Obama's Contradictory Position on the Drug War

At a campaign appearance in Jacksonville, FL, Barack Obama proposed federal drug war funding as a solution to the city’s problems with violent crime:

I will ensure that we fund the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which has been critical to creating the anti-gang and anti-drug task forces our communities need. And I will make sure our federal law enforcement agencies are equipped to fight terrorism and crime by ensuring that the FBI and DEA are appropriately staffed and that federal-local law enforcement task forces have the support they need. [Florida Times-Union]

He said the same thing in New Orleans, thus it’s becoming increasingly clear that Obama really does believe that aggressive drug enforcement can function as a crime control mechanism. For a quick tutorial on how absurd that is, I’d refer him to Mexico, where President Calderon’s attempted crackdown has escalated violence throughout the country with no end in sight.

Moreover, Obama’s praise for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants ignores that program’s role in producing some of the most egregious civil rights catastrophes in modern drug war history. Byrne funding was responsible for the notorious fiascos in Tulia and Hearne, TX, in which large numbers of innocent African-Americans were rounded up and framed for drug crimes. Overwhelming abuse of the program led Texas to ban multi-jurisdictional drug task forces entirely.

Obama’s remarks yesterday are therefore simply impossible to reconcile with his calls for "shifting the paradigm" in the war on drugs. He has frequently called attention to the over-incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, yet now pledges to continue the exact tactics that have played such a prominent role in producing our alarming prison population. As Radley Balko explains:

Because most Byrne grants are also tied directly to drug arrests, they encourage local police departments to use their manpower and resources on nonviolent drug offenses instead of more serious crimes like rape, robbery, or murder.

It seems Obama is trying to have it both ways, scoring points for forward-thinking ideas on incarceration at the national level, while simultaneously promising more policing and drug enforcement to audiences that are concerned about crime. I’d still prefer to think he’s serious about working to reduce our prison population, but he won’t get far without looking at the way our drug laws are enforced. If he plans to dangle federal drug war dollars in front of bloodthirsty local narcotics task forces, you can bet those guys will do what they do best: fill our prisons as fast as they can with anyone they can get their hands on.

That’s just how the drug war works. Politicians fund prohibition. Prohibition funds violence. Politicians feel pressured and fund more prohibition. If Obama wants to change the outcome, he’ll have to change the process.

(This blog post was published by StoptheDrugWar.org's lobbying arm, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, which also shares the cost of maintaining this web site. DRCNet Foundation takes no positions on candidates for public office, in compliance with section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and does not pay for reporting that could be interpreted or misinterpreted as doing so.)