11 Shares 0



11

0







The United States’ War on Drugs has been a thinly veiled continuation of state-sponsored racial repression into the 20th and 21st Centuries. As Paul C. Bermanzohn at Counterpunch explains in August 2015, the “Effects of the repression are clearly racial. But, camouflaged as a “War on Drugs,” it has allowed the rulers to appear “colorblind” or race neutral – as if they are merely enforcing the law.”

War justifies almost anything. We’ve seen this time and again with the latest proof in the indiscriminate airstrike campaigns the United States is waging on Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, all loosely justified as the Global War on Terror.

Never mind that lapses in U.S. intelligence justified the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; never mind that U.S. airstrikes have killed more civilians than militants in any of the countries in which they take place; never mind that the U.S. backs repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia while it carpet bombs over 6,000 civilians in Yemen.

The rhetoric of “A War on” anything pits “us against them,” rendering the terms of engagement as a threat to survival. It is no wonder the state of Israel maintains the outlook of “Holy War” in its occupation of Palestine. As long as Palestinians or Iran are an existential threat, the means surely justify the ends (so the thinking goes).

Likewise in the U.S. War on Drugs. The use of “civil forfeiture” by police departments is a tool that incentivizes large drug busts, while also encouraging more arrests of potential drug dealers.

Officers can confiscate huge sums of money, without filing criminal charges and without proof that the money is obtained illegally, as long as there is suspicion that the money came from drug sales.

With this tactic, officers can ignore the burden of proof--a principle that guides the American justice system.

As Zachary Crockett at Priceonomics shows, “The origins of civil forfeiture are often traced back to the British Navigation Acts, a series of maritime laws created in the mid-17th century. To distinguish between trading vessels, it mandated that all ships importing or exporting goods should bear the British flag; any ship that did not do so -- regardless of whether or not it broke the law -- could be immediately seized.”

These laws remained unpopular for much of the 20th Century, until their proliferation in the 1980s due to the War on Drugs.

Cases of unjust forfeiture of assets by police have been rampant through the 1980s until today. Police departments equipped with expensive new equipment, driving forfeited cars, living in forfeited houses were not abnormal.

Speaking to Priceonomics, an ex-police officer going by the name “Paul” explained some of the uses of forfeited cash within his police department.

“To my understanding, it was set aside to buy things the department needed: new patrol cars -- those things aren’t cheap -- new monitors, riot gear. You know, stuff we needed but didn’t necessarily have a budget for. So, when this money comes in, it’s considered extra, and we treat ourselves to the basic necessities.”

The laws allow police to indiscriminately take assets from merely suspects, then use those assets to purchase equipment that then allows departments to continue its repression of communities and suspects.

And despite a crackdown by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2014, most states still have their own forfeiture laws, so the practice continues today, pretty much unimpeded.