Introduction:
Once again the issue of drugs and the way we treat convicted drug dealers has returned to the public agenda. And, as in the original discussion, the issue has moved from the justification swung from the kind of justice meted out to offenders to the ‘humanity’ of Barbadian society and its moral compass.
But, our Christian nature aside, it is an unnecessary economic burden on taxpayers to adopt a so-called war on drugs when some of the biggest players are easily forgiven and then, worse, incentivised by being allowed to stay on in Barbados with a right of residence and, in due course, a right to citizenship. In so doing, government is recognising for the first time in our history that we no longer believe in the rule of law, but rule by lawyers and the most vocal of us. The treatment of these offenders must, however, be linked to the wider policy objective of combating drug abuse and dealing and the call for a drugs court.
First, there is no need for a specialist drugs court as is proposed. What is needed is a sentencing policy to prohibit magistrates and judges from abusing the custodial system by remanding and sentencing young drug users to lengthy terms in prison for the possessions of small amounts of drugs, usually cannabis. Rather, an effective drug policy should revolve around treating drug use and addiction in the first instance as medical and psychiatric problems, but offenders/victims should first have to cooperate fully with the authorities by giving details of suppliers, etc., before being treated with leniency.
However, the flip side of this policy should be that all dealers should be treated with the harshest penalties, including the confiscation of all their property on the grounds that it was the proceeds of criminal activity. All naturalised Barbadians or those with a right of residence should have these rights and privileges withdrawn on conviction and be deported.
A new drug policy should also give the authorities a right of preventative intervention if someone is visibly living a lifestyle beyond his or her known income. That person, for the good of the wider society, should have to prove the source of his/her income or have the property confiscated – our collective rights out strip individual rights. The simple message should be that Barbados is not a haven for drug dealers, no matter who they are.
Having said this, we have seen how so-called wars on drugs have failed at a huge price to taxpayers in other jurisdictions. The US spends about US$33bn on these drugs war and arrests on average 1.5million people every year, out of an estimated total of 28 million drug users, to execute this war. Yet, after 80 years, the US does not look as if it is winning the war. With over 300000 people in prison on drug offences, this is more than the total prison populations of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain.
We have also seen the failure of the American export of its social problems to neighbouring nations with 50000 murders in Mexico alone, and most of Central and South America having been turned in to a warzone, following the abuse of office by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North. The recent ‘gift’ of US$2m by the Canadians for assistance with security in the Caribbean basin must be seen in this light and is but further proof of the contamination of Caribbean politics by our major geopolitical partners to the North. On terms of Barbados, our domestic policy must not be guided by these experiences.
Although I do not subscribe to the artificial theory of victimology, we must remember that the real victims in drug dealing are the users; successfully dealers become incredibly wealthy. Therefore, Barbadians must not allow a well-orchestrated campaign, backed by many well informed and educated people who ought to know better, to railroad them in to allowing a convicted drug runner, whose remorse has not gone as far as cooperating with the authorities, to remain in the country.
Decent, law-abiding people must not allow themselves to be blackmailed in to being ‘sympathetic’ to someone whose mission was the destruction of our young people, the very future of our country. Any such person is not unwelcome, his or her presence is a threat to national security and s/he could easily become a link person in our small country for major organised drug dealers, and must not be allowed in the country.
Opening our doors to the wealthy, no matter how they got their money, and on grounds of sympathy to drug dealers with major contacts is a high-risk strategy, which could lead to the entire nation being hijacked by an organised mafia, be they Eastern Europeans or Latin Americans.
This is not as far-fetched as it may seem. In the 1970s and 80s, the Colombian drug king Carlos Lehder used a Bahamian island as a transhipment point to send cocaine to the US. Today, the Bahamas is a member of Caricom.
New Dimension:
We have examples all over the world. Outside the Caribbean the problem of law and order takes on significantly interesting dimensions. In Australia, Britain and the US, with the proportion of black and minority ethnic prisoners far outnumber their representation in the wider community – most of them victims rather than organisers. In the US, two-thirds of federal and state prisoners are African American or Hispanics, which Professor Michelle Alexander of Ohio State University called The New Jim Crow (the title of her book). It is, she suggests, the reworking of the old racial and social prejudices which have gripped the US every since it was settled by Europeans.
The offence that exposed this inherent bias in the US criminal justice was drugs, in particular cocaine and its variant, crack. As a post-graduate student, I often got in to arguments with my criminology professor Jock Young and later reporting crime for the Daily Mail newspaper, over how possession of the two illegal drugs was perceived by Anglo-Saxon criminal justice systems. My argument was simple: if cocaine was such a dangerous drug in its pure form, which it no doubt is, why then does diluting it makes it much more powerful? The answer, put forward was that because the potency of the drug is weakened through its dilution, users therefore had to resort to more frequent use. But there is no pharmacological evidence in the literature for this claim. The real answer maybe more simple. Cocaine, because of its price, is the drug of preference for the white professional class, working in the City of London and the Washington DC commuter belt. On the other hand, because users in the inner cities, often black and Hispanic, cannot afford the high retail prices, they have to resort to stretching their purchases as far as it would go.
It now seems as if the argument has been resolved, with the US Justice Department, the Supreme Court and the sentencing organisations now accepting that there was indeed a class/racial bias in sentencing for possessing the two drugs. In July 2010, the US Congress amended the 25-year-old law which, through intention or as a consequence, had “subjected tens of thousands of African Americans to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly whites, caught with the powder form of the drug.” (The Washington Post, July 29, 2010).
The Bill, which was approved by the Senate that March, has also been endorsed by the Supreme Court and, reluctantly, the Drug Enforcement Agency. Under the 1986 Act, a person convicted for the possession of crack received a prison sentence equivalent to someone caught in possession of 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine. The same legislation also imposed a five-year minimum sentence for first-time offenders caught in possession of five grammes of the illegal substance, while imposing a similar sentence for those caught with 500 grammes of the powder cocaine. Under the new legislation, the five-year term now applies to those caught with 28 grammes of the powder or one ounce of the crack. According to the same Washington Post report, 80 percent of convicted crack users were African Americans.
As Obama pointed out during his 2008 presidential campaign, African Americans were as likely to serve just as long for drug offences (58.7 months) as whites for violent offences (61.7 months). Apart from the fact that those jurisdictions which were only too keen to jump on untested US crime ideologies to justify their harsh sentencing, a more mature debate will confirm two further truths: that the issue of the illegal use of drugs is a mainly US phenomenon and dealers only target other nations when entry to the US market becomes more prohibitive, such as greater security along the Mexico/US border.
It is also my contention, as I have pointed out, that the addictive use of illegal drugs is a medical/psychiatric issue while the trading in illegal substances is a criminal one. Such a realisation would radically change the economics of the policing of illegal drugs with the emphasis moving away from common street users, who would have to cooperate with police and the other authorities, including divulging their sources of supply, in order to escape prosecution and be recommended for medical and psychiatric treatment.
On the other hand, police (or preferably customs) will be given the resources to pursue the real dealers who hide behind their gated mansions and professional titles.
Analysis and Conclusion:
Discussions about drug abuse often ignore the economic consequences – the cost of policing, education, the courts, prisons, probation services, the lost of talent, productivity – and its impact on human capital. As a small nation we can hardly afford to waste this talent and taxpayers’ money, nor, indeed, pay the rise of social breakdown. At the same time, we must not play tough, we are not the new sheriffs in town. Barbados is not the wild west. We owe a duty of compassion to victims of the evil people who set out to destroy lives with illegal drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, but our priority must be to our own citizens, our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters.
At the end of the day, despite all this, it is the deafening silence of those with influence and power which is frightening. Where are the politicians who object to the presence of foreign drug dealers in our country? Where are the representatives of the police? Where are the church leaders? Where are the people whose responsibility is the guardianship of our youths? Where are our moral leaders?
Who is speaking for the integrity of ordinary Barbadians?
The blogmaster invites you to join the discussion.