Group Joins Police Officers in Calling for Move Toward Legalization
WASHINGTON, D.C. –Blacks in Government (BIG), a group representing the interests of African-American government employees at the federal, state, county and municipal levels, overwhelmingly passed a resolution at its national delegates meeting last week calling for an end to the failed and racially biased “war on drugs.” The resolution, which will be delivered to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, calls for “alternatives to incarceration that may, in part, include a model to regulate and control the distribution of some drugs.”
The resolution pointed to the words of Maryland State Police Major Neill Franklin and U.S. Marshal Matthew Fogg, both members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a group of police, judges, prosecutors and prison wardens who support legalizing and regulating drugs. BIG and LEAP have noted that African Americans constitute 53.5 percent of all persons who entered prison because of a drug conviction despite the fact that blacks are no more likely than whites to use drugs.
“I personally witnessed racially biased enforcement procedures when I ran a joint DEA task force,” said Fogg, a former U.S. marshal and a past BIG national first vice president. “When I requested equal enforcement of upscale suburban areas, I met internal resistance.”
The BIG resolution calls for “a federal investigation for solutions to eliminate the pretense and continued arrest and incarceration of African Americans at extraordinarily disparate rates for drug related charges.”
In passing the anti-drug-war resolution, BIG joins other African-American groups that have taken similar positions, such as the NAACP, the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and the National Black Police Association.
“The war on drugs has put blacks behind bars for drug offenses at more than ten times the rate of whites, even though the evidence consistently shows that blacks are no more likely to use or sell currently illicit drugs than whites are,” Fogg added. “It is time to end this virtual race war.”
The full text of the BIG resolution can be seen at http://www.bignet.org/regional/delegates/Resolution2_2011R.pdf
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) represents police, prosecutors, judges, FBI/DEA agents, U.S. marshals and others who want to legalize and regulate drugs after fighting on the front lines of the "war on drugs" and learning firsthand that prohibition only serves to worsen addiction and violence. Info at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 30, 2011
CONTACT: Tom Angell – (202) 557-4979 or media@leap.cc
Go Marshal Fogg!
ReplyDeleteBIG, I wholeheartedly approve! The War on Drugs, when broken down to it's ends, targets Blacks, Economically Disadvantshed persons, and those who are, as Nixon's Shaffer Report puts it, may be considered unconventional.
ReplyDeleteAmericans have a Constitutional right to be safe in our homes, Safe in our person, and free from penalties where the punishment does not fit the crime. The federal government, the DEA in particular, have conducted zero conclusive research as to whether cannabis/marijuana is a danger to society, or even if people who use it are actually intoxicated, or it's simply all in their minds.
The DEA refuses to allow research into cannabis, so we must rely on thousands of studies outside the US, many which provide compelling interest in the safety and benefits of cannabis. At the very least, those studies, make the stance held by the DEA that cannabis is a danger to the people and society, a fallacy.
To incarcerate a large minority population based on a fallacy and blatant lack of research is in itself a crime. That crime hurts millions of American Citizens who are quite often innocent of any harm to our society.