Vote Yes on California Prop 19

Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!

OAKLAND—An initiative on the November 2 ballot in California would make the state the first in the country to legalize the sale of marijuana as well as eliminate criminal penalties for possession or use of an ounce or less by those over 21. It would make cannabis available for scientific, medical, industrial and research purposes and permit the cultivation of small amounts for personal consumption. Proposition 19, “The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” is written narrowly to leave much of pot use illegal and concerns itself with regulating and taxing its sale. Nevertheless, a vote for Prop. 19 is an elementary expression of support for a simple democratic right: that the government keep its claws off of people’s private lives.

Equally important, a vote for this initiative is a vote against the “war on drugs,” which is in the main a war against black people. While blacks and whites use marijuana at close to the same rate, the arrest rate for blacks is three times greater nationally and ranges up to four times greater in California counties.

The “war on drugs” has served to greatly intensify capitalist state repression, whose daily workings include street executions by marauding cops, such as the brutal killings of Oscar Grant in Oakland last year and Manuel Jamines in Los Angeles this September. In Latin America, U.S. imperialism—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext for expanding its military presence and propping up pro-U.S. regimes (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February).

Contrary to government claims, the criminalization of marijuana has never had anything to do with protecting anyone’s welfare. Anti-drug laws are designed to maintain social control and regimentation of the population, providing a legal pretext to repress black people, immigrants, youth and others.

Laws against marijuana were first adopted beginning in 1914 as a racist measure against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. A federal ban in 1937 opened the era of campaigns against “reefer madness,” especially targeting both blacks and Latinos. The first federal “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, captured that ban’s spirit with such racist diatribes as “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

Today’s plethora of drug laws are an outgrowth of the web of legal repression under the “war on crime,” kicked off with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Republican Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” These and subsequent measures were implemented to target black militants and the ghetto poor following the upheavals against segregation, poverty and racist cop terror in the mid-to-late 1960s. Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was officially launched, centered on a racist crack cocaine witchhunt. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, especially for young black men, for whom the capitalist rulers have had increasingly little use since the devastation of unionized industrial jobs beginning in the 1970s.

Starting in the early 1990s, marijuana arrests began to shoot up as crack cocaine arrests leveled off. By 2009, annual marijuana prosecutions had reached more than 858,000. More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and 46 percent of all drug arrests—nearly 760,000 a year—are for possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear the government’s opposition to Prop. 19, vowing that the Obama administration would “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.

The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, for any purpose, regardless of its particular risks or effects. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Likewise, we oppose “sin taxes” on activities and products the bourgeoisie deems “immoral” or unhealthy, like alcohol and tobacco.

In fact, marijuana is among the safest of non-food substances consumed by humans. Yet under the Controlled Substances Act, the Feds put it on the list of the supposedly most dangerous drugs, Schedule I, along with heroin, and ahead of Schedule II drugs like cocaine and morphine. Despite the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, which made medical use of marijuana legal in California, the federal government did not stop persecuting a number of patients with harrowing illnesses for whom pot provided some relief.

NAACP president Alice Huffman explained why the California NAACP endorsed Prop. 19 by correctly denouncing “the so called ‘war on drugs’” as “a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans” (San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September). For this, she has come under fire, with more than 20 black preachers and others demanding her resignation. Nate Holden, a longtime black Democratic Los Angeles politician, has come out against Prop. 19. The capitalist Democratic Party, and black elected officials in particular, have been instrumental in the anti-drug crusade. Huffman herself has endorsed Democratic state attorney general Jerry Brown for governor. Brown boasts of enforcing the racist drug laws and opposes Prop. 19. In their role of tying labor to the capitalist class enemy, the bureaucratic misleaders of almost all of California’s public workers unions have also backed Brown, who promises to cut public workers pensions.

The “war on drugs” has at times been supported by large sections of working people and the oppressed who wrongly believe that cops and prisons are a means for combatting the social pathology of drug addiction and the drug trade. In fact, decriminalization, by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade, would also reduce the crime associated with it. For those who wish, any associated psychological or medical problem that may arise from drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. At the same time, we understand that drug addiction in the ghetto is a reflection of the hellish conditions imposed on masses of black people in this racist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004):

“Recreational drug use is nobody else’s business, but widespread drug addiction and alcoholism sap the revolutionary energy of the working class and other sections of the oppressed. The social oppression that breeds alcoholism and drug addiction among the poor should be fought through the moral authority of the proletarian socialist movement, and not through state coercion.”

Whipping up hysteria about drugs in the workplace, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes Prop. 19 because the measure approves only the “existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance”—i.e., the current norm for subjecting workers to drug tests. We oppose all workplace drug testing, which the bosses use as a pretext to frame up or target militants and cow the entire workforce.

The racism and union-busting of the “war on drugs” come together in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, under which port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute to fraud and being an “illegal immigrant.” Under TWIC, many port workers have lost their jobs, disproportionately blacks and Latinos, and including members of the largely immigrant port truckers. As the Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union declared in a statement endorsing Prop. 19: “Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.” Down with TWIC!

We support Prop. 19 as a step toward removing all laws against drug use, but we do not take a position on the particular schemes advanced by Prop. 19 to regulate the commercial production and taxation of marijuana. Moreover, we oppose the draconian measures it would mete out when it comes to youth—the other group specially targeted by drug laws—and those who provide them marijuana. These include up to seven years in prison for offering or providing pot to youth under 14, up to five years for ages 14-18 and six months for ages 18-21. Despite its weaknesses, however, if passed and actually implemented—no sure thing given federal and police hostility—Prop. 19 would eliminate a key legal pretext for state harassment and violence. Down with the racist and anti-labor “war on drugs”! For decriminalization of drugs! Vote yes on Prop. 19!