xxdr_zombiexx

"They Want Blood"_________________________________
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR | COUNTERPUNCH Weekend Edition | August 21 / 22, 2004

Kerry or Bush? How about the 5.9 million people here in the United States, under "the supervision" of the Justice system, either in prison, in jail, of probation or parole. Will it make a difference to these people--two million of them behind bars--which of the two sits in the Oval Office? No. Both Kerry, who misses no chance of emphasizing how he was once a "prosecutor", and Bush, pledge more cops, tougher penalties, and above all no let up in the War on Drugs which has thrown millions into the American Gulag, for ten, fifteen, 20-year sentences based on mandatory minimums and "enhancements" which a federal appeals court has now declared to have flouted the Constitutional right to a fair trial before a jury of one's peers. Ever since the mid-1980s the War on Drugs has been a bipartisan affair. Come with us on a journey back to the time when Tip O'Neill, liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, and Ronald Reagan, colluded in a terrible new chapter of a war aimed at the poor, particularly ethnic minorities, and waged ever since the late nineteenth century and the attacks on the Chinese laborers of California.

This is an excerpt from Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils

In 1930 a new department of the federal government, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, was created under the leadership of Harry Anslinger to carry out the war against drug users. Anslinger, an avowed racist, was an adroit publicist and became the prime shaper of American attitudes about drug addiction, hammering home his view that this was not a treatable addiction but a deviant urge that could only be suppressed by harsh criminal sanctions.

Anslinger's first major campaign was to criminalize the drug commonly known at the time as hemp. But Anslinger renamed it "marijuana" to associate it with Mexican laborers who, like the Chinese before them, were unwelcome competitors for scarce jobs in the Depression. Anslinger claimed that marijuana "can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack. During this period, addicts have perpetrated some of the most bizarre and fantastic offenses and sex crimes know to police annals."

Anslinger linked marijuana with jazz and persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong was also arrested on drug charges, and Anslinger made sure his name was smeared in the press. In Congress, the drug czar testified that "coloreds with big lips lure white women with jazz and marijuana".

By the 1950s, amid the full blast of the Cold War, Anslinger was working with the CIA to charge that the new-born People's Republic of China was attempting to undermine America by selling opium to US crime syndicates. (This took a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the CIA, whose planes were then flying opium from Chiang Kai-Shek's bases in Burma to Thailand and the Philippines for processing and export to the US.) Anslinger convinced the US Senate to approve a resolution stating that "subversion through drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China".

In 1951, Anslinger teamed with Democrat Hale Boggs to marshal through Congress the first minimum mandatory sentences for drug possession: two years for the first conviction for possession of a Schedule 1 drug (marijuana, cocaine), five to ten years for a second offense, and ten to twenty for a third conviction. In 1956 Anslinger once again enlisted the aid of Boggs to pass a law calling for the death penalty to be imposed on anyone selling heroin to a minor, the first linking of drugs with Death Row.

This was Anslinger's last hurrah. Along with John Kennedy's New Frontier cantered sociologists attacking Anslinger's punitive philosophy. The tempo of the times changed, and federal money began to target treatment and prevention as much as enforcement and prison. But the interim didn't last long. With the waning of the war in Southeast Asia millions of addicted GIs came home to be ambushed by Richard Nixon's War on Drugs program.

Nixon resurrected Anslinger's techniques of threat inflation, declaring in Los Angeles that "as I look over the problems of this country I see that one stands out particularly: the problems of narcotics."

Nixon pledged to launch a war on drugs, to return to the punitive approach and not let any quaint notions of civil liberties and constitutional rights stand in the way. After a Nixon briefing in 1969, his top aide, H.R. Haldeman noted in his diary: "Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." And the Democratic congress played along.

But for all of his bluster, Nixon was a mere prelude to the full fury of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, when the War on Drugs became explicitly a war on blacks. The first move of the Reagan administration was to expand the drug forfeiture laws, first passed in the Carter administration. In 1981 Reagan's drug policy advisors outlined a plan they thought would be little more than a good PR sound bite, a public display of the required toughness. They proposed allowing the Justice Department to seize real property and so-called "substitute property"--that is, legally acquired assets equal in value to illegal monetary gains. They also proposed that the federal government be permitted to seize attorney's fees that they suspected might have been paid for through drug proceeds. The Reagan plan was to permit forfeitures on the basis of a "probable cause showing" before a federal judge. This meant that seizures could be made against people neither charged nor convicted, but only suspected, of drug offenses.

Contrary to the administration's expectations, this plan sailed through Congress, eagerly supported by two Democratic Party liberals, Senators Hubert Humphrey and Joe Biden, the latter being the artificer in the Carter era of a revision of the RICO statutes, a huge extension of the federal conspiracy laws. Over the next few years the press would occasionally report on some exceptionally bizarre application of the new forfeiture provisions, such as the confiscation of a $25 million yacht in a drug bust that netted only a handful of marijuana stems and seeds. But typically, the press ignored the essential pattern of humdrum seizures, which more often focused on such ordinary assets as houses and cars. For example, in Orange County, California, fifty-seven cars were seized in drug-related cases in 1989 alone. "Even if only a small amount of drugs is found inside," an Orange County narcotics detective explained, "the law permits seized vehicles to be sold by law enforcement agencies to finance anti-drug law enforcement programs."

In fact, the forfeiture program became a tremendous revenue stream for the police. From 1982 to 1991, the US Department of Justice seized more than $2.5 billion in assets. The feds confiscated $500 million in property in 1991 alone, and 80 percent of these seizures came from people who were never charged with a crime.

On June 17, 1986 University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died, reportedly from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent book Smoke and Mirrors: the War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, "In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs." It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. (He had, in fact, sniffed powder cocaine and, according to the coroner, there was no clear link between this usage and the failure of his heart.)

Bias had just signed to play with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston's rage and grief Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, a representative from Massachusetts, rushed into action. In early July of that year he convened a special meeting of the Democratic Party leadership on the Hill: "Write me up some goddamn legislation," O'Neill ordered. "All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House."

The Reagan White House was moving fast itself. Among other things the Drug Enforcement Agency had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crack houses. "Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War", the head of the New York office of the DEA exulted.

All this fed the congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House Majority leader Jim Wright, the Texas Democrat, called drug abuse "a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young". Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that "drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield".

So the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It boasted 29 new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the entire history of the Republic there had been only 56 minimum mandatory sentences. The new law enacted a death penalty provision for drug "king pins" and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief target of the bill was crack cocaine. Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between the possession of crack and powder cocaine. Under this provision, possession of five grams of crack carries a minimum sentence five years in federal prison. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. John Kerry voted for the measure.

The sentencing disparity in the 1986 law was based on faulty testimony that crack was fifty times as addictive as powder cocaine. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called "violence penalty". Yet there is no inherent difference between the drugs, as Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey was forced to admit. The federal Sentencing Commission, established by Congress to review sentencing guidelines, found that so-called "crack violence" was largely attributable to the drug trade itself and has more to do with the setting in which crack is sold than the drug itself: crack is sold on the street, while powder cocaine is often vended by house calls.

As Nixon and Haldeman would have approvingly noted, Tip O'Neill's new drug law was aimed squared at blacks, reminiscent of the early targeting of Chinese smoking opium rather than post-bellum ladies sipping their laudanum-laced tonics.

In 1995 the US Sentencing Commission reviewed eight years of application of this provision and found it to be undeniably racist in practice: 84 percent of those arrested for crack possession where black, while only 10 percent were white and 5 percent Hispanic. The disparity for trafficking arrests was even wider: 88 percent blacks, 7 percent Hispanics and 4 percent whites. By comparison, defendants arrested for powder cocaine possession were 58 percent white, 26 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic.

In Los Angeles all twenty-four federal defendants in crack cases in 1991 were black. The Sentence Commission recommended to Congress that the ratio should be one-to-one between sentences for offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, arguing that federal law allows for other factors to be considered by judges in lengthening sentences (such as whether guns or violence was associated with the offense). But for the first time in its history the Congress rejected the recommendations of the Sentencing Commission and retained the 100-to-1 ratio. Clinton likewise declined the advise of his drug czar and his attorney general and signed the bill.

One need only look at the racial make-up of federal prisons to appreciate the consequences of the 1986 drug law. In 1983 the total number of prisoners in federal, state and local prisons and jails was 600,800. Of those, 57,975 (8.8 percent) were incarcerated for drug-related offenses. In 1993 the total prison population stood at 1.4 million, of whom 353,564-25.1 percent-were inside for drug offenses. The Sentencing Project, a DC-based watchdog group, found that the increase was far from racially balanced. Between 1986 and 1991 the incarceration rate for white males convicted on drug crimes increased by 106 percent. But the number of black males in prison for kindred offenses soared by a factor of 429 percent, and the rate for black women went up by an incredible 828 percent.

The queen of the drug war, Nancy Reagan, said amid one of her innumerable sermons on the issue: "If you're a casual drug user, you're an accomplice to murder."In tune with this line of thinking, the Democratic-controlled Congress moved in 1988 to expand the crimes for which the federal death penalty could be imposed. These included drug-related murders, and murders committed by drug gangs, which would allow any gang member to face the death penalty if one member of the gang was linked to a drug killing. The new penalties were inscribed in an update of the Continuing Criminal Enterprises Act.

Convictions under the new law between 1989 and 1996 were 70 percent white and 24 percent black. But 90 percent of the times the federal prosecutors sought the death penalty it was against non-whites: of these, 78 percent were black and the rest Hispanic. From 1930 to 1972 (when the Supreme Court found the death penalty unconstitutional), 85 percent of those given death sentences were white. When the federal death penalty was reapplied in 1984, with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the numbers for black death penalty convictions soared. Of those on Death Row, both federal and state, 50 percent are black, although blacks constitute only 16 percent of the US population.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new book on the 2004 elections, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, is just out from AK Press/CounterPunch Books.

__________________
Torture Good, Healthcare Bad, Marijuana Evil.

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel

Plainsman1963

That's the 3rd time I have read it and it just keeps getting me angrier...

Not to take it too far off topic, but you know all those reefer madness quotes? Wouldn't it be a great idea to get a media campaign (similar to the "behind the curtain" ads by the anti tobacco truth people) going where those quotes are shown/attributed and end with a simple question like "is this the government you want?" or "is this our government?"

I just deleted a paragraph.
Too ticked off. Time to smoke a bowl.

Powerful piece you found there Doc. I am going to pick up the book and moniter my blood pressure.

Arise -SWS-

The fact that I'm Black made this article strike a particular chord with me. People always ask why Black men are always so angry towards police and so distrustful of the US government, this article has a few of about 20 answers I could give. Skeptics of racial inequality always dismiss the complaints of the Black community as "paranoia" but you'd be paranoid too if the country you live in passes laws to try to put you in jail. I wish I could take like 100 white people, have them wear prosthetic make-up that makes them look Black for a month, and see how much they enjoy their lives. I'll bet after 2 weeks they'd be crying for their old skin color back.

Plainsman1963

Made me remember a book I read way back when I was a kid. "Black like me".

Let's see what the internet can pull up...Damn, this is a wonderful tool:

Black like me, by John Howard Griffin.
As a child of a racist, that book helped me to understand there was more to be found than what I was seeing at the time.

I would highly recommend it.

MickityMike

I think it has a lot to do with what part of the country one is in. Some places are better than others.

Good article, though, Zombie.

__________________
I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons. - Glenn Reynolds

king cola

We all know what goes into news papers is what gets peoples attention and more than likely a story has to be true is how we view things that get into the papers. Harry Anslinger went to William Hearst to help him with his marijuana propaganda. Cocaine and opium were banned so when Anslinger was in the narcotics he needed to find something that he can say creates a problem to help launch his careeer!

Cocaine and opium were already illegal but marijuana was widely used, he decided to target that substance to launch his career. William Hearst a news paper editor took Anslingers lies and put them in the paper, Hearst had investments in the timber industry. If hemp was used it would put the timber in competition because hemp makes paper, rope, clothes and other products! Anslinger blamed mexicans for marijuana because at the time they brought it over from mexico and we had racism toward them at the time so lets say evil things about their product as well(marijuana). Also left out that William Hearst also hated mexicans so he was willing to put this stuff in his news papers, let's not forget this was before our own US gov said anything about marijuana.

I found out that in 1833 New York City was no different than Amsterdam is today with coffee shops, major US cities had hash parlors, New York alone had over 500 of them!

In 1937 Anslinger had said to congress marijuana is the most dangerous drug known to mankind! In 1948 he recanted his story to congress saying it makes people lazy and peaceful and will cause them to not want to fight during times of war! Around the time they wanted to ban marijuana a doctor from the medical association argued that Anslingers views had nothing to do with what marijuana does. Finally when the marijuana bill made it to the floor, the doctor from the medical assocation wasn't there to appeal it. Someone was asked if the medical association was for the bill to ban marijuana, someone stood up and said yes 100%. Based on that lie marijuana was banned. The public wasn't even aware of this ban, anyone who may have apposed this bill wasn't aware of it.

Anslinger kept things secret for 2 years before going to congress with Hearsts editorials and scraps of lies he made up on marijuana. Anslinger also managed persuade the U.N into getting marijuana banned world wide!

As for medical research, Anslinger illegally stopped research of marijuana by threatning doctors!

1895: The Indian Hemp Drug Commission concludes that cannabis has no addictive properties, some medical uses, and a number of positive emotional and social benefits.

1898: The Spanish American War erupts. During the war, the marijuana-smoking army of Panco Villa seizes 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland belonging to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The timber from this land was used to manufacture newsprint for Hearst's publishing empire. Hearst begins a 30-year propaganda campaign denouncing Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos, portraying Mexicans as lazy pot-smoking layabouts.

1925: Concerned by the high number of "goof butts" being smoked by off-duty servicemen in Panama, the U.S. government sponsors the "Panama Canal Zone Report." The report concludes that marijuana does not pose a problem, and recommends that no criminal penalties be applied to its use or sale.

1931: Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (head of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, one of the two banks with which DuPont did business) appoints future nephew-in-law Harry J. Anslinger to head the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

1934: U.S. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania attacks Harry Anslinger for making references to "ginger-colored ******s" on Federal Bureau of Narcotics stationary in letters circulated to department heads.

1936 - 1938: William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire fuels a tabloid journalism propaganda campaign against marijuana. Articles with headlines such as "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days; Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust" create terror of the "killer weed from Mexico." Through his relentless disinformation campaign, Hearst is credited with bringing the word "marijuana" into the English language. In addition to fueling racist attitudes toward Hispanics, Hearst papers run articles about "marijuana-crazed negroes" raping white women and playing "voodoo-satanic" jazz music. Driven insane by marijuana, these blacks -- according to accounts in Hearst-owned newspapers -- dared to step on white men's shadows, look white people directly in the eye for more than three seconds, and even laugh out loud at white people.

As funny and far fetched as Hearsts article sounds, let's not forget this was back in the 1930s, they had a lot of racism against blacks and jazz musicians were considered evil, many of them chose to smoke marijuana and that too was considered evil because of the groups that used it!

1944: New York Mayor LaGuardia's Marijuana Commission concludes that there is no link between cannabis and violence, instead citing beneficial effects of marijuana. Harry Anslinger goes berserk, denouncing Mayor LaGuardia and threatening doctors with prison terms should they dare to carry out independent research on cannabis.

1961: Harry Anslinger heads the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Drugs Convention, which issues the United Nations Single Convention Treaty on Narcotics. Intended to eradicate marijuana use within 25 years, the Single Convention Treaty removes the issue of legal classification of cannabis from citizens of the United States. Reversal of marijuana's criminalization on a global level now requires agreement among all 108 signatory nations. According to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1920 ruling in Missouri vs. Holland, treaties with foreign nations take precedence over domestic legislation.

1962: President John F. Kennedy forces Federal Bureau of Narcotics czar Harry Anslinger into retirement after Anslinger attempts to censor the work of Professor Alfred Lindsmith, author of The Addict and the Law. Some time after his assassination in 1963, associates of Kennedy claimed that the president used cannabis for back pain and planned to legalize marijuana during his second term.

1964: Dr. Raphael Mechoulam of the University of Tel Aviv isolates THC Delta-9, the primary active ingredient in cannabis -- and one of at least 60 compounds found in cannabis that have therapeutic value.

1971: Medical World News reports that "Marijuana... is probably the most potent anti-epileptic known to medicine today."

1973: Oregon takes the first steps towards decriminalization of cannabis. For the next 25 years, possession of up to one ounce of marijuana is considered the equivalent of a misdemeanor, with no criminal record for those caught in possession.

1974: Dr. Heath conducts his infamous government-funded Rhesus monkey study at Tulane University, touted for years as "evidence" that marijuana causes brain damage. Dr. Heath would put an airtight gas mask on the monkey, strap it into a chair and force-toke the equivalent of 63 Columbian-strength joints over the course of five minutes. The monkeys suffered brain damage, all right -- from suffocation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

1976: The Ford Administration bans independent research and research by federal health programs on the use of natural cannabis derivatives for medicine. Private pharmaceutical corporations are allowed to do limited "no high" research using only THC Delta-9, ignoring other potentially beneficial active natural ingredients.

1989: A government-funded study at the St. Louis Medical University determines that the human brain has receptor sites for THC to which no other known compounds will bind.

December 30, 1989: Ignoring evidence to the contrary, Drug Enforcement Agency Director John Lawn orders that cannabis remain on the Schedule One narcotics list, reserved for drugs which have no known medical use.

1990: As the drug war gets uglier and uglier, 390,000 American citizens are arrested on marijuana-related charges.

September 5, 1990: Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that "casual drug users should be taken out and shot."

I also did somore research and read that some mormons brought marijuana back from a trip to mexico in the early 1900's. The mormons are against anything euphoric, their church did not like the idea of marijuana being used, they were also involved in the prohibition of it.

If you want to know where you can read more on these articles that i copied and pasted, theres a lot more info to read from them, you can find them at these 3 sites, i recommend you read all of them all the way through because each one has more information than the other on corruption, etc.
This article explains a lot about william hearst and harry anslingers articles, quotes from their editorials and more!:
http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stori...naIllegal.html

This article talks a lot about the uses of hemp such as being used to make oil, food, but toward the bottom it gets back to william hearst and harry anslinger with somore surprising corruption the first article leaves out, you will learn that Andrew Mellon a banker was behind backing up a deal for Dupont! Mellon appointed his nephew-in-law Harry Anslinger to head up the FBNDD in 1931:
http://www.bigeye.com/marijuana.htm#protein

This is a history timeline of marijuanas earliest uses/descriptions of it's use all the way up to the 1990s:
http://www.tlmp.org/history_of_marijuana.html

All 3 articles are worth reading all the way through if you want complete information!

king cola

There is a great movie i saw one night on one of the movie channels, it was a movie documentary about when marijuana became illegal and why and just how much money over the years it costed us in taxes so far to fight it. The name of the movie was "GRASS" it came out in 1999. Woody Harrelson narrates it. In his movie you will see real speeches from over the years with lies about marijuana, old marijuana commercials from back around the time they first started lyin about it.

As he shows it through the years it will show how much taxes we wasted, by 1998 it shows a total of $300 billion of our tax dollars wasted to fight marijuana alone, at the time it shows this they make the sound of a toilet flushing in the background because that's pretty much where our money went do to prohibition not working!

I also want to give a shout out to zombie for posting the Anslinger story, i posted websites with articles about this recently and talked a little about it but zombie managed to get everyones attention by posting some of the story allowing everyone to reply. In one article i pasted in my post above this it will show what went on at the committe, real quotes that were said back and forth before they banned marijuana. Especially the part when asked if the medical association approved of the ban!

xxdr_zombiexx

Just say no to drugs.

reefermadness1

"Not to take it too far off topic, but you know all those reefer madness quotes? Wouldn't it be a great idea to get a media campaign (similar to the "behind the curtain" ads by the anti tobacco truth people) going where those quotes are shown/attributed and end with a simple question like "is this the government you want?" or "is this our government?""

I've thought of this before. Wouldn't it be great if we could get an organization like NORML to air mass-advertisements similar to TRUTH.com's, debunking federal claims and assisting in the enlightenment of the public in terms of drug laws? It would take some fund raising, but it could be done.

xxdr_zombiexx

This really is an excellent article. I read it several times before I posted it.

I am afraid if I bought the book I'd get too mad to finish it.

And ads idea is not very much off-topic at all.

My guess is the ad idea came up as a result of being so frustrated and wanting to look at some other way of cutting through the noise.

It's pretty well shown how highly emotionalized the "drug war hysteria" is.

Advertising is what started it :

Anslinger, an avowed racist, was an adroit publicist and became the prime shaper of American attitudes about drug addiction[

And advertising can counter it and I know there is recurring discussions about that.

The issue always comes down to media access - from billboards to tv ads - they never seem to go very far because of the drug war hysteria, etc....

The internet ad campaigns that are seen now are simply a natural tool for that. Shockwave ads like the MOVEON group did and cartoons like Mark Fiore does really are the order of the day.

And yeah - there are some real gems of drug war nonsense quoted in that. Fertile ground.