From Plantations to Penitentiaries

Mark P. Toohey

America imprisons its people in numbers far greater than any other on earth. America is home to a mere five percent of the world’s population, yet we account for a whopping twenty-five percent of its incarcerated people. It was not always so. Prior to the mid-1980s the penal population nationwide was around 300,000. In the years since 1984 when the phony War on Drugs was invented that number has swelled to a stupefying 2 to 3 million. And the greatest majority of those who have found themselves swept up in the war are black and Latino. And that has not been merely coincidental. This may come as a surprise, but there are actually more African Americans now incarcerated in the bowels of American prisons than were owned as slaves before the Civil War. I thought America abolished slavery 150 years ago.

The War on Drugs and "tough against crime" policies, like "three strikes, you’re out," and mandatory minimum sentences imposed by the courts have filled our prisons to overflow capacity with often the most menial of offenders. Possession of seeds and stems? That is likely to get you life in prison without parole. You think I exaggerate? There are currently over 3,200 citizens (the majority of them black and Latino) serving life without parole for such horrendous crimes as shoplifting, possession of a crack pipe, selling a dime bag of marijuana, or passing a bad check. A thirty-two year old single mom (who, of course, is black) is given life simply for being implicated in a drug ring by a dealer-turned-informant in a plea deal for a reduced sentence; no evidence, mind you; she had no drugs; she didn’t even do drugs. The allegation of a snitch will do. (That happens to be a true story). Equal justice for all.

The War on Drugs has fueled the police state as hundreds of millions of federal dollars poured into the police departments of every municipality in return for their "compliance" in executing the agenda. You no play the game; you no get the money. And you don’t get no BearCat armored SWAT vehicles with turret-mounted 50 caliber machine guns and sound cannons to make a show of force to the legally-gathered protestors; and you don’t get no M-16s or night vision goggles; and you don’t get no military Kevlar bulletproof vests, and you sure don’t get no helicopter. Police departments all over the country manned up for the "war," and the prisons began to fill. It is of interest that the war has been primarily waged in the inner cities and ghettos where those arrested are predominantly men of color; not in the upscale white middle-class neighborhoods of town. Statistically, white people use and abuse drugs proportionately equal to blacks; so why is the prison population overwhelmingly black? Just asking.

The Supreme Court, through a number of rulings in the past thirty years, has also been complicit in expanding the powers of the police; not directly, of course, but by redefining the Constitutional guarantee that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated." (Amendment IV) There is also that business about serving a warrant specifically describing "the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In today’s world probable cause has been reduced to "reasonable articulable suspicion." It is the new normal for the SWAT teams, regaled in full military attire, machine guns drawn, to bust down your door at 3:00 am, unannounced, shoot first and ask questions later. They can write their report any way they like; the suspect appeared to be drawing something from his pocket; possibly a gun. We fired in self-defense. That was his wallet, jack hole! He was trying to show you his ID. Besides, your SWAT team showed up at the wrong address.

A police officer can pull you over for any reason whatsoever – or for no reason whatsoever – the officer simply has reasonable articulable suspicion; the car you’re driving looks like something a drug dealer would drive; and the driver is black (and I think he may have a tail light out). The perfect opportunity. It’s known as a "pretext stop." Before you know it you are spread-eagled over the hood, your person frisked and your pockets emptied, and your car searched. There are no drugs. Thankfully, you kept your mouth shut, obeyed the officer’s orders explicitly, and acted as the meek, subservient, non-citizen you are expected to be. "Yes, Massa!" You won’t be going to jail…today. You got lucky. And though you will have to explain to your boss at the computer firm why you are an hour late for work, the officer acted entirely within the framework of the law. Yes, to protect and serve.

In Atwater v.City of Lago Vista the Supreme Court ruled that the police may arrest motorists for minor traffic violations and throw them in jail, even if the statutory penalty for the traffic violation is a mere fine, not jail time. Tens of thousands of police officers have received direct training from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in how to conduct unreasonable and discriminatory stops and searches through such programs as Operation Pipeline, launched in 1984 as part of Ronald Reagan’s rollout of the War on Drugs. (The Pipeline runs from the inner city streets to the prisons). By 2000, the DEA had trained 25,000 officers in forty-eight states; who knows how many by this Year of Our Lord 2014. And what are the profiling guidelines that may prompt a reasonable articulable suspicion? Driving an expensive car, driving a car that needs repair, driving with out-of-state plates, driving a rental car, driving with "mismatched occupants," acting too calm, acting too nervous, dressing casually, wearing expensive clothes or jewelry, even scrupulous obedience to traffic laws like counting to three once the light turns green is enough to raise suspicion. Obeying the law too well must mean you are up to something.

A full 80% of drivers who are stopped by the police on the New Jersey Turnpike are men of color. US Attorney General Eric Holder can attest to being one. And the "stop and frisk" practice that has become epidemic nationwide is simply another bastard child of the War on Drugs. And the most common target is some kid wearing his baggy pants down to his butt with his baseball cap skewed sideways who is guilty of walking while being black. "There’s a black kid in a hoodie. Cuff him!" You’re in the pipeline now, homie.

The courts have also given unprecedented discretion to prosecutors who will routinely "load up" a defendant with additional charges carrying a lengthy sentence, and then coerce the defendant into taking a plea bargain for a lessened sentence, even if the individual is not even guilty. The accused figures he’ll take the lighter sentence than take his chances with a public defender against an all-white jury. Any way, you lose. And the prison brand will follow you for the rest of your life. You will be denied public assistance, food stamp benefits, day care assistance, subsidized housing, access to federally-funded college grants and loans, because you are branded with the "F" word; you are now, in the estimation of our society, a Felon, an "other," one to be stigmatized, ostracized, and marginalized. The "F" word has become the new "N" word. The stigma will rear its head every time you apply for a job. Check the box. "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" Don’t wait for an interview. You are denied the right to vote, in some states for life (Kentucky, Virginia, and Florida). You will never again be considered for jury service, and you will never be able to own a firearm. You will never again be a full citizen; no, something more akin to three-fifths of a person. All for an ounce of pot or a gram of crack.

Just another of the thousands of ruined lives rotting behind bars for no good reason whatsoever. Oh, but there is a reason; the profit motive. And the War on Drugs provided the corporate entrepreneurs with a whole new way of doing business.

As long as there is money to be made why would we ever want to change the system? Prison, like everything else in America, has become big business. So why not have lots of it? It’s the American way. The privatized for-profit "correctional" industry will happily build another prison (I’m sorry; correctional facility) in your town with the state’s generous "tax incentives" to provide much needed jobs for the depressed rural community; the facility is then leased to the state Corrections Department which also pays the prison corporation a monthly stipend for every body occupying a cell. Yes, we will pay you to build that prison, and pay you to lease the facility to the state, and pay you for every man, woman, or delinquent juvenile you can put in an orange jumpsuit. Your tax dollars at work. Give the cops a free hand, throw in some generous kick-backs for the judge and there is every incentive to fill up those jails.

The criminal incarceration system has become a money-making racket.

And your local police department will profit too. The courts have, in their infallible wisdom, deemed it legal, within their twisted rendering of the Constitution, for the police to seize your property when the SWAT storm troopers ransack your home on a "drug bust." They can confiscate your cash (one such bust netted 93 cents), your furniture and personal belongings, your car, your home; anything that may be considered an accessory to the "crime" even if you are not charged with a crime! The courts have decided that property can also commit crime. I doubt that George Orwell even thought of that.

The War on Drugs has proven very effective in imposing control and subjugation of the un-people, especially the black ones; and now it could be done legally. The unspoken "enemy" in the War on Drugs over the last thirty years is not the drugs; in fact, America did not even have a significant drug problem in 1982 when Ronald Reagan invented his war. It was not until some five years later that crack cocaine became the drug of choice; the "poor man’s cocaine." No, the "criminal" element in this war is that lower caste of people who are confined to the inner city and the ghetto, the "others" whom this nation has always despised. The Jim Crow era of segregation and discrimination, voter suppression, poll taxes and literacy tests for black voters; the lynchings, bombings, assassinations, the Ku Klux Klan violence and intimidation had ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964; or so we were told. Racial discrimination is now officially illegal. Unless you are a police officer with a hunch. America has now dutifully become "colorblind." Why, we even have our first black president. It is the new politic correctness. We aren’t racist anymore; we just refuse to see it. Colorblind.

America has always had this problem with that particular race of un-people ever since we "rendered" them from their "homeland" to pick cotton for the white master race. I don’t know that we will ever get over it.

Racism, that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought that has been institutionalized in America for the past 350 years (before it was ever a country), borne out of the slave trade, is the greatest disgrace upon our nation and society. I think it is in the genes of the Anglo-Saxon race. They have forever considered themselves the superior race in every respect, their civilization and religion exceeding all others, their right of dominion unquestionable, and their standing armies to conquer any who think otherwise. Remember the Romans? Well, ok; maybe you’re not so up on your Roman history, so maybe you can just conjure up Hitler. No? Well then let’s try Christopher Columbus.

The history of slavery and genocide in the North Americas began the day Christopher Columbus made land on some small unnamed island in the Caribbean. He never "discovered" America (America didn’t exist at the time); besides, the Norsemen had landed on the shores of the North American continent half a millennium hence. Columbus came looking for gold; he had assured Queen Isabella of Spain, who financed the adventure, a good return on her investment (and he damned well better deliver; Isabella had pawned the crown jewels to finance the expedition). And in return for delivering the goods, Columbus would share in ten percent of the booty, be granted governorship of his new found lands, and lauded the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea. There was fame and fortune to be had. Just one problem; there wasn’t much gold to be had; maybe a few specks in the streams, but not that legendary city of gold you hear tell about. So Chris had to find another profitable booty; humans. If he couldn’t pack the holds of the Nina and the Pinta with gold (the Santa Maria had run aground and its timber used to build a fort), then he would pack them with slaves bound for Europe.

So pleased was the queen that she outfitted Columbus for his second great adventure to the "New World" with seventeen ships and some twelve hundred men. His manifest was to return gold and slaves. From his base on Haiti the Spanish occupiers went on a great slave raid, rounding up fifteen hundred natives, singled out five hundred of the best specimens, and packed them chained and shackled into the dank, suffocating bowels of his ships. Two hundred would die before ever seeing land again. Columbus would note in his journal, "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." Apparently, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost approve.

You will never read the gory history of his conquests in your school textbooks, but perhaps a brief account from an eyewitness will make the point: Bartolomé de las Casas, a young priest who arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, wrote that "our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle, and destroy" the placid Arawak natives. Those of fourteen years or older were enslaved and worked to death mining what little gold could be found, and any native not meeting his quota (an impossible task to begin with) would have his hands cut off and bleed to death. Las Casas records that the Spanish "thought nothing of knifing Indians by the tens and twenties and cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades." He relates that "two of these so-called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys."

In 1508 Las Casas records, "there were (only) 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it." Natives even committed suicide en masse to escape the horrors of their conquistador terrorist occupiers. By 1650 not one of the original Arawaks or their descendants remained.

Webster has a word for that: Genocide.

And we have a national holiday in honor of this guy!

And the terrorism was just beginning. Discovery of the "New World" opened a plethora of plundering opportunities for not only the Spanish, but also the British. To quote Howard Zinn, "What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots" (A People’s History of the United States). How ironic that we are only now "discovering" the advanced civilizations of the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, and the other indigenous cultures annihilated by the conquest of European terrorism.

The English conquerors (whom we quaintly call "pilgrims") were no different; they come from the same stock of the master race. The history of savagery in the extermination of the native peoples of North America has been well documented. The white people are here now, and we want the land – all of it. Our politicians like to call it the right of "manifest destiny"; what was once yours is now ours. Treaty? What treaty? You didn’t really think we were serious about that, did you? Didn’t we give you enough beads? Our right of dominion is unquestionable. And we will take it by force. And kill off all of the buffalo in the process. We have relegated what’s left of them to their own prisons, reservations where they can be the un-people in meek silence, living in abject poverty, despair, and hopelessness, selling their wares by the side of the road. Chief Sitting Bull has finally surrendered; the savages have been conquered.

Subjugation, exploitation, discrimination, and racism have been at the very heart and soul of this nation from the moment it was "discovered." How is that ever eradicated from the cultural mind-set of the master race? And now it would be institutionalized in this brand new nation we would call the United States of America; you know; land of the free.

It is hardly surprising, considering that the Founding Fathers were the substantial people of their time, not to mention slave owners, who fashioned the Constitution to entrench the rich property owners, the ruling class, to the administration of the government, while excluding the un-people; blacks, women, Indians, indentured servants, and anyone who was not a property owner from having any say in the "democratic process." One had to own significant property to vote or hold public office; and the very first law passed by Congress following the ratification of the Constitution stipulated that only free white persons could be considered citizens. It was always intended that America should be ruled by the rich. George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant, Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy author, printer, and scientist; the list goes on. Of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution, the majority were lawyers and men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, and half of them were wealthy enough to have money loaned out at interest (today they are called bankers). It may be argued that they had a direct economic interest in seeing that the ruling class of the rich would be permanently ensconced in this new democracy. At least, that was the elite caste mindset that molded their thought.

Actually, "democracy" is incorrect. This nation was never intended to be a democracy; it was established as a republic. You remember that line from the pledge you used to recite every morning in grade school – "…and to the Republic for which it stands…" The Constitution makes not one reference to a democracy; rather a centralized government ruled by the entitled class, the privileged and influential, the intelligential and most learned of men, those who understood the rationality of governance; as opposed to the irrational, impassioned, and ignorant whims of the people who were, it was argued, incapable of governing themselves if left to their own devices. The Founders, almost without exception, believed that democratic majority rule posed the gravest threat to a republican system. They preferred what might be called a "dissociated democracy," one in which the people reigned but did not rule. Ok; so they will let some of us vote.

Sheldon S. Wolin writes in Democracy Incorporated, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it…Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered."

When Thomas Jefferson penned the words that "all men are created equal," that wasn’t really what he meant. He didn’t mean women; women are not men. He was not referring to Indians; they are simply uncivilized savages. And he certainly didn’t mean blacks; they were not even considered human. The original Constitution defined a black man as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of census and apportioning representatives of the respective states (Article I, Section 2). Not until the fourteenth amendment was ratified in 1868 were free blacks considered citizens. Jefferson owned some 200 slaves; do you suppose he intended that they have "equality" with the white ruling class substantial people? Not in our republic.

Oh, some concessions would be made to the little people, the "rabble" as our second president, John Adams, called them, enough to give them the thought that democracy is working for them too; a tidbit from the table now and then, just to keep them under the boiling point. It would be necessary to placate the white "middle class" with the carrot and stick that they too could someday aspire to the equality by which all men are created equal, a popular theme even today. Every time President Obama spouts his rhetoric about the poor and underprivileged "working their way into the middle class" and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, he is simply miming Horatio Alger’s fictitious "American Dream." The boys in the hood, four out of five of whom will carry the Felon brand before attaining the age of eighteen, stopped dreaming years ago.

The middle class has always served a necessary purpose in codifying the rulership of the wealthy elite while acting as a buffer between the rich ruling class and the desperate poor and culturally ostracized for whom democracy has always been non-existent. Tom Watson, a prominent Populist leader of the 1890s said in a speech advocating a union between black and white farmers: "You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both." Michelle Alexander writes in The New Jim Crow; "Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would sustain inter-racial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. As William Julius Wilson has noted, ‘As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.’" It’s the conservative political strategy still employed today known as "divide and conquer." Racism serves well to insure the unchallenged rule of the wealthy elite; and any participation of the un-people was not welcome.

First we had institutionalized slavery. After we fought a Civil War over it and Abraham Lincoln settled the issue and set the slaves free, we had this problem. What to do with all these Negroes. Another system of control must be devised. It came to be known as Jim Crow. Jim Crow was never a real person; it was the persona of a minstrel show character – a white guy actually – who painted his face black, his lips red, with large white globes around his eyes, and did his comedy act mocking the black race; a nineteenth century Dave Chappell. But the ensuing system of discrimination, oppression, subjugation, repression, and the Ku Klux Klan campaign of bombings, murders, castration, lynchings, and cross-burnings became identified with the term; Jim Crow was the yoke of oppression. Slavery was now illegal; discrimination was not.

States implemented every sort of law imaginable; vagrancy laws; laws defining "mischief" and "insulting gestures." The Negro who did not avert his eyes and cross to the opposite side of the street at the approach of a white was breaking the law. In some states it was illegal for a black to play checkers with a white. The aggressive enforcement of these laws filled the prisons with black "criminals," much as the War on Drugs has done in the past thirty years, and spawned an enormous market for convict leasing. Once in the grip of the criminal incarceration system, you became the property of the state, and sold into leased servitude to the highest bidder. Tens of thousands of African American citizens were arbitrarily arrested, charged with court cost and fines that they had no means of paying, so they must work off their debt in criminal servitude as forced laborers. Prisoners were sold to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozens of corporations throughout the South. The horse whips of the slave masters were brutal. Those who collapsed to injury or exhaustion were simply left to die.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery, but with one major exception; slavery remained legal as the punishment for crime. And legalized criminal slavery served well the profit motive of the corporate entrepreneurs of its day. Free labor. Hell yes!

And lest you think this to be some ancient history, you need only to look back 60 years or so; to the 1950s and 60s. That’s current history for me. Coloreds must sit at the back of the bus. The white people get the front seats. And a colored woman must give up her seat to the white man who just came aboard. You know your place. Restrooms are labelled "colored only," and "white only." Blacks were assigned their own drinking fountains, clearly labelled so as not to be confused with white drinking fountains. A black man or woman could not sit at a lunch counter with whites; the restaurant has the right to refuse service to anyone of color. And we certainly don’t want any of those niggers in our white neighborhoods; or in our white schools. An African American was prohibited from attending an all-white college.

As recently as 1954 a black man by the name of Clyde Kennard attempted to enroll in the all-white University of Mississippi. His application was denied. He applied again. He would not be denied Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that all men are created equal. The governor actually offered to pay his tuition to a black college if he would only shut up. He did not. So the state found a way to shut him up. He was implicated in the theft of five bags of chicken feed, which he did not steal in the first place, and sentenced to seven years at the notorious Parchman Farm prison where he served his "debt to society" under the whips of his white masters, and eventually died of prostate cancer, the potential of his mind and intellect never to be fulfilled.

Have you ever wondered why your parents hated rock and roll and Elvis Presley in particular? Rock and roll was born in the South out of black gospel music and rhythm and blues. The likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard were anathema to the superior white class. Their genre was more Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Connie Frances. And when Elvis recorded "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog," which was originally a black blues song, everybody thought he was black. The fact that he was a Southern white made it even worse; a white guy making black music! The very term "rock and roll" carried overt sexual connotations associated with the stereotype of black immorality. And the worst parental horror was that your white sons and daughters were shuckin’ and jivin’ with black kids! Elvis was corrupting the white culture!

As the blatantly racist governor of Alabama, George McGovern declared in 1968, "Segregation today; segregation tomorrow; and segregation forever." It’s no wonder someone tried to assassinate him.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed all that, didn’t it? Outright discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation is now illegal under the law. (Try telling that to the South). We have been instructed to become "colorblind" as the twenty-first century reincarnation of Jim Crow takes form before our very eyes. The ruling elite has devised a more "legally correct" form of subjugation and control for the undercaste of society; the War on Drugs, the militarized police state, and the Help America Vote Act. Jim Crow is officially dead. What shall we call it this time?

We have simply moved the unwanted population from plantations to penitentiaries. And silenced all the "others" who just might make a difference.

I have always been something of a radical in my approach to such things, so allow me to propose a radical idea that may very well empty the prisons, end gang violence and street crime, and rehabilitate the drug addict: Call an end to the war and decriminalize the drugs – all of them.

Let’s be honest; if someone is a heroin addict or simply enjoys the recreational joint now and then they are going to use drugs regardless whether it is legal or not. It should be obvious by now that drug laws have done nothing to deter drug use, no matter how stiff you make the penalty. The law only serves to criminalize your habit. The notion that if drugs were legalized it would encourage more people to use and abuse them is sheer nonsense. Look at the state of Vermont. Nearly the entire state is in the grip of a heroin addiction epidemic; every city, town, and berg. And it’s illegal. Ok; so what? Those having no inclination to shoot up in the first place are not about to be motivated to take up the habit simply because it may be legal to do so, no more than the law will deter those who choose to use regardless that it is illegal. Drug usage has no correlation to the law. But the decriminalizing of drugs has a direct correlation.

Other countries have taken the more sane approach in dealing with rising drug crime and seemingly intractable rates of drug abuse and addiction, choosing the path of drug treatment, prevention, education, and economic investment in crime-ridden communities. Poverty and lack of jobs and opportunity are major contributors to the sale and use of drugs. Portugal took the radical step of decriminalizing all drugs ten years ago; and the result was not an explosion of drug-addicted brain-eating zombies. No, Portugal decided to redirect all that money that would have been spent on waging a drug war against their people and putting users in cages, and put it into drug treatment and prevention. The result has been that rates of drug abuse and addiction have plummeted, as has drug-related crime. And their prisons have a whole lot of empty cells.

The United States has done exactly the opposite. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1.042 billion in 1991. DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 million to $1.026 billion and FBI antidrug allocations from $38 million to $181 million. At the same time the war money was skyrocketing, funding for federal agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education were being slashed. The National Institute on Drug Abuse saw their funding cut from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984; antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were reduced from $14 million to $3 million. America’s idea of drug treatment and rehabilitation is to throw the addict in prison; he’ll have plenty of years to sober up in there. And as long as the drug war and the criminal injustice incarceration system continues to be profit-driven big business nothing is likely to change.

Or will it? There is a growing international movement toward decriminalization and redirecting all the billions of dollars spent on enforcing prohibition to treatment and prevention.

On Tuesday September 8, 2014 a group of former presidents and United Nations leaders known as the Global Commission on Drug Policy gathered in New York to call for an end to the criminalization and incarceration of drug users. The Commission includes the former presidents of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland, as well as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and George Shultz, former secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. (I hope that bit of irony was not lost on you). The Commission first made headlines in 2011 when it declared the global war on drugs to be a complete and dismal failure. The altruistic notion that a drug-free world could be achieved through prohibition and incarceration was laughable to begin with. America has yet to learn its lesson from the years of alcohol prohibition of the early twentieth century. Didn’t work then; doesn’t work now.

Commission member Louise Arbour, the former UN high commissioner for human rights, also condemned the war on drugs: "It is a model, the model that we’ve embraced for the past 50 years, that is now demonstrably ineffective, inefficient, costly—and by "cost," I don’t mean only financial cost, (but also) catastrophic human cost—that delivers nothing on a promise that was a ridiculous one to make in the first place."

Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy on HIV/AIDS for Eastern Europe, agrees: "The policies in the past have been based on a prohibition paradigm. There was a dream or an unrealistic goal of drug policies of a drug-free world, and that could be achieved by just prohibiting drugs, prohibiting production, sale, distribution, consumption. That paradigm has failed. That’s what we have been saying since our first report in 2011. So, we’re talking about a new paradigm, and that is that we advocate for policies that are not based on repression and prohibition, but policies that are based on health, promotion of human rights and more humane policies." Now we’re talking!

The fact that both the states of Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana in 2013 was monumental, and not just for the US. The White House and the Department of Justice had a quandary on their hands; marijuana is officially illegal under current US federal law. Once President Obama decided to take a "hands off" approach, others saw permission to proceed. Uruguay proceeded to legalize weed in December 2013. Oregon, Florida, and Alaska have ballot initiatives to legalize pot coming before the voters this November. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said he would sign a bill that would make Philadelphia the largest city in the country to decriminalize marijuana possession. Just two weeks ago, the City Council in Santa Fe voted to decriminalize marijuana, and there will be a referendum on the ballot in Albuquerque as well. Earlier this year, District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray signed a bill to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana in the U.S. capital. It is a good sign that America may be headed in the right direction.

The feds, of course, are always the last to get the message, and the greatest opposition to changing the prohibition/incarceration paradigm comes from…wait for it…the prison/industrial complex and police departments. No surprise there. They are going through an identity crisis trying to hang on to what they had. Decriminalization at the federal level would mean hundreds of millions in lost DEA dollars to perpetuate their racket. They just may have to give back their M16s and SWAT vehicles. And perhaps America can indeed be the land of the free.