Beyond the War on Drugs

Detroit Anti-War Conference

The Metro Detroit Greens local co-sponsored the National Lawyers Guild's Beyond the War on Drugs conference held on the Wayne State University campus in April.

The goals of the conference were to bring together the experience and knowledge of a wide variety of community groups to analyze the economic, international and domestic implications of the war on drugs. The conference also sought to develop common strategies and organize toward humane alternatives to the war on drugs. Through the course of the two-day conference, over 300 people registered as participants.

Friday afternoon was mainly educational. It consisted of 3 different panel discussions with local and national experts giving overviews and analysis of the war on drugs. The evening program was a dinner where community activist Grace Boggs was keynote speaker.

Saturday's program moved into action mode. Keynote speaker, Eric Sterling, President of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation spoke of the need for drug policy reform. Next were testimonials by victims of the war on drugs followed by a town hall meeting with state and local panelists. After a box lunch, workshops were held. Participants then chose a workshop to attend. A representative from each workshop made a short presentation of the action items formulated there.

The facts presented at the conference show that the war on drugs can never be won - what would victory look like? We have been looking at defeat for a number of years. 74% of Americans realize we are losing the drug war. But the war continues because the war on drugs is big business with $400 billion per year being spent. The federal budget alone is $20 billion with almost every federal agency getting a piece of the pie. The balance of spending used to be evenly split between law enforcement and treatment but increasingly every year the scale tips more toward law enforcement.

The conclusions drawn at the conference reflect the need for drug usage to be treated as the health issue it is and not as criminal. Necessary changes include treatment being made available, spending more money on prevention and providing honest education.

At the follow up meeting held in May, the Drug Policy Forum of Michigan (DPFMI) was formed. The mission of DPFMI is "to educate, advocate and organize the community so as to influence positive changes in drug policy and to better hold public officials accountable." DPFMI holds monthly meetings, established an educational speakers bureau, and created a web site and E mail list servers to advance their mission.

DPFMI's Next meeting is August 22, 2001 - 7 p.m. at Boysville 5555 Conner, Detroit.

Web site: http://www.drugsense.org/dpfmi/

Activist Relates Experience

I first became involved in anti-drug activities in the mid-1980s when crackhouses began turning up everywhere in our neighborhoods. By the mid-80s the de-industrialization of Detroit was almost complete and Reaganism had made it clear that we couldn't depend upon the government for social programs. So in 1985, when crack was invented, young people began saying, "Why go to school for years with the idea that one day you'll be making a lot of money when you can make a lot of money rollin' right now?"

As a result, turf wars and violence in the black community escalated. In 1986, for example, 43 young people were killed and 365 wounded, and in January, 1987 Clementine Barfield (whose 16 year son Derek had been killed and 14-year old son, Roger, had been wounded) founded Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD). I became editor of the SOSAD Newsletter and Jimmy [James Boggs] began writing a column, raising new questions about rebuilding Detroit and asking "What Can We Be That Our Children Can See?"

SOSAD brought a spirit of hope to Detroit and in 1989 community people began organizing to get rid of crackhouses. In 1989 some of these groups came together to form "We the People Reclaim Our Streets" (WE PROS). For three years we marched every Friday night, in the snow and sleet of winter and the blistering heat of summer, through neighborhoods all over the city, chanting "Up with Hope, Down with Dope! Dope Dealers Run and Hide, People are Uniting on the other side!"

WE PROS' purpose was to "Break the Cycle of Fear." Our spirits were high because we weren't just complaining. We were taking seriously Jesse Jack- son's statement that it was just as important to march on crackhouses in the 1980s as it had been to march on the KKK in the 1960s. Our marches received some good media coverage and in Dorothy Garner's neighborhood on the northwest side the police reported that crime had gone down 80% since we started. As Dorothy put it, "We were dying - and WE PROS gave us life."

But even though we felt good about what we were doing we noticed that only older adults and children were marching. Teens and youth weren't joining us, and people were saying that young people didn't care about the city. Around the same time Coleman Young was promoting Casino Gambling as a way to rebuild Detroit by creating jobs, challenging those who opposed him to come up with an alternative. So in.1992 we founded Detroit Summer, to give young people the opportunity to become involved in rebuilding, redefining and respiriting Detroit from the ground up and to show that they cared. Detroit Summer youth volunteers engage in community projects with community organizations. They plant community gardens with elders ("Gardening Angels"), rehab houses, paint murals and participate in intergenerational dialogues and workshops to explore visions of what a 21st century would look like. Now in its tenth year, Detroit is developing a new kind of youth leadership and creating a new spirit of hope in the city. It is spreading the ideas of urban agriculture and the importance of public space. It is also attracting artists and other creative people who see in the ruins and vacant lots of Detroit not only the end of the industrial era but the place and space to begin creating a new 21st century city and a new culture built on new values .

Meanwhile, new possibilities have opened up for more holistic organizing around drugs. In the last few years there has been a growing recognition that the anti-drug war has failed and that drug addiction is a health and political issue. Drugs keep coming into the country despite the billions spent to keep them out. The only way to win the war against drugs is by reducing the demand. The way to reduce the demand for drugs is by programs for individual and community recovery.

Moreover, there is a growing recognition that imprisoning small drug dealers is not only criminalizing people who need help but also creating a monstrous prison-industrial complex. So there are increasing demands to fund treatment programs rather than prisons and for "Education, Not Incarceration." People are also beginning to talk about replacing our outmoded concepts of Punitive or Retributive Justice with concepts of Therapeutic or Restorative Justice. There are now sympathetic judges who are practicing or want to practice Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

Our challenge is to develop holistic strategies that incorporate these developments. For example, community groups can begin:

(a) Organizing Restorative Justice programs, with the help of sympathetic judges, to begin bringing back individual prisoners to their families and communities. Information on organizing these programs is available on the Internet.

(b) Compiling information about drug treatment programs and organizing to demand more programs.

(c) Conducting anti-drug marches to get out the information about ongoing Restorative Justice and drug treatment programs.

(d) Engaging children and young people in community-building activities that give them a sense of themselves as change-agents who are making a difference in the city.

Through activities like these the struggle against drugs becomes a struggle for community recovery and the struggle for community recovery becomes a struggle against drugs.

Grace Lee Boggs has a weekly column on the back page of The Michigan Citizen, "Michigan's most widely read African American newspaper," and "America's most progressive newspaper."