voices
14 the georgetown voice
march 6, 2014
No solution, no end, and no hope in sight for American war on drugs by Noah Buyon We Americans love our wars. There are literal ones (The War on Terror), metaphorical ones (The War on Poverty), and downright silly ones (The War on Christmas). While we haven’t won any of these wars per se, I think the argument can be made that we’re fighting, and fighting hard. There is one exception, though. We’ve long since lost this war. As Ellis Carver of The Wire will tell you, “You can’t even call this shit a war: wars end.” Whatever you call it, the cost of defeat is unmistakable: a trillion dollars wasted, and 500,000 people imprisoned, on American soil no less. What “war,” you ask? The War on Drugs, or as The Wire’s Omar Little might term it, “the game.” Allow me to draw upon The Wire one last time. Its creator, David Simon, said of the War on Drugs: “Say it this way, because it’s more honest … ‘Let’s just get rid of the bottom 15 percent of the country. Let’s lock ‘em up.
In fact, let’s see if we can make money off of locking them up.’ … At that point, why don’t you just say, ‘Kill the poor. If we kill the poor, we’re going to be a lot better off?’ Because that’s what the Drug War has become.” Hyperbole, perhaps, but the essential point remains—that the American War on Drugs has contracted crippling mission creep. The fight is no longer about curbing the nation’s addictions. It has devolved into a cash cow for bloated law enforcement agencies and private contractors. The War on Drugs has become a $51 billion annual feeding frenzy, wherein the American justice system arrests and incarcerates a steadily increasing number of citizens in order to show progress on a stat-plot, rather than on a city street. Since Richard Nixon launched the Drug War in the 1970s, the American prison population has grown by 705 percent. In the same time, drug use has only increased. That is what failure looks like. So says the Global Commis-
sion on Drug Policy, a 22-person body that includes Kofi Annan and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker—the group’s groundbreaking 2011 report notes, “Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers, and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption.” But why? Like my Facebook relationship status, it’s complicated. Fundamentally, though, the American approach to illicit drugs closely resembles that of a medieval doctor: bleeding the nation of perceived corruption— even amputating the undesirable parts. The “producers, traffickers, and consumers” listed in the GCDP report are treated by the American justice system as a cancerous monolith that needs to be cut out, instead of as diverse groupings of sick and shattered people—most of whom are not beyond the point of salvation. Drugs and the Drug War are easy to critique, but nigh impos-
sible to solve. I don’t have the solution to what ails the addicted nation. What I’d like to address, instead, is a dangerous misconception about who it is that we’re fighting in our crusade against narcotics. Who’s to blame? A segment of the documentary The House I Live In details the experiences of Shanequa Benitez, an ex-drug dealer. She says, “Basically, [the Drug Trade] is just about survival. I feel like sometimes cops and shit [never ask] ‘Damn, was this your choice’?” Benitez lives in Yonkers, NY, in a housing project called Cromwell Towers. I live 20 minutes away, give or take. I’ve driven past Cromwell Towers. I’ve gone out to eat maybe six blocks away. I’m not trying to say, in any way, that I share in Benitez’s life, but I’m nonetheless struck, shocked, even, by our proximity. She’s alleged to be an enemy—the enemy—in the War on Drugs, and she lives the next city over. That’s not how I choose to see my neighbor. Benitez isn’t the enemy. She’s just as much a victim
of our national drug policy as the politicians who can’t afford to be perceived as being soft on crime, or the police officers who can’t afford to skip out on pay raises and promotions by not pursuing easy drug targets. When it comes to the faces of the Drug War—Shanequa Benitez, the Barksdale drug ring and Baltimore PD of The Wire, or whoever it is that siphons so much weed into New South—it is essential to remember that, good or bad, all combatants are victims of some sort. The Drug War isn’t being won by shadowy kingpins in the inner city. It’s being lost, in one way or another, by all of us. So instead of castigating our neighbors, let’s recognize that we’re all caught in the same vicious cycle when it comes to this endless war.
Noah Buyon is a freshman in the College. He prefers his favorite spicy sausage broiled to perfection and hopes to one day work at Citibank.
Middle class bears burden of unemployment and wage woes by Roey Hadar At the end of 2013, Congress tentatively agreed to extend expiring unemployment benefits immediately upon its return in 2014. They voted on Feb. 6, and the bill failed a cloture vote by a margin of 59-41. You read that right. Failed—with 59 votes out of 100. Even while the solidly Republican House of Representatives would likely not act if the bill were passed, the Senate vote was a symbolic failure, and the most
recent of many middle fingers that certain members of Congress have flipped in the direction of America’s middle class. Because 41 Senators decided to vote against cloture, millions of Americans now no longer receive the benefits they need to pay off bills, put food on their tables, or even get to job interviews. Furthermore, President Obama proposed a hike of the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, which, while it has been applied to federal contractors,
LEILA LEBRETON
Inaction by Republicans in Congress means a colder winter for those on minimum wage.
has still not been enacted in workplaces nationwide. Congress needs to get off its tail and extend unemployment benefits. The minimum wage must go up as well. Both these initiatives would provide significant boosts to the still-lagging economy, as lower- and middle-class citizens would have a few hundred more dollars every month to spend on necessities or the occasional pleasures. The Congressional Budget Office reports that the United States is missing out on 200,000 jobs that could be created in 2014 with an extension, and a report from Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee indicated that the country lost $400 million from its economy one week after benefits expired. An increase in the minimum wage would also put more money in the pockets of American consumers. A CBO report on the proposed $10.10 minimum wage shows that real income would increase by $5 billion for families under the poverty line, boost their average family income by 3 percent, and lift 900,000 people out of poverty. It is also about time the minimum wage is raised, since the last hike occurred over five years ago. Also, according to a 2012 Center for Economic and Policy Research study, the minimum wage would be over
$20 per hour if it were adjusted to keep pace with productivity from 1968 to the present day. American workers are suffering, and we have to help them. Our government has not served the people. Congress settled for one stimulus that, while slowing the economy’s freefall, did not provide the extensive job programs necessary to get people to work. After a few years of watered-down bills meant to provide at least some help to the struggling middle class, Congress was afflicted with severe polarization, sacrificing people’s livelihoods for the sake of petty political fights. Now our economy has been strangled with sequestration and tax hikes in an attempt to solve a nonexistent debt crisis. The deficit may have gone down, but the burden of the cost has fallen on the middle class because Congress ignored the economic truth that a government must spend to escape a recession even if it means raising the deficit, and then pay off the deficit when the economy is at full strength. Now we are stuck in a nearly permanent state of deficit-hawk austerity and sluggish economic growth. President Obama and Congress must act. They need to pass an unemployment benefit extension as soon as possible and then raise the minimum wage. Fortunately, the president has
proposed a 2015 budget that would increase spending on domestic programs like education, job training, and energy efficiency that can all help boost the economy and keep it strong in the years to come. Not many of us at Georgetown are directly relying on unemployment benefits, but we all know someone who is on them, whose parents are on them, or who relies on a minimum wage job. Most students here work for minimum wage or close to it. While the District is ahead of the curve on this issue with its upcoming minimum wage raise to $11.50 by 2016, those who work in Maryland, Northern Virginia, or at home over the summer will need this raise to bring in more money to be able to spend at school or to pay off student loan interest a bit early. Of course, all of this is for naught if the Republicans play their typical spoiler role and continue to block any sort of progress. We can only hope that they come to their senses, but then again, that probably won’t happen any time soon.
Roey Hadar is a freshman in the SFS. He has resorted to game-time “performances” in order pay for his Hilltop education because minimum wage won’t cut it these days.