US War on Drugs Wreaks Havoc Among Hispanics

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

Alton Lucas never thought about gardening

As a teenager, Lucas thought that basketball or music would allow him to travel the world. In the late 1980s he was the right hand of his best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, known as DJ Nabs in the hip hop environment.

Lucas, however, discovered the drugs and the business that represented their sale in the middle of the "war on drugs." Crack addict and drug dealer, he faced decades of imprisonment at a time when drug use and the violence that wreaked havoc in large cities and in poor communities of African-Americans and Latin Americans were not considered a public health issue, as is the case today with opioids.

By chance, Lucas benefited from something that few received in the midst of the crack epidemic: Treatment of his addiction, an early release and the opportunity to start again.

"To be honest, I started with this gardening thing because nobody wanted to give me work because I was in jail," Lucas said. His company Sunflower Landscaping received help from Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national non-profit organization that offers advice and education to people with criminal records who want to start a business.

Lucas was trapped in a system that sets lifelong restrictions on most people who go to prison for drug-related crimes, without thinking about their rehabilitation. They are denied employment and have little access to education and commercial loans, housing, the possession of their children, voting and possessing weapons.

It is a system that was born when Lucas was practically a baby.

50 years ago, the Richard Nixon administration declared war on drugs, without much success. Today, the United States faces an epidemic of opioid use and it is not clear if there was any winner in that battle. What there is no doubt about is that there were losers: Numbers of African Americans and Latin Americans, their families and their communities.

A basic aspect of that war was the imposition of very harsh prison sentences. That policy gave way to an increase in the prison industrial complex where millions of people, mostly minorities, were locked up who lost all hope of making the American dream a reality.

A review by the Associated Press of federal and state data indicates that, between 1975 and 2019, the prison population in the United States rose from 240,593 people to 1.430 billion. The most serious crime of one in five inmates was linked to drugs.

Racial disparity reveals the uneven impact of this war. Following the approval of harsher punishments for crimes related to crack and other drugs, the incarceration rate of African Americans increased from 600 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 1,808 per 100,000 in 2000. In the same period, the incarceration rate of Hispanics rose from 208 per 100,000 people to 615. Among whites, the increase was from 103 to 242.

Gilberto González, a retired Drug Control Administration special agent who dealt with drug trafficking in the United States, Mexico and South America, said he will never forget the day he was acclaimed by residents of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood of Los Angeles when he took drug dealers handcuffed.

"I understood the reality that the people of these neighborhoods live, their impotence, because they fear what the traffickers who control the streets, who control the neighborhood, can do with them and their children," said González, 64, who spoke of his experiences in a recently published book, "Narco Leyenda."

"We realized that, in addition to dismantling the trafficking organizations, we had to clean up the communities, help the defenseless people," he said.

The heavy-handed policy, however, has had serious consequences for people who reformed themselves. Lucas wonders what would have become of him and his family if he did not have that criminal record.

Despite his willingness and after being clean for almost 30 years, Lucas, 54, cannot pass criminal background checks every time he seeks employment. His wife says that his past prevents him from doing things as simple as accompanying his children on school trips.

"It's like a life sentence," Lucas said.

The heavy-handed policies were mostly accepted because they coincided with an increase in homicides and other violent crimes throughout the country. They were supported even by the African-American clergy and the Black Legislative Bloc.

These policies were not accompanied by programs for the prevention and treatment of addicts.

Crack consumption rose markedly between 1985 and 1989, to decline in the early 1990s, according to a Harvard study.

The sale and consumption of drugs was concentrated in cities, especially those with large communities of African-Americans and Latin Americans.

Rolandn Fryer, author of the Harvard study and professor of economics, said that the impact of the crack epidemic on a generation of black families has not yet been properly documented. He added that during this time the distrust of minorities in government institutions increased.

"People ask why blacks don't trust (public) institutions," said Fryer, who is African-American. "They don't trust because they saw how we treat the opioid epidemic, as a public health issue. But with crack, they said 'lock them up and throw away the key; what is needed is harsher sentences.'"

Lucas spent four and a half years in prison for robbing several small businesses. He says he never carried a gun. Since his crimes were considered nonviolent, he was able to avail himself of a treatment of his addiction in prison, which facilitated his release early.

Once his freedom was regained, his old friend Fowler paid out of pocket all Lucas' fines and fees, which was thus able to recover his right to vote.

Not everyone has their luck. Generally, a drug conviction, combined with some violent crime, carries much longer penalties. And at the height of the war on drugs, all the members of a gang were judged together, and they were all to blame for a homicide, no matter who pulled the trigger.

These cases generated sentences to life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, a punishment that disproportionately affected African-American and Latin American prisoners.

El Mañana