Aydan Büșra Çelik ‘21 and Jess Lee ‘23, respectively the co-founder and a member of Princeton Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), interviewed Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, a senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch (HRW) and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. The transcript of their interview is below, edited for length and clarity.
Jess Lee: What were some of the more racially charged or racial motivations behind the drug policies enacted during the ‘70’s and ‘80’s which… kick off of the war on drugs
Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno: yeah I mean I think it is important to take a step back even further and realize that prohibition drug started out in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s with strong racial underpinnings as an effort to, in many ways, control Black and Brown people… There was a lot of messaging that started back then that is associated specific groups who were unwanted in different ways with specific types of drugs, so historically there have been times when Mexicans or Latinos have been linked to marijuana, Asians to opium, …and Black people with cocaine and that’s morphed in various ways overtime but there’ve always been those strains in US drug prohibition. Now in the ‘70’s what happened was that Nixon declared this war on drugs and that basically marked the beginning of a pretty vast expansion in the use of law enforcement and the criminal legal system to enforce drug prohibition and a ramping up of penalties in the criminal legal system… “Tough on Crime” policies, harsh sentencing, which got worse and worse over through the ‘80’s and the ‘90’s, and when Nixon announced the war on drugs, …according to one of his closest advisors, what he had in mind was very much controlling Black people and having a tool to go after hippies, to go after the Left and the anti-war movement at the time, and that’s something that came up in a Harper’s interview by Dan Baum. Now my colleague at HRW and… came out [with an article] like four years ago. , So, you know, the intent is actually explicit there …long ago.
JL: …We’re also curious about the political rhetoric surrounding the war on drugs; was there any racially coded language or did the government try to euphemize their policies as restorative or did they publicly push it as a punitive system?
MMSM: I think there’s been different ways of talking about it, and it depends on the party and the moment. In general, the US criminal legal system has moved away from rehabilitation as a goal. That was something that might have been in play until the ‘70’s. With the War on Drugs, with Tough on Crime, the US turns its back on that and it’s really about retribution and punishment—and that is particularly strange and nonsensical in the context of drug use, when you’re criminalizing drug use to make it about punishments for something that is fundamentally a personal choice or a health issue. It just doesn’t add up if the goal—which policy makers often say—is to help people who are struggling with problematic drug use to overcome that. Punishment is not in any way a solution. And meanwhile there hasn’t been an investment in the things that do help people who are struggling with substance use disorder. There hasn’t been an investment in evidence-based drug treatment, there hasn’t been an investment in harm reduction services, so that for people who are struggling with problematic drug use, at least they don’t overdose and die or they don’t contract HIV or hep C because they’re using contaminated syringes. Those types of measures that would actually help people, that would also support them with the many other issues in their personal lives that may be contributing to problematic drug use—like housing, poverty, other health issues, mental health concerns—there’s been no investment in that, and so that really makes the rhetoric around “Oh well this is about getting people to stop using drugs” or “helping people who are struggling with substance use disorder”—it’s nonsense. Punishment doesn’t solve anything.
JL: My understanding is that marijuana at one point in time was classified as a Schedule I drug… Could you speak on any of the sentencing and classification disparities across different drugs that may have reflected some of these racial biases.
MMSM: Well I think it’s not even just across the drugs that are considered illegal… There’s a question about why certain drugs are illegal at all and others are not, alcohol is the biggest example. [It] leads to more deaths than any other drug in the United States every year and yet it’s not restricted or considered illicit, and so these are all decisions that are driven by particular cultural moral norms but also in a context in the United States, a political context that is very highly racialized… Structural racism but also racial stereotyping and associations and dog whistles have all played into the particular structure that we have in place right now.
JL: Especially nowadays with the recreational use of marijuana becoming more widespread, what are some of the ethical concerns surrounding the fact that [marijuana dispensaries]are so profitable [while] communities of color are still broken by some of these policies.
MMSM: Yeah there is a big question there about the rush to legalize—which of course is extremely important in terms of reducing the number of people who are getting arrested and imprisoned and having their lives ruined because they were criminalized for marijuana use or sales. But in the rush to legalize, often the interests whose voices are heard the most are not the communities that have been historically impacted, they are not the Black and Brown communities who up to this day are over-policed with the excuse of Drug Enforcement, it’s often been businesses and investors who come in and try to help shape these policies. he the burden is on policymakers and advocates to make that very clear and to ensure that this is grounded in what’s best for the community, that there is a taxation system in place, for example, that allows for reinvesting [the revenue that’s] brought in from marijuana legalization into the communities that have historically been the most impacted…
JL: What other elements of the prison industrial complex associated with the War on Drugs had [a negative impact] on urban communities of color, I think you mentioned policing as well…
MMSM: I mean it’s the entire system put together, but policing is the is the first point of interaction and it’s what touches the largest number of people. Over the years as the war on drugs has justified ever more money going to local police departments from the federal government, police departments have invested those resources in policing communities of color—and that is excused by the War on Drugs, by the need for drug enforcement. We know for a fact that Black and Brown people use drugs at the same rate or even slightly less than white people but Black and Brown people are arrested for that drug use almost three times as often nationally, and that’s because of where police have put those resources. So the War on Drugs has served as the fuel for an extremely aggressive increase in policing in Black and Brown communities and that translates into higher rates of arrest but also larger numbers of convictions, more time spent in jail or even prison, and that means enormous disruptions to people’s lives and deep devastating harm. It’s not just the time that you spend behind bars and away from your family, it also is your loss of your job it’s the loss of any number of opportunities that you might have been pursuing at the time you were arrested and convicted. It’s obviously lost income. And it’s the burden that criminal records imposes, because people with criminal records often can’t access student loans anymore, they can’t access public housing, they can’t get jobs, in many states they can’t vote—and so this system that criminalises enormous numbers, disproportionately Black and Brown people,cuts them out of the benefits of society in many cases and of being part of this political system and doesn’t even allow them to have a voice in reforming it. So it’s a very perverse system that you have in place and we see efforts to to undo that in some places that are exciting, we’ve seen in Florida the amendment that passed last year that would restore the right to vote for people with felony convictions [Constitutional Amendment 4/Felon Voting Rights] although that now there all these obstacles to that that are being thrown in by policy makers so we’ll see what happens. Also on the drug front we we have this ballot initiative that has qualified for the ballot in November in Oregon which is very exciting that would for the first time invest heavily in services and support for people who are struggling with problematic drug use and remove the criminal penalties associated with that use, so effectively it’s decriminalization but with it an entirely new approach to helping people. So you know that’s a good example of investing in services and communities and pulling back from this over-policed, aggressive punishment-focused model that has been the default for so long.
Aydan Büșra Çelik: Do you think government officials and organizations have been cognizant of the fact that this impact has been created as a cause of the War on Drugs or have they attempted to mitigate the inequalities caused by those policies?
MMSM: I would say that the ones who [stand out at the federal level] include people like [Sen.] Cory Booker [NJ – D] who have introduced legislation that would aim at reforming this pretty substantially… That being said I think that the reforms that were on the table two years ago and that led to this law that passed a couple years ago called the First Step Act which is about sentencing reform at the federal level—they don’t really speak to the current moment right at this point. You have large numbers of people in the United States who are frankly just appalled and unwilling to put up with the basic approach to criminalization that the United States has had for many years and they’re demanding deeper, more structural reforms. So you know some of the incremental reforms that would reduce sentences are not going to cut it. I think it’ll be interesting to see in coming months whether policy makers do start asking some of the deeper questions about why so much money is going to local police departments and what it’s being used for. At a time when you have a national overdose crisis that is still claiming about 70,000 lives a year, why isn’t more of that money going towards helping people who are struggling with substance use disorder? A lot of this stuff also needs to happen in local and state governments because that’s where police are really mostly operating out of. I think there you’re gonna see a lot of variety in how they respond to the moment like you saw in Los Angeles, after initially proposing an increase to the police budget, Mayor Garcetti, when the protests happened, decided “Ok ok ok, we’re going to cut it, we’re going to cut the budget.” And of course all this is happening in the context of the pandemic and local revenue declining and so what is that going to mean for what the money that does come in is used for. Is it really going to keep getting poured into drug enforcement that has these terribly racialized implications orcan it be used for some of these other things that the public is calling for? There’s going to be a huge need for investment in education, for example, because of the school situation and the fact that so many schools can’t open. There’s a vast digital divide, lots of poor kids don’t have computers or Internet access so that they can do school virtually, and of course there’s a child care question for small kids—who’s going to be there, what about all these women who are now out of work because they have to take care of their kids, and what does that mean for people’s incomes? And there are lots and lots of social issues that are coming up, social and economic issues that are incredibly pressing—not to mention healthcare. And… I mean Black and Brown communities have known about this for a long time, right, but I think other parts of the country are waking up to these issues in part because of COVID-19 and that’s changing the conversation a little bit… We can only hope that the government and local officials will listen to the ongoing protests happening across America.
ABÇ: Speaking of which, how are drug policy and policy on police brutality connected, and what does a defunded police system look like? Are there any publicized instances of death inflicted by police violence that had to do with alleged drug use and possession?
MMSM: Yeah a lot of instances… Look, police killings, police violence, happens because if you have more heavily policed Black and Brown communities you’re going to have more interactions between police and Black and Brown people and more situations that escalate into killings eventually. And of course there’s a lot of day-to-day violence that’s not captured by data about police killings that is also horrific and all sorts of abuse that goes on. So, yes, there have been killings that are associated with searches for drugs or alleged drug use, Terence Crutcher in Oklahoma if I’m not mistaken involved alleged drug use, the case of Brianna Taylor was supposedly a search for drugs, and so this is this comes up repeatedly, where the the policing is in the name of drug enforcement. And so I do think that part of the answer to police abuse is to reduce the footprint of policing and to carve out areas where policing really isn’t the answer, isn’t appropriate, and one of those clear areas is anything having to do with drug use. Other areas have to do with mental health- or poverty-related offenses, situations where police are basically policing homelessness… But drug use is a clear one and the single most arrested offense in the United States is drug possession for personal use, I think it’s 1.4 million a year. And so if you can decriminalize possession for personal use and instead support people who are struggling with problematic drug use and leave the people who aren’t struggling alone then that on its own is a huge bite out of the role of the police.
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