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War On Drugs 3.31 – The Sentencing Project
Part THIRTY-ONE of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “The Sentencing Project”.
HOW TO LISTEN
If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts.
Show Notes:
Georgia Gospel Choir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2wCBAdT6FI
We finished up last time In 1989
Mass murderer George HW Bush is President.
May he get anally raped for eternity by the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were murdered on his watch.
Percentage of high school seniors who said cocaine is “easy or very easy” to get in 1980: 48.
Percentage who said the same thing in 1990: 59.
So despite a fortune being spent on the war on drugs during the Reagan years, the “problem” is getting worse.
What’s that old saying about doing the same thing and expecting a different results?
Sounds like me and podcasting.
In 1988, the chief administrative judge of the DEA, Francis Young, recommended the DEA reclassify marijuana to a less restrictive classification.
He called it “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man”.
He quoted scientific evidence and medical studies.
The DEA in 1990 ignored him.
In the spring of 1991, Harvard University researchers surveyed a third of the country’s oncologists, and of the thousand who responded about half said they would prescribe marijuana if it was legal.
Of those, almost all said they’d done so anyway, telling at least one patient that, though illegal, marijuana can fight the debilitating nausea of chemotherapy.
The survey, published in May, seemed to discredit the DEA’s contention that marijuana has “no accepted medical use.”
Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic was going into overdrive.
Since Bush’s inauguration, the number of drug-related AIDS cases had jumped from 12,000 to 16,000.
A third of all the country’s AIDS cases were believed to have originated with a dirty needle.
The obvious solution was to provide clean needles for drug users.
Pharmacists didn’t want junkies coming into their stores to buy needles.
Parks and sanitation workers didn’t want to handle discarded and potentially lethal syringes.
Requiring addicts to bring their needles back provided an opportunity for counseling, health care, even addiction treatment.
New Haven, Connecticut, launched a needle exchange program in 1990.
They had a van that drove around handing out needles.
If you brought back your old needles, you got clean ones in return.
In the first few months, two out of ten needles that were handed were returned to the van – and 68% contained the AIDS virus.
Two years later, some seven in ten were coming back, and the percentage of those testing positive was down to 44.
one of every six addicts participating had gone into drug treatment
But the Bush administration’s position on drugs was “zero tolerance”.
They convinced Congress not to fund a nationwide needle exchange program.
Because FUCK people dying of AIDS.
Bush actually said “Here’s a disease where you can control its spread by your own personal behavior. You can’t do that in cancer.”
Because no-one can help it if they smoke a pack a day.
According to the Washington Post, by 1990, U.S. Customs Service agents had confiscated more than $50 million using sniffer dogs at Border crossings and airports, most of which has been forfeited to the government.
Did you know that if a sniffer dog smells cash tainted with cocaine on your person, the police can confiscate the cash?
Trained dogs sniff cash, and if they bark, that’s taken to mean the money is contaminated with drugs and is therefore “drug money” and seizable.
A guy from the ACLU said: “Everything the dog does, no matter what it is, the police claim it’s a hit. If the dog barks, it’s a hit. If the dog sits down, it’s a hit. If the dog fell over dead, they’d probably claim the scent of cocaine killed him.”
The Pittsburgh Press found in 1991 that virtually all currency in the United States is tainted with enough cocaine to trigger a dog’s response.
Two different private labs tested currency from banks in eleven cities and found as much as 96 percent of it showing traces of coke.
In one study, they tested more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities and found that all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine.
Clean money put in the same drawer as “dirty” money will later make a dog bark.
Police and federal agents don’t clean or destroy drug-tainted cash they seize.
They deposit it in the bank, to be put into circulation — perhaps to be seized — again.
Baum 317
And then, in 1992, the tide started to turn.
The Sentencing Project, a tiny liberal nonprofit organization, had been tracking big increases in incarceration since 1981, issuing a series of reports that quickly disappeared into obscurity.
But then they stumbled onto wording that worked in the media.
“America has more black men in prison than in college,” they wrote.
“One in four are under control of the criminal justice system —jail, prison, probation or parole.”
And suddenly – the country began talking about the racial implications of its War on Drugs.
Across the country, small papers were carrying front page stories about how blacks were arrested more often, offered fewer opportunities for bail, and sentenced to longer stretches than whites.
USA Today did a national story, DRUG WAR FOCUSED ON BLACKS, that led off: “Urban blacks are being detained in numbers far exceeding their involvement” in the drug trade.
Local Bar Associations — notably in Boston and Rochester, New York — issued thick reports on the waste, racial disparities, injustice, and futility of the Drug War.
Judges started speaking out too, about the disparity in how many minorities came into their courtrooms for drug offences versus whites.
Norman Lanford, a criminal-courts judge in Houston, who considered himself a law and order Republican, did the math.
More than 2,500 people from the county had been sent to prison in 1991 for holding less than a gram of cocaine.
Most drug convicts held half that much.
Threequarters of them were black, even though blacks constituted less than a fifth of the county’s population.
Average sentence for a minor drug possessor in Houston that year: eight and a half years.
Lanford figured it cost Houston’s taxpayers almost $22 million in 1991 to imprison all the people convicted of holding less than half a gram.
He identified 2,113 people imprisoned in Houston that year for possessing — among them — seven ounces of cocaine.
“We’re occupying a 25-year space in prison for a guy [about whom] all we can prove in his entire criminal career is ownership of $40 worth of crack.”
The comment cost Lanford his judgeship.
When he came up for reelection in early 1991, an assistant district attorney hammered him for being “soft on drugs” and knocked him out of the primary.
The mayor of Baltimore in the late 80s argued that drugs should be decriminalized. His name was Kurt SCHMOKE. I kid you not.
He ran again in 1991, still pushing against the war on drugs, and won with a bigger margin than he had in 1987.
The post War On Drugs 3.31 – The Sentencing Project appeared first on The BS Filter.
View all episodes
By Cameron Reilly & Ray Harris
4.6
5151 ratings
Part THIRTY-ONE of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – “The Sentencing Project”.
HOW TO LISTEN
If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts.
Show Notes:
Georgia Gospel Choir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2wCBAdT6FI
We finished up last time In 1989
Mass murderer George HW Bush is President.
May he get anally raped for eternity by the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were murdered on his watch.
Percentage of high school seniors who said cocaine is “easy or very easy” to get in 1980: 48.
Percentage who said the same thing in 1990: 59.
So despite a fortune being spent on the war on drugs during the Reagan years, the “problem” is getting worse.
What’s that old saying about doing the same thing and expecting a different results?
Sounds like me and podcasting.
In 1988, the chief administrative judge of the DEA, Francis Young, recommended the DEA reclassify marijuana to a less restrictive classification.
He called it “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man”.
He quoted scientific evidence and medical studies.
The DEA in 1990 ignored him.
In the spring of 1991, Harvard University researchers surveyed a third of the country’s oncologists, and of the thousand who responded about half said they would prescribe marijuana if it was legal.
Of those, almost all said they’d done so anyway, telling at least one patient that, though illegal, marijuana can fight the debilitating nausea of chemotherapy.
The survey, published in May, seemed to discredit the DEA’s contention that marijuana has “no accepted medical use.”
Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic was going into overdrive.
Since Bush’s inauguration, the number of drug-related AIDS cases had jumped from 12,000 to 16,000.
A third of all the country’s AIDS cases were believed to have originated with a dirty needle.
The obvious solution was to provide clean needles for drug users.
Pharmacists didn’t want junkies coming into their stores to buy needles.
Parks and sanitation workers didn’t want to handle discarded and potentially lethal syringes.
Requiring addicts to bring their needles back provided an opportunity for counseling, health care, even addiction treatment.
New Haven, Connecticut, launched a needle exchange program in 1990.
They had a van that drove around handing out needles.
If you brought back your old needles, you got clean ones in return.
In the first few months, two out of ten needles that were handed were returned to the van – and 68% contained the AIDS virus.
Two years later, some seven in ten were coming back, and the percentage of those testing positive was down to 44.
one of every six addicts participating had gone into drug treatment
But the Bush administration’s position on drugs was “zero tolerance”.
They convinced Congress not to fund a nationwide needle exchange program.
Because FUCK people dying of AIDS.
Bush actually said “Here’s a disease where you can control its spread by your own personal behavior. You can’t do that in cancer.”
Because no-one can help it if they smoke a pack a day.
According to the Washington Post, by 1990, U.S. Customs Service agents had confiscated more than $50 million using sniffer dogs at Border crossings and airports, most of which has been forfeited to the government.
Did you know that if a sniffer dog smells cash tainted with cocaine on your person, the police can confiscate the cash?
Trained dogs sniff cash, and if they bark, that’s taken to mean the money is contaminated with drugs and is therefore “drug money” and seizable.
A guy from the ACLU said: “Everything the dog does, no matter what it is, the police claim it’s a hit. If the dog barks, it’s a hit. If the dog sits down, it’s a hit. If the dog fell over dead, they’d probably claim the scent of cocaine killed him.”
The Pittsburgh Press found in 1991 that virtually all currency in the United States is tainted with enough cocaine to trigger a dog’s response.
Two different private labs tested currency from banks in eleven cities and found as much as 96 percent of it showing traces of coke.
In one study, they tested more than 135 bills from seven U.S. cities and found that all but four were contaminated with traces of cocaine.
Clean money put in the same drawer as “dirty” money will later make a dog bark.
Police and federal agents don’t clean or destroy drug-tainted cash they seize.
They deposit it in the bank, to be put into circulation — perhaps to be seized — again.
Baum 317
And then, in 1992, the tide started to turn.
The Sentencing Project, a tiny liberal nonprofit organization, had been tracking big increases in incarceration since 1981, issuing a series of reports that quickly disappeared into obscurity.
But then they stumbled onto wording that worked in the media.
“America has more black men in prison than in college,” they wrote.
“One in four are under control of the criminal justice system —jail, prison, probation or parole.”
And suddenly – the country began talking about the racial implications of its War on Drugs.
Across the country, small papers were carrying front page stories about how blacks were arrested more often, offered fewer opportunities for bail, and sentenced to longer stretches than whites.
USA Today did a national story, DRUG WAR FOCUSED ON BLACKS, that led off: “Urban blacks are being detained in numbers far exceeding their involvement” in the drug trade.
Local Bar Associations — notably in Boston and Rochester, New York — issued thick reports on the waste, racial disparities, injustice, and futility of the Drug War.
Judges started speaking out too, about the disparity in how many minorities came into their courtrooms for drug offences versus whites.
Norman Lanford, a criminal-courts judge in Houston, who considered himself a law and order Republican, did the math.
More than 2,500 people from the county had been sent to prison in 1991 for holding less than a gram of cocaine.
Most drug convicts held half that much.
Threequarters of them were black, even though blacks constituted less than a fifth of the county’s population.
Average sentence for a minor drug possessor in Houston that year: eight and a half years.
Lanford figured it cost Houston’s taxpayers almost $22 million in 1991 to imprison all the people convicted of holding less than half a gram.
He identified 2,113 people imprisoned in Houston that year for possessing — among them — seven ounces of cocaine.
“We’re occupying a 25-year space in prison for a guy [about whom] all we can prove in his entire criminal career is ownership of $40 worth of crack.”
The comment cost Lanford his judgeship.
When he came up for reelection in early 1991, an assistant district attorney hammered him for being “soft on drugs” and knocked him out of the primary.
The mayor of Baltimore in the late 80s argued that drugs should be decriminalized. His name was Kurt SCHMOKE. I kid you not.
He ran again in 1991, still pushing against the war on drugs, and won with a bigger margin than he had in 1987.
The post War On Drugs 3.31 – The Sentencing Project appeared first on The BS Filter.
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