On this fall’s ballot, Amendment 64 would legalize marijuana use for Colorado adults. Most Americans are confused about drug laws, believing they’re in place to protect public health, children’s in particular. We need a paradigm shift in our understanding: the main purpose of our drug laws is the persecution of minorities.

America’s first drug-prohibition laws, against opium, were enacted to persecute Chinese in America. The history of marijuana prohibition tells the same tale: the victims have been, among others, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Native-Americans and Punjabi-Americans. Further, America’s drug warriors have been vehement bigots. Harry J. Anslinger, the longtime head of the Bureau of Narcotics, infamously said, “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. . . . the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”

White House tapes show that in 1972 President Nixon adamantly refused the recommendation of his own Schafer Commission to legalize marijuana largely because, Common Sense Drug Policy reports, “the President believed many of the myths about marijuana and tied it very closely to . . . blacks, Jews and the counterculture.” Yes, since the late sixties, pot prohibition has also targeted that new ethnic kid on the block, Hippie-America. Likewise, modern crack laws target inner-city blacks. That drug laws punish minorities is not an accidental byproduct: it’s usually their raison d’etre.

Yes, drug abuse is unhealthy, sometimes fatal, but usually prohibition only makes things worse. Reporter Daniel Baum’s “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure” explains that late in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military started drug testing troops headed home; a soldier failing a marijuana test couldn’t leave Vietnam. Instead of stopping drug use, the policy led to soldiers trying heroin, which drug tests didn’t detect; this created our Sam Stone’s, returning GI’s addicted to heroin.

And of course, as with alcohol during Prohibition, the illegalization of a substance drives it into an underground economy dominated by gangsters.

And the pillar of the public-health argument (Gateway, i.e., pot smoking will lead to harder drugs) is preposterous. It’s a cause-effect fallacy which assumes that marijuana smokers become “bored” with marijuana; if that’s true, explain the continuing popularity of pot. Also, Gateway implies ever increasing heroin use as pot smokers “graduate.” Baum, however, shows that heroin-use rates have generally flattened over the last decades, and they follow the price of heroin, not the number of pot smokers.

Protect the kids? First, the best defense against youth drug abuse isn’t blanket illegalization: it’s honest drug education. Yet, today’s standard fare, DARE, promotes Gateway and parrots the most hysterical anti-marijuana “facts” such as the allegedly scientific study showing pot smoking makes young men grow breasts.

Also, intelligent drug education distinguishes between use and abuse–not everyone who consumes alcohol, for instance, is an alcoholic. Yet War on Drugs propaganda automatically deems any and all marijuana use “drug abuse.”

Kids are smart; when they’re lied to, they eventually figure it out — and then we’ve lost our credibility, our control.

More importantly, as a nation, how is it we’ve come to the conclusion that the way to protect public health is to jail masses of people, to create what one former Drug Czar calls “an American gulag?”

Who are we? What kind of society will we live in? There are two basic choices.

The first is the War on Drugs model. With its persecution of minorities, its hysterical demagoguery based in bigotry and scapegoating, its inclination towards incarceration and its tendency towards a police state, it leads to American fascism.

The other path leads to the social equality and personal freedom America has long promised. If drug prohibition masks racial and ethnic persecution, struggles against such laws are struggles for civil rights. When you see Amendment 64 on the ballot, ask yourself, Which path will America take?

Paul Dougan is a member of the Green Party; he lives in Lafayette.