Drug Crazy - Prescription for Sanity - Page 189

Not only has America nothing to show for this monumental effort, but the failed attempt has clearly made everything worse. After blowing hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, the drugs on the street today are stronger, cheaper, more pure and more widely available than at any time in history.  Everything from crack cocaine to dilaudid is just a phone call away and chances are they’ll deliver. You can buy it in the school yard, in the alley, you can buy it in small Indiana farm towns that just a few years ago had never even heard of the stuff.^[15]

The fallout from this misadventure cannot be looked upon simply as one of our many problems. It rains down on everything, blanketing the nation in a smog of delusion so pervasive nobody can see it, even as it warps U.S. foreign policy, corrodes the Bill of Rights, and successfully reverses years of progress in race relations. One of the most shocking things about the O.J. Simpson trial was the gulf it revealed between black and white perceptions of the criminal justice system. White people instinctively believe the cops—”Why would they lie?” Black America, more accustomed to being spread-eagled on the pavement, has an entirely different perspective of the officer on the witness stand. With one black man in four now behind bars or under supervision by the state, it’s hard to find an African American family that has not had a direct, personal, unpleasant experience with law enforcement—more often than not, something to do with the drug war.

 This is the arena where the fault lines of American justice are clearly visible. In a drug bust, the complaining witness is the cop, who can decide on the spot whether to prosecute or not. This absolute power is inevitably subject to political pressure and favoritism. The white kid in the Mercedes gets a pass and the black kid in the car behind him gets five years without parole. When Indiana Congressman Dan Burton’s son was caught