NY Drug Law Reforms: Marginal or Real?
Nicolas Eyle, the Syracuse-based leader of ReconsiDer, a major New York reform group, dismisses the softening of the Rockefeller laws as "a joke" that gets the New York Legislature off the hook for having the country's harshest laws but "won't help the drug problem, or reduce the black market in drugs, or stop violence." Two mega-issues, ones we all like to avoid, lurk behind every debate -- state or federal -- on drug policy. The first is prohibition. It took two amendments to the Constitution and a wave of gangster-led criminal activity to prove it didn't work for alcohol, so why should we ever expect it to work on drugs? The second issue is race.An overwhelmingly disproportionate number of African-Americans is imprisoned for drug offenses. We have a global record-breaking 2.2 million prisoners. But black Americans, though just 12 percent of the U.S. population, are 44 percent of our population behind bars -- hundreds of thousands on narcotics charges even though surveys show actual drug use among blacks is no greater than and often far less than that of whites. A prime reason: police routinely target blacks, especially young males in poor neighborhoods. A sample result: While blacks are 28 percent of Maryland's population, they're 90 percent of its prisoners convicted on drug charges. Nationally, one in three black men aged 20 to 29 is in prison, on probation or parole. [more]