There’s a lot of talk on the presidential campaign trail about America’s drug epidemic. GOP candidates have been incredibly forthright about the effect that it has had in their personal lives. During the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction, presidential hopeful Jeb Bush spoke candidly about his daughter’s struggles. “My daughter Noelle suffered from addiction, and like many parents facing similar situations, her mom and I struggled to help,” he said, “I never expected to see my precious daughter in jail.” Ted Cruz shared at length his sister’s battle with drugs and Carly Fiorina openly discussed the experience of losing her stepdaughter to addiction. Chris Christie also weighed in with testimonials about the effect that drug addiction has had in his inner circle. The conversation around drug addiction in this country is not a new one. What’s new is the way it’s being discussed.
The discourse has taken a decisively more compassionate tone. The hard-nosed, tough on drugs rhetoric of yesterday seems to be transitioning away from treating addiction as a criminal act punishable by imprisonment to viewing it as a disease requiring rehabilitation and treatment. This humane approach with a focus on decriminalizing addiction is a welcome one, particularly for African American and Hispanic communities that have been disproportionately targeted by zero tolerance drug enforcement policies and mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses.
As rural meth labs have become the new crack house and heroin addiction continues to plague suburban neighborhoods, the inner city SWAT raids and militarization of law enforcement notoriously associated with the “War on Drugs” are no longer appropriate measures for combating addiction. The truth is, they never were.
No one is disputing the need to change the way drug addiction is addressed in this country. What is troubling, however, is the blatant contrast in the way issues are handled once they become a white problem. This paradox is not lost on presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich who said during the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction,
“This disease knows no bounds, knows no income, knows no neighborhood; it’s everywhere,” “And sometimes I wonder how African-Americans must have felt when drugs were awash in their community and nobody watched. Now it’s in our communities, and now all of a sudden, we’ve got forums, and God bless us, but think about the struggles that other people had.”
Herein lies the problem. Although I commend Gov. Kasich who was the only candidate to acknowledge the racial disparity in the humanization of addiction, this is yet another reminder of the deeply rooted, possibly subconscious ideology that sees us as less than Americans and more as “those people.”
