When the enemy in the war on drugs became marijuana, suddenly the enemy was everywhere. And, while it was hard to imagine your neighbor as the enemy, it was easy to imagine the community across town as the hive of the enemy.

It may seem like a stretch to claim a “narrative” played a significant role in how the Ferguson, Missouri, police force was armed and deployed in a military-styled response to community protests, but here I go.

The war on drugs isn’t just federal and local laws, police objectives and billions of dollars for training and deploying law enforcement to investigate and make arrests — it is first and most damaging a narrative.

A narrative we are all responsible for.

That narrative goes like this: Illegal drugs are manufactured and sold by bands of heavily armed, utterly lawless and desperate criminals who are invading our cities, and police are at war with this criminal element, fighting to take our cities back, block by heavily armed block.

This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children. Let there be no mistake: This stuff is poison. Some used to call drugs harmless recreation; they’re not. Drugs are a real and terribly dangerous threat to our neighborhoods, our friends, and our families. No one among us is out of harm’s way. When 4-year-olds play in playgrounds strewn with discarded hypodermic needles and crack vials, it breaks my heart. When cocaine, one of the most deadly and addictive illegal drugs, is available to school kids — school kids — it’s an outrage. And when hundreds of thousands of babies are born each year to mothers who use drugs — premature babies born desperately sick — then even the most defenseless among us are at risk.

That’s former president George Bush the elder in a 1989 speech announcing $7.9 billion in spending to fight the war and at least $2 billion to fight the war on foreign ground (remember, we invaded Panama in 1989, arrested and sent to a U.S. prison Manuel Noriega on eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering).

These sums are just the tip of the mountain of money spent over the decades of the war, BTW.

“I’m also proposing that we enlarge our criminal justice system across the board — at the local, state, and federal levels alike. We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.” — Bush

And, for sure, crack/meth/cocaine/heroin have been and are terrible drugs that destroy lives. Police officers were facing and currently face dangerous criminals engaged in making and selling these drugs, here and internationally. We hire police officers and demand that they make arrests, whether the suspects want to be arrested or not, but want also to protect police in the line of duty.

But the war on drugs escalated:

“The war on drugs will be hard-won, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, child by child,” Bush declared in his first nationally televised address from the Oval Office, according to a 1989 story on Philly.com.

Sold on crack, but got marijuana instead

This war-on-drugs narrative got stuck in our collective culture, because there’s truth in it. Movies, novels and other narrative platforms still pit officers with little handguns against drug lords packing heavy artillery.

Time and time again, we heard how our police forces were “outgunned” and needed increased firepower. And, with the help of military surpluses, our nation’s police departments have, more or less, built up a stockpile of military-grade weapons, armor and vehicles.

But where are they going to use them? How much crack cocaine is being made and distributed in the country? Too much, for sure … but really: Are there large marauding bands of crack dealers, armed to the teeth, in every neighborhood of the country?

No. But there are lots of marijuana growers, importers and dealers. There’s the easiest target for all this military hardware: Marijuana.

When the enemy in the war on drugs became marijuana, suddenly the enemy was everywhere. And, while it was hard to imagine your neighbor as the enemy, it was easy to imagine the community across town as the hive of the enemy.

And, let’s not forget, marijuana prohibition got started, to a large extent, because it was said to be brought to America by minority immigrants from south of the border. It was also heavily associated with minority, especially black, communities, which looked to the dominant, white culture at the time (early 1930s) as a foreign land.

So, marijuana arrests skyrocketed. In 2012, according to FBI statistics, marijuana arrests accounted for roughly half of all drug arrests, with 42.4 percent for possession.

“Heroin or cocaine and their derivatives”? Six percent for sale and manufacturing and 16.5 percent for possession.

Like cocaine, the narrative tells us that marijuana is associated with dangerous, marauding gangs — and they are out there to some degree. After all, the illegal trade in marijuana is so lucrative that gangs absolutely traffic in it and fund their operations with the resources. And, no doubt, they will protect their market share with violence.

But the narrative goes completely awry with marijuana because marijuana is so prevalent. Every neighborhood, every city, county and state is hip deep in marijuana. The militarized escalation of the drug war had an easy target, but a pointless one.

Despite blowing more money than a coke fiend, the UN estimated that opiate use actually increased 35 percent worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27 percent, and marijuana by 8.5 percent. — Writes RT news.

It’s now a common refrain to hear from many police and other officials that “The war on drugs is a failure.”

Nevertheless, our law enforcement policies and practices, motivated by the “war on drugs” narrative, still use all that heavy armor, bought for the war, to bust down doors, toss flash-bang grenades and aim assault rifles at an increasing rate — for primarily marijuana-related busts.

Even though paramilitary policing in the form of SWAT teams was created to deal with emergency scenarios such as hostage or barricade situations, the use of SWAT to execute search warrants in drug investigations has become commonplace and made up the overwhelming majority of incidents the ACLU reviewed —- 79 percent of the incidents the ACLU studied involved the use of a SWAT team to search a person’s home, and more than 60 percent of the cases involved searches for drugs. The use of a SWAT team to execute a search warrant essentially amounts to the use of paramilitary tactics to conduct domestic criminal investigations in searches of people’s homes.

That’s from a June 2014 ACLU report titled “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing.”

Overall, 42 percent of people impacted by a SWAT deployment to execute a search warrant were Black and 12 percent were Latino. This means that of the people impacted by deployments for warrants, at least 54 percent were minorities. Of the deployments in which all the people impacted were minorities, 68 percent were in drug cases, and 61 percent of all the people impacted by SWAT raids in drug cases were minorities. In addition, the incidents we studied revealed stark, often extreme, racial disparities in the use of SWAT locally, especially in cases involving search warrants.

The narrative of the drug war inspired the militarization of our police forces and then that war escalated against marijuana, a drug so common that it is now legal in two states. And that mission creep has extended to almost any interaction between the police and the citizens of our country.

The images coming out of Ferguson were finally so absurd and so clearly racist that America, finally, collectively, said, “Wait, WHAT!?”

(Note on video: The more relevant part gets going at around 5 minutes in.)

We have to see the narrative at play — America’s war on drugs has, like wars always do, burst out of its initial storyline to include almost any conflict between police enforcing the strict letter of the law and the rest of us.

We, you and I, have to dismantle the war on drugs narrative, remove it from the center of our social dialogue about drugs — especially about marijuana — so that we can also then begin to dismantle the military response to the call of “To Serve and Protect.”

End note on ACLU report:

This report builds on a body of existing work establishing that police militarization is indeed a problem. For example, Dr. Peter Kraska, Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, has surveyed police departments across the country on their use of SWAT teams and estimates that the number of SWAT teams in small towns grew from 20 percent in the 1980s to 80 percent in the mid-2000s, and that as of the late 1990s, almost 90 percent of larger cities had them. He also estimates that the number of SWAT raids per year grew from 3,000 in the 1980s to 45,000 in the mid-2000s.35 David Klinger and Jeff Rojek, both at the University of Missouri-St. Louis’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, conducted a study using SWAT data from 1986 to 1998 and found that the overwhelming number of SWAT deployments studied were for the purpose of executing a warrant (34,271 for warrant service, in contrast to 7,384 for a barricaded suspect and 1,180 for hostage-taking cases).

Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook.

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