Doctor Joshua Kane, the head of research at A Better Today Recovery Services and Lecturer at Arizona State University is back to continue his talk on The War on Drugs, having left of from The War on Drugs, Part 4 – The Crack Cocaine Epidemic.
Prison Population
Even though it’s the elites that are bringing in the drugs, they are not the ones going to jail for it.
“What we see is poor black and brown people going to jail disproportionately,” Kane explains.
“Blacks currently make up 13 percent of American society, and the numbers are very clear on this, [they] are also 13 percent of drug users, and drug abusers, and drug dealers. The numbers are really disproportionate … although 13 percent of drug users and abusers are black, well over 50 percent of the prison population in on drug crimes is black. You have to take a step back and ask yourself why?” Kane says.
Prison for Profit
“In the 1980 we also got the rise of the privatized prison system, led by what’s known as the Corrections Corporation of America. Now prisons became, not a way to help people or at least keep them off the streets … it became a means of profit,”
The CCA will come in and build a prison in a state and foot all of the costs, but then that prison has to meet a designated capacity or it will have to pay large amounts of penalties.
“States know ‘we need to keep this prison filled’ the main method that states all over the United States are using to keep their privatized prisons full, and the profits flowing, is The War on Drugs,” He says.
Kane explains that from the 1990s on, we have seen drug use as an epidemic that affects poor neighborhoods, and minorities.
“We ignore that drug use is all around us, in every community.”
Kane also explains that we ignore the rising police state that is a consequence of The War on Drugs.
Over 500 times a week swat teams enter people homes looking for drugs and other illegal substances.
“They break down people’s doors, sometimes the wrong doors, and abuse people and brutalize people. Why? For doing drugs.”
Kane continues to explain that nothing is going to stop drug use from happening in the U.S, or any other culture.
“But us, our citizens, we’re being hurt every day by The War on Drugs. [We’re] being brutalized, citizens of all types.”
Big Banks Money Laundering
“HSBC, a huge bank, was caught laundering billions of dollars of drug money for cartels, [it] was caught red-handed,” Kane says.
The bank had to pay a fine, but no charges were brought against anyone in the company.
“Eric Holder, the attorney general at the time, was asked why isn’t anyone going to jail and he had the nerve to say that not only is HSBC too big to fail, but [its] CEO is too big to jail.”
…continue on to The War on Drugs, Part 6 – Solutions for Addressing Drug Abuse in the U.S.
