"The intersection of the tragic dangerousness of the War on Drugs in Central and Latin America with criminal justice and drug policy reform in the United States has never been clearer." I made that observation months ago in a blog on how Latinos fared under our broken criminal justice system. The intersection is even clearer today.
In 2012, I witnessed the Caravan for Peace that emanated from Mexico, traveled 6,000 miles and stopped in 20 cities in this country before arriving at the steps of New York City Hall. The delegation was not received by Mayor Bloomberg, but by the current City Council President Melissa Mark Viverito. Their message to the country -- the world's biggest consumer for illegal drugs -- was clear: Please change your approach and stop this war.
I also witnessed Mexican mothers shed tears at a vigil at the foot of the Washington Memorial in the Capitol in November of 2015. Their message was equally clear: Help us stop the killings and the missing bodies and stop this war.
And in April of this year, I will witness and enthusiastically receive a caravan of families that will start in Honduras and work their way through Guatemala and El Salvador and Mexico to end in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on global drug policy. They will join forces in solidarity with the mothers of Great Britain and Canada, and advocates from the Caribbean, to ask, again, for an end to the drug war.
These voices from Central and Latin America will make the effects of the war on drugs palpable. They will articulate the pain and suffering of so many families of innocents. They will inform this country of the over 60,000 people murdered, tens of thousands missing and many more displaced -- in Mexico alone.
At the same time, Latinos in the U.S. -- from the same regions of Central, South America and the Caribbean -- suffer from the effects of a radicalized and broken criminal justice system. Those are the consequences of failed prohibitionist policies that the U.S. has adopted for decades. The following practices barely get mainstream notice:
The 34,000 bed quota in immigration detention centers that Congress mandates and that the executive branch abides by feeds the greed of the private sector that owns the centers and creates perverse law enforcement paradigms that often focus on marijuana possession or traffic violations to funnel Latino bodies into the deportation pipeline. This arrangement from hell is condoned with no objection.
Pretrial and bail adjudications as noted by the Pretrial Justice Initiative often disfavor Latino criminal defendants at rates that sometime exceed that of African-Americans because the stereotype of the Latino defendant charged with drug possession is that he or she is involved in the drug cartels.
New York City where Latinos are the largest racial/ethnic minority is also the marijuana arrest capital of the world. Improvements in policing in the last year or two show potential but more has to be done.
It is no surprise then that for Latinos, as for African-Americans, the worst effects of the War on Drugs is a civil rights issue. Indeed, a human rights issue.
All of this is occurring against the backdrop of criminal justice and sentencing reform debate that is taking root in the U.S. Senate, at the White House and nationally. It occurs as the lexicon of drug "addiction" is morphing into "substance abuse disorder" because the face of addiction, especially for heroin and prescription drugs, is now increasingly white. To the extent that shifts the paradigm away from prohibitionist models to health and treatment models, I'll take it.
I'll also take it because we finally have a president who gets it. A president who actually visited a prison -- the first ever. A president who talks about racial profiling and how it affected him and his peers. A president who admitted to his youthful indiscretions and experimentation with drugs. A president who openly speaks of the racially disparate outcomes of the entire criminal justice system: from stops and frisks, to arrest, to bail determinations, to convictions, to sentencing, to incarceration and to its collateral consequences.
But President Obama cannot stop there. Indeed, the president must address the biggest engine in our insatiable drive to punish via mass incarceration. He must address the War on Drugs.
So I urge the President to address the UNGASS session on global drug policy slated for April at the United Nations. President Bill Clinton addressed that body at its last session on drugs with a message that finds no place in today's parlance. President Obama should elevate this discussion with modern approaches to the use of drugs.
Indeed, I urge him to finish the job of highlighting the worse aspects of our criminal justice system by connected the cause and the effects. I ask that he reaffirm the national approach towards a public health and harm reduction approach as the best way to address persons who have substance abuse disorders. I urge him to reaffirm a national change away from the tried, but failed, prohibitionist paradigm.
In short, I ask the president to listen to the voices of reform from Central and Latin America. To hear their plea, their lament, their humanity. And then echo it on a world stage.
That would be a signal of true reform.