THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF SOUTHEASTERN CT
THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF SOUTHEASTERN CT
A Case for Decriminalizing Drugs, Starting With Marijuana
By Rosanne Smyle
Special to The Times
It’s not just the bad kids who smoke marijuana; it’s our kids and it’s your kids, according to criminologist Susan Pease, and she’d rather see them treated for substance abuse than sentenced to a jail term.
“I’m not saying drugs are good,” Pease said. “I’m saying prison is bad.”
Pease, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Central Connecticut State University, made a case for decriminalizing drugs by detailing a historical pattern of drug legislation that targets and punishes the country’s underclass. She spoke at the annual meeting of the League of Women Voters of Southeastern Connecticut at the Cottage at the Spa at Norwich Inn.
The local League adopted a plan at the meeting to initiate a regional study focusing on the pros and cons of the decriminalization of marijuana by gathering information from a variety of sources, including those in law enforcement, education and substance abuse treatment.
Pease said 50 percent of federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses; forty-six percent of those people are black.
Some of the nation’s first drug legislation passed in 19th century San Francisco after Cornelius Vanderbilt hired Chinese migrant workers to do the dirty and dangerous work of building a transcontinental railroad, work few white workers found appealing, Pease said. Along with their work ethic to earn enough money to return to their homeland, the Chinese brought their custom of opium smoking. Not readily available to his workers, Vanderbilt supplied them with opium, selling it at inflated prices that kept them forever in debt, not unlike what we’ve seen throughout history with migrant workers at mills or factories renting company housing and buying food at the company store, she said.
With no money to return home after building the railroad, a subject romanticized now that all the work was done, the Chinese settled on the West Coast. At about the same time, the country experienced a recession and unemployed white workers began to envy their Chinese counterparts for building the grand railroad, thinking they had stolen their jobs. Consequently, they were not welcomed in their communities and, being private people, settled in Chinatowns in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
They also continued their opium habit, because, as Pease said, “People just don’t give up their psychoactive drug of choice. Plus they’re addicted.”
In 1875, laws made it illegal to sell and smoke opium. This marked Pease’s first instance of otherwise law abiding people now being treated as criminals.
Civil War soldiers fought the pain of battlefield injuries and dysentery by using a new drug called morphine, derived from opium. About the same time the hypodermic needle was invented as an efficient delivery system of the drug and many soldiers returned home addicted to morphine.
In the 1900s, smear campaigns started after the American Medical Association wanted to have cocaine removed from patent medicines, Pease said. The South, still smarting from the Civil War, resisted the federal legislation and began linking cocaine use with African Americans and telling lies about unruly blacks terrorizing white women.
Marijuana smoking was popular among jazz and theater artists in the early 1900s, but Mexican migrant beet workers brought the most attention to the drug, Pease said, because they did the jobs no one wanted until the Great Depression when those jobs started to look good. One way to get the Mexicans to go home was to fire them by associating them with pot smoking, Pease said.
A comprehensive drug act was passed during the Nixon administration in the 1970s, while the 80s saw the introduction of crack cocaine, harsher drug laws and the rise of the Colombian drug cartels and three-strikes you’re out laws. Crack cocaine users, more often people of color from inner cities, served longer prison sentences because of tougher laws for crack, while powdered cocaine users, more often suburban whites, served less time under more lenient laws.
With prisons and jails brimming with drug offenders, Pease said, “I’m not sure what society was being protected from.”
With marijuana, she said, “You laugh at unfunny stuff and you eat a lot. You get the munchies.”
If young men and women using drugs are put into treatment programs rather than jail, they have a better chance of being productive members of society.
“There’s no recovery” from imprisonment, she said. “There is no coming back. Your life is ruined.”
As for young drug offenders sentenced to jail, Pease said, “They’re off and running. We’re never going to see them in polite society again.”
Rosanne Smyle of Stonington is a board member of the League of Women Voters of Southeastern Connecticut. The League welcomes memberships from all men and women who are at least 18 years old. Call Marilyn Mackay at 860-535-1192 to become a member of this non-partisan organization that encourages informed and active participation in government.