© Davidson Loehr
13 May 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
READING: A Mother’s Day Proclamation
In this country, the Unitarian Julia Ward Howe was the first to try and start a Mother’s Day, back in 1870 – though it would have been a very different kind of Mother’s Day than we now have. She had lived through the Civil War. She even wrote the words for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But she saw some of the worst effects of the war: not only the death and disease, which killed and maimed the soldiers. She worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized the effects of war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war. In 1870, she was distressed at the rise of the Franco-Prussian War, distressed that war seemed to be part of the human condition rather than a one-time slip. So she called for women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted to organize a Mother’s Day for Peace, and for that she wrote the declaration which appears as responsive reading #573 in our hymnals:
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!” The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet firs, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
CENTERING:
Mother’s Day has been a national observance in this country on the second Sunday of May since 1914. And so it is Mothers’ Day:
– For mothers, whether they gave birth to the children or adopted them;
– For mothers who have lost a child, through miscarriage, abortion, adoption, or death, and who still feel the loss.
– For those who have never had children but who miss being mothers, and who are mothers in their hearts who express their nurture in other ways;
– For our own mothers, and theirs, as far back as our living memory will carry us;
– And for all who have lost their mothers, and still feel that loss.
It is Mothers’ Day. Let us remember all the varieties of mothers in all of our lives in gratitude and prayer.
And let us remember in prayer those other names, which we now speak aloud or in the silence of our hearts.
SERMON: Our War On Drugs: A Mothers’ Day Sermon
When President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother’s Day in 1914, it was a very different day than Julia Ward Howe had intended.
Today, Mother’s Day is largely celebrated with trips to a special restaurant, gifts and flowers. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Mothers — and fathers — deserve all the recognition and all the pampering they can get.
But something was lost when we lost the roots of this day in its gutsy opposition to wars that killed the children of mothers. And it is that spirit I want to honor today, by spending a little time on a war that is doing more violence, creating more crime and draining the economy faster than any other war we have going. This is our war on drugs.
On April 25th, I was invited to attend a luncheon for and speech by Judge James Gray, a Superior Court judge from California with over 20 years on the bench, who has been crusading for a fundamental overhaul of our drug laws for the past nine years. I bought his book, and also read a magazine filled with articles from others with long stints in law enforcement who also argue that, in every way imaginable, our war on drugs is even more ill-conceived and harmful than we can imagine.
America’s widespread use of cocaine began at least 115 years ago, when cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 to 1900, and Bayer Pharmaceutical Products introduced heroin in 1898, and sold it over the counter for a year before Bayer offered aspirin. Those are just interesting little facts you may not have known.
But our most famous mistakes – before the mistakes we are making in today’s war against drugs — came with the prohibition of alcohol, from 1920 to 1933. During this fourteen-year period, our country saw a huge increase in crime, violence, police and political corruption, and death from poisoned liquor. It also saw a high consumption per capita of stronger beverages like whiskey instead of weaker beverages like beer, in accordance with a cardinal rule of prohibition: there is always more money to be made in pushing the more concentrated substances. It’s cheaper and easier to transport a fifth of whiskey than a case of beer. We spent a lot of money to make strong alcohol more plentiful, more expensive, and more deadly. It wasn’t the last time we would employ this remarkable tactic.
Federal funding for law enforcement efforts against alcohol was increased over five times in the 1920s; the prison population quadrupled, with two-thirds of inmates incarcerated for alcohol and other drug offenses. However, the national murder rate increased steadily throughout alcohol prohibition. Then it decreased for eleven consecutive years after Prohibition was ended. The only phase of Prohibition that worked was when we ended it, took the federal government out of it, and let each state decide how to handle its local problems.
Marijuana was our next failure, in the 1930s. We treated it in exactly the same way, with exactly the same results, only more devastating.
We now know that one lasting effect of prohibiting marijuana was the growth of drug cartels in countries like Colombia to process and distribute not marijuana but cocaine in this country. The reason was the same as selling whiskey rather than beer: the more concentrated form was easier to conceal and transport, and far more profitable.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon formally declared that America was at war against drugs. A 1984 law increased bail and lengths of sentences for drug offenders, and also increased federal power.
In 1986 we added mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of drugs. The Crime Bill of 1994 provided for capital punishment for some types of drug selling and for mandatory sentences of 20 years to life.
Every time we have tightened up our drug laws with all of this “get tough” stuff, the harms inflicted on society by the presence of these drugs have just increased. The laws have been successful in filling our prisons with the less organized, less violent, less brilliant offenders, leaving this lucrative market to be filled by those who were more organized, more violent, and smarter. (Judge James P. Gray, Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs [Temple University Press, 2001], p. 31)
Two things are really driving this failed drug policy today: our political system, which rewards (by electing) the politicians who posture as being the “toughest on drugs” – like our newly-appointed Drug Czar – and the “runaway freight train” of federal money. The annual budget for our War on Drugs is now about $20 billion, which does not even begin to take into account all of the additional state and federal budgets for the hundreds of other programs.
What has it bought us? Some dramatic statistics, for one thing. Between 1973 and 1983, the number of state and federal prisoners in the US doubled to about 660,800; and then that number more than doubled again by 1993 to 1,408,685. We had 668 inmates for every 100,000 residents. That gave the US a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world except Russia, which reported a rate of 685. (Gray, p. 29)
There are six times more people behind bars in this country than in all twelve of the countries that make up the European Union combined, even though they have 100 million more citizens. More people are behind bars for drug offenses in the US than are incarcerated in England, France, Germany, and Japan for all crimes combined. The state of California has more people incarcerated than France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined, even though California has only about one-tenth of their combined populations. In fact, the US, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. (p. 30)
Let’s put the danger posed by illegal drugs in perspective. Over 500,000 people die in the US each year as a result of the use of legal drugs – tobacco and alcohol – while less than 10,000 die per year from the combined use of all illegal drugs. Yet someone is arrested for a marijuana offense somewhere in the US every forty-five seconds. That number is almost as high as the number of total arrests for all murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults combined (695,201 to 717,720). (p. 30)
We have made lifetime prisoners out of a nonviolent underclass of drug-using and addicted people. The average prison term for drug offenders in state prisons has increased – up 22 percent since 1986. But in the same period, average prison terms in state prisons for violent offenders have decreased by 30 percent. (p. 32)
Another result of prison overcrowding is that wardens throughout the country are routinely forced to grant an early release to violent offenders so that nonviolent drug offenders can serve their sentences in full. This is because, for the most part, federal law requires that even nonviolent drug offenders must serve their entire sentences; however, there is no such law for bank robbers, kidnappers, or other violent offenders.
Texas is number one in prison incarceration. Louisiana and Oklahoma are second and third, but we don’t have to worry about losing our Number One status for awhile. It costs taxpayers between $20,000 and $30,000 to keep just one inmate confined for a year. The average cost for a state inmate over the age of fifty-five increases to about $69,000 per year because of increased health costs. (37)
And here’s a statistic that might be interesting. After six years on the job the yearly salary of a California prison guard with a high school diploma was $45,000 in 1994. At the same time, the starting salary of a tenured University of California associate professor with a Ph.D. was $43,100. For prison guards, stiff mandatory sentences mean job security. So you won’t be surprised to learn that in the 1998 election, the association of prison guards (California Correctional Peace Officers Association [CPOA]) was the state’s number one donor to legislative races, with donations to all campaigns totaling $5.3 million. These contributions included a $100,000 donation to a group working for the passage of a tough three-strikes sentencing ballot measure. This $5 million wasn’t spent for the good of the state; it was spent to insure jobs for prison guards. The money we are spending on our drug war – while it has only made the drug problem a thousand times worse – has infected many federal and state agencies, many professions and unions, whose jobs are fueled by this money, and who therefore find reasons to support it. But they are not supporting it for the health of the country. They are supporting it for the security of their jobs and their purpose. They aren’t evil people; they’re just people, with the full helping of self-interest that most of us have.
Police are even better at catching women for drug offenses. Between 1986 and 1996, the number of women imprisoned for drug offenses increased by 888 percent, compared to an increase of 129 percent for non-drug offenses. Typically the women involved are low-level lookouts or “mules” who transport drugs for short distances either as favors for their husbands or boyfriends or for a small fee. (p. 43)
About 75% of these women prisoners are also the single parents of young children; this is Mother’s Day for them, too. But legally, these mothers have abandoned their children, who are sent to child dependency court. Even setting aside the enormous human costs, the expense to the taxpayer of keeping one child in a group home can be $5,000 per month, above and beyond the costs of incarcerating the mother. For a mother with two children, this means that about $145,000 per year of taxpayer money is spent to keep a mother separated from her children. (p. 44)
Then there is the impact of our massive prison program on ethnic minorities. In 1995, 33% of young black men in this country were either in prison, on parole or probation, a total of about 827,440 young black men in one year. The figures for Hispanic males was 12.3 percent, and for white males it was just under 7 percent. (p. 44)
What do they do in prison, besides learn how to be better criminals? Well, a lot of them take drugs. In 1998, 9% of the 1.6 million men and women behind bars tested positive for illegal drugs – drugs they obtained in prison. Even high security prisoners like Charles Manson are testing positive in prison for illicit drugs – in fact, Manson was transferred from one high security prison to another for being caught selling drugs to other inmates. (49)
We can’t keep drugs out of our maximum-security prisons. How would we ever keep them off the streets? It is easier for our children to get illegal drugs than it is for them to get alcohol. (p. 50)
Our drug laws have turned illegal drug pushing into such a high-profit industry that there will always be people willing to take the risks.
For instance, if you bring $100 worth of cocaine from Colombia to any city in the US, it will be worth between $5,000 and $10,000. That’s a return of fifty to one hundred times your investment. Where in the world could you find a cash cow like that? Police and military forces are helpless to counteract economic forces that huge. (p. 57)
According to a United Nations International Drug Council Program report, world trafficking in illegal drugs made up about 8 percent of all world trade as of 1995 – it must be higher today. That was about $440 billion of international drug transactions. Illegal drugs are a bigger business than all exports of automobiles. (p. 80)
Our drug wars guarantee there will be hundreds of millions of dollars to be made selling drugs. When there’s that much money to be made, every time we imprison another drug dealer, all we do is create a new job opportunity.
You don’t have to look to national statistics to see the complete failure of the war on drugs. You can go down to Sixth Street and see it first-hand. Or look on the front page of yesterday’s Metro & State section of the Austin American-Statesman in the story titled “Drug problem loiters near police headquarters.” Since January, our police have arrested 66 people for dealing narcotics in the area and 143 for possession. It’s the area where the 15-year-old boy was stabbed in the throat last week.
Police Commander Harold Platt, who is in charge of the officers paid to patrol the area, says crack dealers have been there as long as he can remember. But with profits like these, you can’t get the dealers off the streets. Even if you do arrest and imprison a dealer, he says, “there are six people waiting in line, trying to take over his business. You arrest somebody, you finally get them put away, and the next day, somebody else shows up.” (Austin American-Statesman, Metro & State, Saturday May 12, 2001, pp. B-1 and B-3) With 30,000 people going into the Sixth Street entertainment district each weekend, there’s just too much money to be made selling drugs that are expensive because they are illegal, are illegal because we made them illegal, because we have still not learned the lessons we had learned 70 years ago when the prohibition of alcohol ended because of exactly the same failures.
Getting “tough” on drugs also inevitably translates into getting “soft” on all other crimes, including the more violent ones. With drugs taking a priority on police, court and prison time, there just aren’t the officers, the prosecutors, the courts, or the prison cells to hold the really violent offenders.
Our drug policy has been increasing crime in our country for decades, to the extent that, according to conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr., “More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from [drug overdoses].” The cure is worse than the disease. (p. 73)
This gives insanity a bad name!
Law enforcement corruption, sparked mostly by illicit drugs, has become so chronic that the number of federal, state, and local police and law enforcement officials serving terms in federal prisons increased fivefold in four years, from 107 in 1994 to 548 in 1998 (p. 74). By now, it’s probably tenfold. (http://www.uudpr.org)
Today, when Mother’s Day is celebrated with feasts and flowers, it feels out of place to talk about wars, even wars on drugs. But think of these awful facts about our unwise, our disastrous, our murderous drug war, and then listen again to some of the words from Julia Ward Howe’s declaration written in 1870, and see how well they go together:
“Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of fears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies – Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.”
“As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women – meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, and each bearing after her own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”
Today, she speaks to women, men, and children, and I say Amen, Julia Ward Howe,
Amen!
