drugs? Not even close. Pot use and availability has increased. Between 2002 and 2011, the number of pot users increased about 30 per cent, from 6.2 per cent of the total population to seven per cent.

The majority of Americans favour legalization of marijuana. Colorado and Washington have legalized it. But powerful forces work against them. America’s prison system is corporate. Private prison companies campaign in Washington for tough sentences.

With five per cent of the global population, the U.S. has 25 per cent of its prisoners, or 2.2 million people in jail. That’s more than China.

“There are some people who are serving life without parole in the deep south for marijuana,” Edwards said. “The prison industrial complex relies a lot on the drug war.”