“Race, Drugs, and Prisons” Sept. 10, 2017 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
John Ehrlichman as quoted in Harper’s, April 2016 “The Nixon campaign in
1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left
and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it
illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to
associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then
criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest
their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night
after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of
course we did.”
Politics and religion can
be a lot like retail marketing. In the retail world, advertising works to
convince you that you have a problem that their product can solve. Consider the
products on your bathroom counter. You have soap that you usually use to wash
your body but when a guy wants to shave, he is supposed to use another kind of
soap for shaving when, in fact, any soap will do the same thing. After you bathe,
using soap, scented shampoo, and scented conditioner, you apply deodorant to
your underarms as if you need to somehow mask the smell of soaps.
And the marketplace has
persuaded us through years of advertising, after we have shampooed with one
sweet smelling soap, shaved with another, washed our bodies with a different
aroma of perfumed soap, then put another sweet smelling product on our
underarms, then we are supposed to apply cologne or after shave because that
smell will drive women wild. We brush our teeth with sweet smelling tooth paste
and we’re supposed to then rinse our clean mouths with another minty product. Women
potentially have several more steps to this ritual which may include shaving a
lot more area than their face, but even men walk out of their homes smelling
like a candy store and they do so with no real reflection and may, in fact,
make an emergency run to the store to replace any of one of these unnecessary
products that they are running low on.
Now, I know all of
this. I have known it for years. I managed to stop buying shaving soap,
choosing to just shave with soap. However, knowing that the only reason to use
deodorant or cologne is if you have, for some unforgivable reason, failed to
use soap, I still religiously use these unnecessary products every day of my
life. I do so unthinkingly, unconsciously, not thinking of the absurdity of it
all until some store clerk standing four feet away from me says, “boy, you sure
do smell good.” Which clearly needs to be interpreted to mean, “Wow, you smell
like a French bordello from several feet away,” but she is too nice to say
that.
If you pay attention
to advertising, you can spot when they are trying to add another product line
to your daily habits. Fabreeze can make your trashcan smell like a rose
garden…. Sure but it is garbage, and if it smells bad, shouldn’t you take it
out to the garbage bin rather than spraying chemicals in your nostrils that
deaden your ability to smell? Toilet paper commercials constantly seek to make
you uncomfortable about your personal hygiene and there have been several
attempts at adding either wet wipes for adults or a very elaborate toilet
seat/car wash for your personal undercarriage so that you can feel better about
yourself.
All of this in the
span of a single lifetime when we used to get by on leaves and corncobs! My dad
always claimed that he didn’t know what the Sears Roebuck catalogue was really
for until he was 20 years old. Go back a couple of hundred years and the only
one of these products you would have found in most homes is where we started
this marketing saga. Just soap.
Marketing is a
powerful thing. It literally changes our perceptions of reality.
We will believe
things that have been consistently and successfully marketed to us regardless
of all of the evidence to the contrary. Religion has gotten by on this scheme
for millennia. We tell people about heaven and hell from the cradle to the
grave, though there is not an ounce of evidence for either one, and while we
spin these yarns of fear and greed, we assure the people that we, the church,
the priesthood, the clergy, are the only ones who can sell you eternal fire
insurance or a golden ticket for the train ride to heavenly bliss…. It is like
a spiritual deodorant stick… keeps you from smelling bad while making you smell
good when, in fact, soap should have already done the trick.
Governments use marketing.
Specifically, politicians use marketing to get elected and then to remain in
power. After spending time in prison for his involvement in Watergate, John
Ehrlichman now supports himself by writing quasi-pornographic novels. He was
captured in a moment of unguarded honesty last year by a reporter who asked him
about the Nixon administration’s anti-drug policy. He said, very matter of
factly:
Nixon had two main
political enemies: the black leaders of the civil rights movement and the
increasingly middle class white protest against the war in Vietnam. He
knowingly lied to the American public to associate war protestors with
marijuana and civil rights leaders with heroin, he then criminalized both drugs
in wildly exaggerated ways and used that to raid homes, seize property, break
up meetings, and send leaders to prison.
Ehrlichman
concludes the interview saying, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of
course we did.”
This is not
Stalin’s Russia, this is not Mao’s China, this is our America…sweet land of
liberty, the home of the free and the brave, the greatest Democracy since
ancient Greece. I hope that you know that I take no pleasure in either
revealing or rehearsing these facts. Here is the naked, unavoidable, and
painful truth: the government of the United States, in successive
administrations, has lied to the population to gain their acquiescence to
policies that result in the oppression and imprisoning of minorities and
dissidents. They do this in many ways but one of the most insidious and
dishonest is the use of drug charges.
Now, let’s be very
honest about this. Heroin is a scourge. It is a highly addictive yet relatively
cheap and available drug that is killing tens of thousands of people. If making
it illegal and criminally charging those who manufacture, distribute, and use
it would wipe it off the face of the earth, I would feel differently. But what
we know for a fact is that 50 years of a war on drugs has failed entirely and
our policies have ruined the lives of millions, cost us billions in tax
dollars, and has, almost single handedly, broken up minority families and kept
the sons and daughters of 19th century slaves locked in chaos and
poverty.
I know that not all
of you agree with me and I know that just saying it out loud in church would
have guaranteed a rush to the exits in most of the churches I have served
before but I adamantly favor the nationwide legalization of pot and I do so
knowing that it can be addictive, it can turn productive people into basement
dwelling couch potatoes, and it increases traffic accidents. I favor the
legalization of pot because, all things considered, it appears to be less
harmful and addictive than America’s drug of choice, alcohol, and because, in
the states where marijuana use has been made legal, it appears to reduce the
rate of addiction and the frequency of death due to drug overdoses from harder
drugs like heroin, cocaine, crack, and fentanyl.
I could go on to
talk about taxing and regulating the product and its medical benefits but this
is not my pro-pot sermon. This is my sermon about how the government of these
United States, for nearly 50 years, has used totally trumped up drug laws to
incarcerate black people, to keep lots of unruly government critics on parole
and felon lists, and to trick the rest of us into accepting this monstrously
unethical situation.
The idea has been
marketed to you that addiction is a crime… perhaps, more deeply, it has been marketed
to us as being a sin. Drug use is something bad people do. No one makes them do
it. They choose to do it. Most of us believe, in fact, that they could stop if
they just wanted to, or if they can’t now, they surely could have before they
ate away their brains with drugs.
What we know, and we know this based
on math, hard data, research, is that the USA is the most strict about the criminalization
of drug use; we have both the largest percentage of our population in prison
and the highest drug use in the world.
For example, Americans are four times more likely to use cocaine
than the next closest country, which is New Zealand (16% vs. 4%).
There are four European countries
that have essentially decriminalized drug use and while that doesn’t “fix” the
problem, each of those countries has seen a reduction in drug addiction and a
huge drop in the spread of HIV and an even more impressive drop in the numbers
of drug related deaths. In the Netherlands, which has more liberal drug
policies than the U.S., only about 2% of their population has ever tried
cocaine whereas in the USA, eight times as many people have. So, it isn’t about
money, it isn’t about race, but it is apparently related, at least in large
part, to incredibly stupid, indefensible, and cruel federal laws, and a prison
system for which a lot of people would one day go to hell if there were such a
thing…. Though the numbers of senselessly incarcerated people may make me
reconsider my theology.
Conservatives try to market the
idea to the public that drug use is a crime that deserves the most severe of
punishment. Bleeding heart liberals generally try to say that it is an issue of
physiology. People get hooked on the drugs and they can’t help themselves.
I’m not going to say that there is
nothing to support either of those positions. Anecdotal evidence abounds when
the problem affects tens of millions of people. Everybody knows someone who was
an addict that got clean in one way or another but here is the laboratory
evidence:
In the 1960’s scientists conducted
experiments on rats. They would put a rat in a cage with two water bottles. One
bottle had water; the other bottle had water with either cocaine or heroin in
it. In virtually every case, the rat would keep going back to the drug laced
water bottle and die of an overdose. So, the evidence is in: drugs are
addictive. Drugs are bad. Drugs will kill you.
It wasn’t until recently that some
clever researcher wondered if it might not be the drugs. He wondered if it
might be the cage. He repeated the experiment but this time it wasn’t one rat
in a small cage, he created what he called “rat park” - A cage with lots of
good things to eat, lots of other rats, plenty of sex, and colored balls to
play with. In rat park there were two water bottles: one with water and one
with drugged water. The rats tried both but given the choice between good food,
sex, playful friends, none of the rats became addicted or overdosed. They, in
fact, didn’t like the drugged water.
In fact the same researchers
pointed out that we had a human version of the experiment for many years in
Vietnam.
At one point, upwards of ten
percent of American soldiers stationed in a miserable jungle where they didn’t
want to be and where they might be killed at any moment were using heroin.
It was feared that when these
soldiers came home that they would be roaming the streets as heroin addicts,
which, quite evidently, did not happen. When they came home to family, jobs,
school, they were no longer interested in heroin. They were not criminals. They
were not physically addicted. They just changed their cages.
I did my masters thesis on
addiction treatment and I spent a lot of time with recovery groups where we
talked about the progressive disease of addiction in which addicts would lose
their job, lose their family, and lose their health if they didn’t change their
ways. What we were less able to see that a lot of people didn’t have a drug
problem, they had a drug solution. They had already lost their family, their
job, or their health and the drugs or alcohol was the solution to the pain that
they were in.
A lot of how we have reacted to
drug use in America has depended upon race and class. We all know that Billie
Holiday died from heroin addiction but did you know that at the same time that
Billie Holiday was hooked on heroin that Judy Garland was too? Judy Garland’s
doctor told her to take longer vacations and spend more time with family and
friends. Billie Holiday was put in jail and handcuffed to a bed.
Look, James Taylor was a heroin
addict… do you think of him as a criminal? Sweet Baby James? Is it a weak
minded person who sang “I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain?” If James Taylor were black, they would probably
be dead now and that is the issue about race and drugs in America.
Now, I know that a
lot of you have heard a lot of this before. Some of you have heard me talk
about it more than once. But, you know what, I have known for ten years that
you only need to use deodorant and cologne if you don’t bathe regularly and I
still get out of the shower and use deodorant and cologne. I’m a fairly clever
guy and the marketing world still makes me feel like I have to do something
that I know good and well that I do not need to do.
So, you know that
addiction is not a crime but you live comfortably in a county with a million
people in cages for using drugs. What do I have to say to create the discomfort
necessary for us to change our prejudices about this? This nation’s attorney
general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, has directed prosecutors to reverse the
more lenient approach to drug charges under the Obama administration and to
seek maximum sentences for drug offenses.
This has nothing to
do with reducing drug use, addiction, or death from overdoses. This has
everything to do with increasing the prison population … it has to do with his
racist hatred of brown and black people. He isn’t stupid.
He knows this
doesn’t work to help with the drug problem. He is just prejudiced and mean
enough to put poor white people, black people and brown people in prison so
that there are more jobs for government employees, lawyers, judges, and more
construction and service contracts for federal prisons and for profit prisons
and if that doesn’t make you angry then there must be a cold hard place where
your heart was supposed to be.
Forty-five years
ago, when Nixon turned Johnson’s war on poverty into a war on the poor by
jacking up laws to criminalize drug use this nation was sold a lie. And you
have it straight from the mouth of a Nixon administration advisor, John
Ehrlichman, who said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we
did.”
If you didn’t know
the truth about this before, you do now. So, now, what are you going to do?
