Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered
Research Paradigm: Analysis and Recommendations
Prepared By: Lawrence Grandpre,
Director of Research, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
Process Overview
This document offers guidance for theorizing questions related to a proposed research
project purposed to advance drug decriminalization in Maryland.
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle is a grassroots think tank in Baltimore, Maryland. Over the
past ten years, we have been engaged in community organizing and legislative advocacy work in
a variety of issues from racial consciousness in education curriculum, to advocating for police
accountability, and cannabis legalization. Additionally, our organization has pursued youth
development through policy debate instruction, research, academic conferences, consulting with
nonprofits, and public sector entities on anti-racism, public outreach, and policy advocacy. Our
organization pulls from the theory and experiences of academics and political activists from the
Black radical tradition, with a specific focus on understanding the theory and praxis of antiblackness
and the Pan African liberation struggle. This combination of experiences gives us a
unique perspective of academic analysis skills and real-world experience with advocacy and
community organizing, and it is this unique perspective that we seek to bring to this research
project on drug decriminalization in Maryland.
This document reflects the processing of various topics, specifically the analysis of drug
decriminalization. It is the result of reflecting on several questions, critiques of traditional drug
decriminalization research, discourses, and practices, and notes recommendations on how best to
pursue future research on the issue.
Close to 2000 pages of material – to include books, journal articles, media, and news
reports - have been processed for this report. Although these materials are available for
independent review, extensive quotes from these source materials are included to eliminate the
need for readers to assess the totality of the source material.
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Introduction - Beyond the “Standard Model” of the “Decriminalize Drugs” Argument
Since the 1930s, when Harry Anslinger led federal efforts to criminalize drugs through the
1937 Marijuana Tax Act, and then aggressively enforced prohibition under the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics (the precursor to the DEA), drug prohibition enforcement has been a staple of American
governance (Hari, 2016). Federal policy trickled down to state policy, claiming the harmful social
and public health impacts of drug use warrants an aggressive expansion of the “War on Drugs.”
With the notable exception of a short period in the 1970s where cannabis decriminalization was
pursued, state and federal governments have continued to enforce drug prohibition aggressively.
(Alexander, 2010). From its outset, with Anslinger conjuring fears of Mexican marijuana
intoxication, creating the threat of violence, and targeting Black jazz musicians with explicitly
racialized justification, the War on Drugs has had disproportionate impacts on racial minorities.
Despite making up approximately 30% of the nation's population, minorities make up 80% of
federal convictions on drug charges and 60% of state and local drug convictions (Drug Policy
Alliance, 2016). Despite this hyper incarceration, rates of addiction and drug crime have primarily
remained static despite the American prison population exploding by over 700% from 1970 to
2010 (Flatow, 2014). The impacts on communities of color have been expansive, and a full
accounting of the harmful effects are beyond the scope of this project.
Within the past 20 years, America's War on Drugs has faced a new development - the
expansion of a widespread “opioid epidemic” - which has swept the nation. While created by a
multitude of factors, the epidemic is largely seen as a confluence of economic malaise in broad
swaths of the country, especially Appalachia and the Southern United States; the massive
expansion of prescribed opioid-based painkillers such as Perdue Pharmaceuticals “oxycontin,” and
the availability of less expensive heroin from Mexico (Quinones, 2015). Unlike the cocaine
epidemic of the 1980s, this opioid epidemic produced a massive increase in overdose deaths,
including in white communities, which largely avoided the worst impacts (both addiction and
police crackdowns) of the cocaine panics of the 1980s and 1990s. Opioid overdose deaths have
more than quadrupled from 2000 to 2019 (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2020). Visions of
young men and women withering away under the grip of opioid addiction shocked the nation,
leading many to wonder what radical interventions were needed to address this crisis.
These historical realities create the environment for what one could call the “standard
model” of drug decriminalization. This model is an intellectual intervention to the ideological
“common sense” powering of the previously established narrative around the War on Drugs. In a
nutshell, it might sound something like the following:
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“In the face of this wave of overdose deaths, and after decades of prodding from public
health officials, harm reduction activists, and concerned citizens nationwide, there is an
increasing focus on fundamentally reconceptualizing addiction and drug policy in
America, centering on shifting the issue of drug addiction from the criminal legal system
to an approach driven by public health. The current environment of criminalizing drug use
creates a chilling effect, deterring individuals from seeking treatment and even calling the
police when someone doses from fear of being criminalized for their addiction. Moreover,
the disruption of cycling in and out of jail prevents stability in terms of employment and
housing, which is necessary for individuals to effectively recover from addiction. Rather
than serving as an essential deterrent to addiction, it creates social disruption, which is
perpetuating the addiction crisis.
As opposed to viewing drug addiction as an issue of personal moral failing, drug addiction
should be viewed as a disease, met with treatment, not incarceration. Rather than spending
tens of thousands of dollars per year incarcerating individuals who were suffering from
drug addiction, a key driver in the expansion of the prison system, putting individuals in
treatment would save millions of dollars and allow individuals to return to being
productive members of society. Drugs should thus be decriminalized, with policy
implementation to be overseen by public health professionals, addiction treatment
specialists, researchers, and community advocates, allowing for a more compassionate,
evidence-based approach to drug policy to take shape. This might include centering
addiction responses on housing, opioid replacement treatment such as methadone and
suboxone, training police and other individuals on the delivery of overdose-reversing
agents like naloxone, and replace the criminal legal system with parallel institutions
specifically designed to address addicts, such as the “deferral commissions” pioneered by
Portugal, which should be modeled in the United States.”
This is the starting point for the vast majority of research on decriminalization produced by
mainstream academic and nonprofit institutions. As such, it is essential to start at this narrative to
explore its underlying assumptions and broader political implications.
On Methodology - The Eurocentric Nature of “Scientism” and African Centered Research
Paradigms
The question of methodology is perpetually overlooked and under-theorized in the context
of research. There are assumptions as to what constitutes “quality” research claims and how it
relates to the scientific focus on quantification and ostensible research objectivity. These
prerequisites are essential before interrogating any literature base.
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While the scientific method claims to seek universal knowledge through a system of
empirical validation, in reality, the cultural assumptions of those who build scientific institutions
impede the introduction of culturally specific ways of thinking into the paradigm. Morgan State
University professor Jerome Schiele discusses this in his critique of the concept of objectivity,
writing:
“...Although qualitative methods may do a better job at eliciting in-depth aspects of an
individual's or group's interpretation of the world than quantitative methods, qualitative
methods also are restricted in their ability to know and interpret human behavior. This is
partly because most current qualitative methods, similar to quantitative methods, share the
same underlying assumptions regarding knowledge/scientific inquiry that originate from
Eurocentric culture; they are as follows:
1. Human bias and emotion should be controlled, reduced, or eliminated in human inquiry.
2. There should be separate expectations for the observer and the observed, even if their
reciprocity is acknowledged. In other words, the observer and observed are usually viewed
as separate entities, often-times with mutually exclusive roles.
3. When collecting, processing, and coding information, phenomena should be reduced to
their simplest forms (i.e. reductionism).
4. Directly observable (i.e., material) phenomena are deemed the most legitimate forms of
reality. In other words, deemphasis is placed on unseen or spiritual aspects of reality.
5. Rational, linear, and dichotomous thinking are the primary modes through which human
behavior is understood and interpreted…” (Schiele, 2000)
The forms of thought that Schiele identifies links to notions of a rational, thinking subject with
links to European philosophy from René Descartes to classical liberal philosophers like John
Locke. Before we understand the implications these specific characteristics have for research of
drug decriminalization, it is vital that we:
1. Acknowledge that these differences are real and meaningful
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2. Understand that paradigmatic analysis asks you to view the content of research through the
lens of the cultural assumptions embedded in the research framework and the institutions
which produce and support researchers.
Methodology sets the parameters for what one is capable of envisioning in their research
project. Assumptions embedded within the researcher shapes the scope of research questions and
determines which forms of data collection and evaluation are likely to be pursued. Florida State
University professor Na’im Akbar analyses this within the context of psychology, writing :
The model determines the answers of your research in that it predetermines what will be
seen when the investigation begins. The questions predetermine the answers (Clark, et als,
1976). The method determines how to look. The method, predetermined by the model
dictates how the questions are going to be answered. The method is selected as an
instrument of the pre-established model. Contrary to the usually more objective view of
research methodology the emphasis here is that the model precedes the search determined
by the qualities pursued and it is selected to identify those qualities to the exclusion of other
sets of qualities. Scientific methodology is only one such instrument of pursuit. The
modality determines the expression of implementation of what the method has identified.
Structured by a model, guided by a method, the modality becomes the particular form or
matter of expression to be determined by the research investigation. Given this progression
both the questions and answers of the research agenda are actually predetermined by the
paradigm. (Akbar, 2003).
An example from the medical world can help emphasize how these insights work in function. One
well known example of the scientific process reflecting cultural bias relates to American slavery
and the medicalization and pathologization of the agency of people of African descent by an
ostensibly “objective” scientific establishment. University of Nevada - Las Vegas professor
Harriet Washington notes that doctors often diagnosed slaves who ran away from the plantation
with the disease of drapetomania, or an irrational desire to wander or walk away from the captivity
(Washington, 2015). As a solution, slave owners distributed “prescriptions” of “10 drops of
rawhide”, or ten lashes, as well as continued infantilization of slaves to “cure” drapetomania.
Many would counter that this is a perversion of the scientific process. They would argue
that contemporary scientific research disproves the reality of biological racism, dispelling these
sorts of myths and proving the objectivity of science and the value of the methodology. The truth
of the treatment of Black people in the medical world disproves this assertion. University of Texas-
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Austin professor John Hoberman writes in his book Black and Blue that medicalized racism
against Black people continues to be pervasive and precisely reflects assumptions around Black
patients, which are linked to slavery. Black patients are often prescribed less pain medication, with
research showing this stems from an assumption among medical providers that Black patients are
more likely to abuse drugs and also that they feel less pain. 2 out of 10 doctors said they believed
Black patients have “thicker skin” than whites, a trope which links back to slavery and the belief
that Blacks had a hardier constitution and resistance to mosquito bites which made them uniquely
suited for hard labor in the South (ibid). Thus, it is the doctors, individuals who should be the most
immune from bias with their extensive scientific training, who seem to be propagating some of the
worst examples of racism. Finally, the psychological or even spiritual suffering many Black
Americans face dealing with racism is often completely ignored by medical practitioners. Medical
practitioners continue to falsely pathologize Black coping mechanisms such as overeating,
smoking, or drug use as “personal failures” needing medical intervention; instead of the
manifestations of deep historical oppression requiring more comprehensive solutions.
A more in-depth examination of Hoberman’s analysis shows that these deficits in
understanding are linked to some of the traits of eurocentric scientific study, which Schiele
isolates. As opposed to ignoring race, Hoberman found that medical programs often pursued
extremely perfunctory, individual-based discussions of racism, which stressed Schiele’s point
about checking individual bias. As a result of the failure of these programs to engage in substantive
analysis of the structural reality of racism, many doctors boiled these discussions down to
simplistic notions of not harboring explicitly negative beliefs around racial minorities. This
allowed the implicit manifestations of racism to go unchecked, as many of these medicalized
manifestations were not necessarily solely based upon negative bias by the medical professors but
also their attempts to establish patterns out of what they see as “objective” empirical observations
on patients of different races. This shows the dangers of the “reductionism” that Scheile discusses.
Moreover, it ignores a consistent factor discussed throughout Hobernman’s work - the poor
communication between Black patients and white doctors. Studies have shown doctors often
lecture to Black patients, talk more slowly to them, and show a general pattern of infantilization
or an enhanced belief that Black patients are more likely to be “non-compliant” (Hoberman, 2012,
Nittle, 2020). This shows the flaw of the Eurocentric totem of valuing seemingly objective
“empiricism.” Black patients often don’t trust white doctors, meaning they are usually not entirely
honest with them about their fears, pain, or symptoms. Black patients are less likely to complain
about pain to white doctors because they don’t trust they will understand and maybe even fear that
they are “drug-seeking” or will be seen as being improperly differential to medical authority. This
silence leads some white doctors to believe “objectively” that Blacks feel less pain because they
talk about it less than their white patients (ibid). These failures relate not only to these doctors not
having enough data, or the “science” being done incorrectly but at a fundamental level, the frame
being applied is flawed and needs to be fundamentally questioned. While this example addresses
the broader medical system, it clearly challenges the notion that shifting the structure of addiction
research from the criminal legal system to the medical system is inherently positive.
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While it is seductive to chalk these epistemic limitations up to pure human nature, research
shows the history of how these ideas of “scientific objectivity” and “universalism” mirror the
history of western imperial control. Former Hunter College professor Marimba Ani uses the
philosophy of John Stewart Mill to make a more significant point around the very concept of
“social science” as an attempt to bring the scientific method to the social world as inherently an
act of control and an effort to leverage science as a tool of power. Ani writes:
“Formidable minds were committed to the task of imparting “objectivity" and
“universality” to Western social science… For Mill the inability to predict human behavior
has nothing to do with a qualitative difference between the social and the natural or the
physical. His conclusion in this regard is not influenced by a recognition of the human
spirit, but is rather based on what he thinks is a quantitative complexity of causal factors,
but the desire to predict and to control (the uncontrollable European need to order)
compels him to apply the “scientific method“ to social phenomena. And so on the level of
theory, that is, superficially, sociology becomes, at best, a collection of insignificant
descriptive generalizations, which reflect and encourage a dehumanizing concept of
human nature, characteristic of the culture in which the discipline was created. Its
epistemological purpose is to give Europeans a feeling of intellectual control that they do
not have, in an area that they do not understand. Something else is happening here. The
ideology of progress (while on seemingly sound footing when applied to the arena of
technology), when viewed critically, reveals the ineptness of Europeans in the social,
psychological, moral and spiritual spheres. Europeans needed to be able to “prove“ to
themselves and others that they also represented the epitome of moral and social progress.
It is for this reason that the edifice of European social science was constructed. Most
importantly this “social science“ provides a vehicle for the exportation of European
ideology by giving Europeans the “right“ to speak for all people.” (Ani, 1994)
While recognizing the complexity of human beings fighting abstract science, Mills feels compelled
to apply the scientific method to social relations, an act which Ani sees as a diminution of the
human spirit and furthermore a culturally specific desire to acquire the right to speak for other
cultures through the lens of these superior “objective” social sciences. The inability to truly
capture the complexity of human social relationships in social science renders much of social
science, for Ani, “a collection of insignificant generalizations''. While this may seem harsh, one
need only look to the history of addiction studies to see how this theory may help explain what can
only be described as the morass of often contradictory and ineffective explanations for addiction
in the literature. Despite the standard model describing addiction as a disease which is ripe for
scientific management by public health professionals, the social realities of addiction have
continued to frustrate researchers attempting to apply traditional scientific methods to this
“disease”. Bruce Alexander, the Canadian addiction researcher known for his “rat park”
experiments, comments on how the social and spiritual nature of addiction frustrates attempts to
apply traditional scientific methodology to the disease, writing:
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“The mysterious transformation of ordinary people into drug addicts urgently requires
explanation. Fortunately, addiction is well suited to theoretical analysis because it refers
to a single recognisable phenomenon, whatever drug is involved, including alcohol.
Unfortunately, however, analysis of addiction is hindered by the secretiveness of addicts,
because drug addictions are socially abhorrent or illegal. People in this situation have
many reasons to lie to authorities. It is perhaps for this reason that theories of addiction
are so often drawn from research on laboratory rats, an aspect of current scholarship
that—I predict—future generations will find hilarious…
Since the 19th century, however, the conventional wisdom has consistently viewed
addiction as maladaptive and explained it with malign hidden causes like loss of will power
to ‘addictive drugs’, unconscious fixations of the libido, deficiencies in the brain reward
system, neural sensitisation to the reinforcing effects of drugs, and genes for addiction—
or some combination of these. But theories based on these hidden causes have failed to
generate either a generally believable account of addiction or anything more than
marginally effective forms of therapy. A reasonable conclusion after more than a century
of frustrated searching for the hidden underlying disorder is that it does not exist. Addiction
is, in fact, not maladaptive for growing numbers of people under the dislocating conditions
of our era. There is no underlying disorder. Although only dislocated people become
addicted, many severely dislocated people
live and die in ways that cannot be called ‘addiction’ without stretching the word too thin.
Many of them ‘get by’ by dint of admirable resolution and a little help from their friends.
Others may become depressed, suicidal, apathetic, murderous, or mentally erratic, rather
than addicted. Thus, dislocation is a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of addiction.
As psychosocial integration is a fundamental human need, and free-market society, by its
nature, produces mass dislocation at all times (not just during times of collapse), and as
addiction is the predominant way of adapting to dislocation, addiction is endemic and
spreading fast. Free-market society can no more be addiction-free than it can be free of
intense competition, income disparity, environmental destruction, unequal access to lifesaving
medical care, or dishonest business practices. There can be no ‘technical fix’ or
‘market solution’ for problems that are built into the structure of society itself. Instead,
today’s society must either modify its free-market structure enough to keep its side effects
under control or watch these side effects continue to spread.” (Alexander, Bruce, 2010).
Ani explains how social science reflects a technocentric vision of material progress, and Alexander
explains how our contemporary addiction crisis is linked to the loss of psychosocial integration
this “free market society” produces. If this is true, it is essential that we not use the scientific
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paradigms and tools created by the social sciences of a “free market society” to attempt to solve
the problems this society produces (i.e., addiction).
Alternative Methodologies - African American Research Paradigms
While the tenants of the research Schiele outlines may represent the tenants of the dominant
methodology of scientific research, it is not the only paradigm available. Here we can begin to
analyze what I call African Centered Research Paradigms. I use this specific term as it is inclusive
of multiple different ways of describing research methodologies guided by the culture, knowledge
production practices, and experiences of people of African descent. As there is diversity within
African peoples, there are multiple different Black scholars with different versions of what could
be called African Centered Research Paradigms. The goal here is not to attempt to parse one from
the other meticulously but to take a general conceptual understanding of what the paradigms bring
to the research process and what general characteristics reflect researchers using these
methodologies. One additional note on terminology, many scholars use the term “Afrocentric” to
describe these practices, including many who will be cited in this report. As this term is used
increasingly to describe the specific methods of research produced by Temple University professor
Molefi Asante and his academic disciples, we feel it is more accurate to use the term “African
Centered” to reflect the diversity of scholars beyond those directly affiliated with Asante and
Temple University.
Na’im Akbar outlines the tenants of what he calls the African American Research Paradigm
(i.e. AARP), a process where the author attempts to proceed through four distinct research phrases
to produce knowledge explicitly in the service of liberation. Akbar writes:
“The second issue of methodology is the "how" or types of research procedures that
appropriately address the model. There are four (4) general types of research which are
most relevant to an African American paradigm: (1) theoretical, (2) critique of falsification
(deconstruction) research, (3) ethnographic, and (4) heuristic (construction or
reconstruction) research.
Theoretical research is for the purpose of generating questions. Theory development grows
from self-reflective observation and the introspective analysis of ones (collective)
experiences. No data beyond ones subjective and affective appraisal of the observer's
experience are necessary. This is not unlike the procedure for the ground breaking and
paradigm-setting work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William James, B.F. Skinner and the
vast array of luminaries in all fields of social science research who never produced a
control group while laying the corner- stone for Western thought. Once a logically
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coherent and systematic theory is in place, then one elaboration may be to raise questions
that may require empirical answers. The empirical question is neither necessary nor
sufficient as evidence for the validity of theory. Considering the conspicuous absence of
introspection and self-study within the context of the appropriate worldview for African
people, then it would seem that empirical questions would be premature in the absence of
theoretical base from which to generate such questions.
Curtis Banks (1980) has identified "deconstructive" or falsification research as another
type of research. Such research is concerned with an analysis of the construct validity of
traditional research. The falsification researcher is concerned with demonstrating the
fallacy of the inferences and the methodological distortions of that traditional research.
This is a process beginning to undo the kinds of destructive inferences about African
Americans such as we have described above that emanated from traditional research.
Falsification research involves both theoretical dismantling as well as empirical rebuttal.
Ethnographic research is probably the only authentic form of empirical research that is
appropriate for this point in our scientific method of development. This approach permits
the researcher, having passed the “Relationship [Research] Index” (Sowande, 1971) to
observe black people where they are and to try fulfilling the criteria of a worker within the
African paradigm who can begin to identify those characteristics of Black people that are
most fruitful in the light of our research model. Rather than cataloging deficiencies of
Black people, the ethnographer researcher can identify those strengths and self affirmative
patterns that have facilitated our growth.
Finally, heuristic research offers the bridge to our discussion of modalities. This research
follows from the ethnographic research in that it begins to articulate culturally adaptive
styles and begins to demonstrate the benefits, which come from adapting that style. The
objective of this research is to fortify those structures that have been demonstrated to be
beneficial to the survival and advancement of Black people. If tests are to be used, what
kinds of tests would be most appropriate in identifying those qualities that have emerged
as valuable and effective for survival from the ethnographic research. (Akbar, 2003).
While named the “African American” research paradigm by Akbar, this 4 part methodology is a
good starting point for an emancipatory research methodology for individuals of any race.
Theoretical research does not take into account the existing research in the field. In contrast,
deconstruction research attempts to question the underlying assumptions behind existing research,
with an understanding that in a society structured by racism/white supremacy, no research can
extricate itself from reflecting the cultural bias of the researchers and is used in some way,
according to Ani, as a tool to help strengthen the existing system of power. Ethnographic research
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is both an attempt to account for the researcher's cultural background and potential bias, and also
an account of the cultural characteristics of the groups of people being studied. This goes beyond
a “strength-based” perspective that sees culture as a system that can help us understand how to
interpret behavior and to predict how different interventions and proposals might function.
The research index is particularly important, as it challenges notions of scientific
“objectivity”. Many scholars within the dominant scientific tradition have tried to account for the
bias of individual researchers, but, like Hoberman’s discussion on the limits of sensitivity training
of doctors, the argument is not simply that the individual researcher has some bias, but that the
process and methodology of scientific inquiry imbeds bias into the process. Schiele cites both
Akbar and Ani in his critique of the concept of objectivity, writing:
“The Afrocentric paradigm posits that since research or knowledge inquiry is a "people
made" activity, it, as with additional human creations and activities, is influenced by, and
imbued with, human values (Akbar, 1994; Asante, 1990; Semmes, 1981). These values not
only influence the process of a particular knowledge inquiry and development paradigm
but also shape the very structure and philosophical tenets that undergird the process.
Unlike the positivist/post-positivist paradigm, the Afrocentric paradigm does not posit the
superiority or hierarchy of methods. The Afrocentric paradigm rejects Kerlinger's (1979)
assertion that "procedures of science are objective—not the scientist" (p. 264), because
this exaggerates methodology's power to remove subjectivity from knowledge inquiry and
development. Methods are developed by people, and the Afrocentric paradigm contends
that all knowledge inquiry methods are subjective, reflecting the ideas about knowledge
inquiry and development held by their creators.
The Afrocentric paradigm also repudiates Popper's (1972) notion that objectivity is a
system of organized/mutual critique—that science is objective because of the willingness
of the scientist to have his or her work critiqued by colleagues. Although Popper (1969)
contends that it is rare for the social scientist to be value free, he still implies, similar to
Kerlinger, that objectivity lies in some sort of method (in his case, the critical method),
thus again separating the method from the people who create and subscribe to it. The
notion that the critical thinking method in some way suspends the scientist's values while
the scientist forms a critique is unfounded, Afrocentrically. Although the critical thinking
method appears to be value neutral because of its focus on identifying the pros and cons
of an idea, all critiques are permeated with the philosophical and ideological preferences
of the evaluator. Furthermore, critical analysis is itself a value, in that it demonstrates the
preference for a more subdued form of debate: by identifying the pros and cons of an idea
uneffusively, one is misled into believing that one's assessment of the idea is objective or
at least fair. At the core of the Afrocentric vision that knowledge inquiry and development
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are value laden is the belief that objectivity is an illusion (Akbar,1984; Ani, 1994). It is
believed to be illusionary because Afrocentricity disagrees with the notion of
objectification, the belief that the knower should, and can, emotionally detach himself or
herself from that which he or she is attempting to know—even if the targeted entities are
humans and their social environments. This, of course, nurtures the well-discussed
"subject/object" duality. From an Afrocentric viewpoint, this duality is inappropriate
because "in the pure Africanized worldview of the unity of [people] and the phenomenal
world, there is no empty perceptual space between the self and phenomena" (Dixon, 1976,
p. 70). Further, this duality fosters and reinforces a process of knowing that is sterile and
incomplete.” (Schiele, 2000).
Schiele argues the those who attempt to resurrect the notion of scientific objectivity confuse the
perceived ability to detach their emotions from research and focus on data as proof of their
objectivity, where in reality their belief that they can separate themselves from the world around
them is an illusion and fundamentally misconstrues the ability of the subject to exist outside of the
world, and other people. The idea of the thinking subject to be able to transcend the influences of
the world, to create themselves as an autonomous being of pure logic, goes back to the famous
statement of philosopher Rene Descartes “I think therefore I am.” Scholars of African descent have
often countered this view of rational, autonomous subjectivity with a notion of collective subject,
with the human subject coming into being through their reciprocal relationships with others, often
expressed through the notion of “Ubuntu” and the phrase “I am because we are”. This seemingly
academic distinction reflects a deep divide between two different systems of thought, with the
AARP challenging the researcher's ability to separate themselves from their research and forcing
them to take accountability for how their research interacts with the world.
This is important because the critical 4th stage of Akbar’s AARP, heuristic research,
suggests that research findings should be applied to make recommendations for what should be
done to materially improve conditions for the oppressed. While the dominant vision of research
views knowledge in and of itself as a laudable goal and seeks to turn research findings into grist
for the mill of scientific progress (i.e., more research), the AARP says explicitly research findings
should be used to recommend changes to the world. This is often seen as outside the scope of the
academic’s role, which is to produce knowledge that others may use to recommend political
interventions, but to be involved directly in advocating policy changes would violate scientific
notions of “objectivity.” AARP recognizes that objectivity and the notion that the researcher
should be morally separated from the applications and ramifications of their research is false and
obscures the responsibility the researcher has to use research as a tool to address the material
conditions of oppression. This is not to say emancipatory research has the trust, or capability, to
eliminate white supremacy, but that it has its own role to play in the struggle for liberation.
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Just as the dominant mode of scientific inquiry can be seen as reflecting specific cultural
traits, evaluations of research paradigms for people of African descent can be seen as reflecting
the cultural traditions of African people. This is not to say these traditions are superior to any
others, but that they have been under valued within academic institutions which have tacitly valued
research methodologies which reflect the previously discussed Eurocentric values of “objectivity’,
“reductionism”, technophilia, and subject/object dualism. In his explanation of what he calls the
Afrocentric social work research paradigm (there is diversity even amongst African Centered
Research Paradigms) Schiele contrasts a view of progressivism - the assumed notion of liberar
progress through progressive scientific method vigorously testing methodologies and data claims,
discarding the inferior ones and progressively picking the “best”, with an African centered visions
which respects the possibility of ancient wisdom and rejects the dichotomous concept of
knowledge. He writes:
“In Afrocentric social work research, tradition and consensus are key elements. Horton
(1993) maintains that knowledge development tends to be "traditionalistic" and
"consensual" within the African framework. According to Horton (1993), a traditionalistic
and consensual concept of knowledge development is one in which (1) the major precepts
of a community's knowledge are thought to have been developed and handed down by the
ancients, and (2) theorizing is carried out in a way that accentuates the commonalities,
notwithstanding differences, among diverse ideas. In contrast, a progressivistic and
competitive concept of knowledge development is one wherein (1) knowledge is seen as a
process of gradual but steady improvement (i.e., future knowledge is thought to be better
than present knowledge and present knowledge to be better than past knowledge) , and (2)
the generation and advancement of ideas takes on a competitive character in which various
theories compete aggressively to demonstrate their superiority over rival theories in
explaining and predicting social and human phenomena.
If Horton (1993) is correct about the Afrocentric paradigm's focus on tradition and
consensus in the knowledge development process, then that focus might be based on at
least three assumptions:
1. Knowledge that stands the test of time is worthy of continuation (Horton, 1993). This
adage advances the belief that much of what we need to know today about human behavior
can be found in the wisdom of the ancients. It asserts that for knowledge to be valid, it must
endure the ultimate test of time. Time is essential because it is through the repetitious use
of ideas by various groups across generations that the validity of ideas can be adequately
assessed. If ideas have been useful for past generations, it is suggested that they are, and
will be, relevant for present and future generations. This is in contrast to what Horton
(1993) refers to as the "progressivistic" feature of knowledge development in the West (i.e.,
knowledge is seen as a process of gradual but steady improvement).
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2. African ancients—especially those of the Nile Valley—are thought to have possessed
supreme wisdom because their objective was to generate knowledge that would enable
people to tap into the complete, positive potentiality given to them by the Creator (Akbar,
1994; Asante, 1990; Diop, 1991; Karenga, 1989; Van Sertima, 1989). By cultivating the
beliefs that humans have great potential to tap into the spirit and essence of the Creator
and that science should not be separated from this pursuit, the African ancients are thought
to have possessed the moral ingredients for creating a society wherein human interactions
and ideals are undergirded by mutual respect, a concern for collective well-being,
spirituality, and a striving toward excellence.
3. Each idea or theory uniquely adds to a different understanding of the totality of the
human experience. Afrocentric social work research asserts that no one theory is, or can
be, robust enough to explain all or most dimensions of social and human phenomena.
Rather, theories are conceived as uniquely different ways in which social and human
phenomena can be described and explained. They are unique in that they reflect
interpretations held by one individual or a cadre of like-minded individuals.
Each theory serves to contribute a unique piece of understanding that can be used to
construct a complete picture of social life that limits or prevents knowledge hegemony.
(Schiele, 2000).
Scheile’s analysis is essential, as it addresses an assumption that often props up around African
centered research paradigms. They do not seek to replace the hegemony of eurocentric models of
research with their own orthodoxy and perspectives, instead, the African research paradigm seeks
to balance knowledge by incorporating often overlooked aspects. This reflects another distinction
often noted between eurocentric and African centered thought systems. The eurocentric scientific
method assumes a dichotomous and competitive vision of knowledge creation, where ideas are
locked in mortal combat and through objective experimentation and analysis. The better idea wins,
and the inferior ideas are relegated to the dustbin of history. This might make some sense to
scientific inquiry in fields like astronomy, where for some questions (such as the debate between
the heliocentric or geocentric vision of the planetary system) there can only be one correct answer.
As Ani notes, applying this methodology from material sciences to the social sciences obscures
the complexity and humanity and the nature of racism that impacts our view of social sciences.
Moreover, it ignores the political implications of even so-called objective, “hard” science, such as
the heliocentric universe being attributed by many solely to the Greeks even though there is
substantial cultural intermixing between Egypt and Ancient Greece, as well as often overlooked
evidence that the heliocentric theory traces it roots to Ancient Egypt (Van Sertima, 1999). In
contrast to this, African systems of thought are often seen as diunital, seeking to unite disparate
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concepts and find the truth embedded in them rather than assume contrasting ideas are
diametrically opposed.
It is crucial, along these lines, that we delineate the critical (“deconstructive”) components
of African centered research paradigms from “critical” research paradigms produced within the
“critical theory” tradition. A vital part of the distinction is centered around the heuristic component
of the research. Rather than recognizing the contingency and power relations behind so-called
“objective” knowledge claims as an end in itself, as the Critical Theory often attempts with
rhetorical analysis, it is a materialist paradigm which seeks to undermine not only oppressive
systems but the very systems of thought which make this oppression possible. As Schiele notes:
“...the Afrocentric paradigm endeavors to foster what Foucault (1977) calls the
insurrection of subjugated knowledges. The Afrocentric paradigm is a form of knowledge
insurrection in that it challenges interpretations of people of African descent that stem from
groups who benefit from the oppression of people of African ancestry and advocates that
these interpretations emerge from the narratives of black people themselves. However,
unlike some from the postmodernist camp (see, for example,Bauman, 1992; Lyotard, 1984;
Seidman, 1994), the Afrocentric paradigm does not view the affirmation of a subjugated
group's narrative as an end in itself. The Afrocentric paradigm is materialist in that it
endeavors to validate the narratives of people of African descent not only for psychological
(i.e., self-esteem) and scientific (i.e., knowledge validation) reasons but also to change the
political and economic conditions faced by people of African descent. Knowledge
insurrection within the Afrocentric perspective defies Eurocentric universalism and strives
to abolish the material conditions and consequences of racial and cultural oppression.
Similar to those within the ranks of the Frankfurt School (see Habermas, 1971;
Horkheimer and Adorno 1994; Marcuse, 1964), the Afrocentric view of social work
research, and by extension social theory, merges social change activities with those of
knowledge inquiry and development.
Unlike the proponents of "Critical Theory," the Afrocentric paradigm does not limit its
social change activities to the elimination of a specific economic system with its
accompanying ideology, although this is important. Rather, the Afrocentric paradigm
aspires to eliminate the underlying worldview that creates the need for such an exploitative
system in the first place.
In essence, Afrocentric social work research encourages humans to become more at one
with the Creator and the universe. This "oneness with nature and God" cosmology is
thought to bring about respect and appreciation for all aspects of nature—including human
beings—both for the common aspects and the different ones, and is believed to preclude
the exploitative behavior that accompanies oppression (Schiele, 1994). In this regard,
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Afro-centric social work research generates knowledge to enhance the potential of people
and societies to behave morally and in ways congruent with the belief in the oneness of the
universe and humanity.” (Schiele, 2000).
This is important to note, as the intellectual innovations created by people of African descent are
too often seen as iterative or reflective of some previously established European theorists or
thought traditions, rather than deserving respect as a wholly unique and distinct contribution to
research.
This raises the critical point that research should not only be evaluated by its specific
claims, but also through the ideological and rhetorical justifications used to justify these claims.
These claims have serious implications from the perspective of African Centered Research
paradigms, as they impact the underlying thought systems readers take away from the research.
From the standpoint of African Centered Research paradigms, this is essential, as it implicates the
heuristic value of the study if the justifications behind the findings undermine the emancipatory
values of the recommendations. For example, an analysis of drug policy might argue that addiction
should be treated as a public health issue because Black communities are incapable of producing
alternatives to the underground economy, and thus decriminalizing drugs should reflect a realistic
approach to contemporary urban poverty. This would be seen by many as positive, as it seeks to
address the material suffering caused by hyper incarceration and addiction. However, it would
ignore that Black communities are, of course, not incapable of producing alternatives to the
underground economy, but instead politically starved of the resources needed to create these
alternatives. This replicates the previously stated fallacy of taking existing information as
“objectively” true without understanding the social, historical, and structural conditions behind
these “facts.” It also fails to accomplish the stated role of challenging the underlying assumptive
logic behind these systems of inequity, which, in this example, would be to focus on the underlying
conditions leading to addiction in under-resourced black communities and to study the positive,
productive capacities of individuals who use selling illegal drugs as a means of survival and
economic empowerment. Importantly, this does not mean that any of the negative social impacts
of addiction or violence stemming from the drug trade is ignored. Rather it suggests that the
research around drug decriminalization takes these issues into account from the lens of using the
history and culture of the people impacted by these issues into account both in terms of explaining
these issues and offering recommendations for how to address them.
This example helps show how these paradigmatic considerations are not merely questions
of fairness, but strong influences on the sorts of questions that researchers ask, the methods they
use, and the conclusion they come to. Using Akabr’s African American Research Paradigm, this
section could be seen as theoretical research and deconstructive research at a meta-level, seeking
to analyze many of the characteristics of the dominant research paradigm, expose their limitations,
present alternative research paradigms and provide examples of how they may be applied. The
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next section will seek to apply these theoretical and deconstructive research methodologies to the
specifics of the drug decriminalization literature.
Part II. Literature Review: Drug Decriminalization Analysed through an African Centered
Research Paradigm
Remembering what we have established as a frame of analysis, it is reasonable to assume
that deconstructive research can be applied specifically to the literature on drug decriminalization.
In keeping with the previously established notion of fundamentally challenging the
ideological suppositions behind policy analysis, it is essential to start a study of drug
decriminalization by analyzing how research comes to explain and understand the War on Drugs.
As previously discussed, there is a common explanation of the harms of the War On Drugs,
which is often used to justify drug decriminalization. Understanding the cultural biases embedded
in these explanations, the limitations of how these narratives are produced is essential to find where
an emancipatory research project could add new and productive insights to the literature.
A Synopsis of the “Standard model” on explaining the harm of the War on Drugs is
reflected in the joint Human Rights Watch Report entitled “Every 25 Seconds”:
“Every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of
possessing drugs for their personal use, just as Neal and Nicole were. Around the country,
police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other crime.
And despite officials’ claims that drug laws are meant to curb drug sales, four times as
many people are arrested for possessing drugs as are arrested for selling them.
As a result of these arrests, on any given day at least 137,000 men and women are behind
bars in the United States for drug possession, some 48,000 of them in state prisons and
89,000 in jails, most of the latter in pretrial detention. Each day, tens of thousands more
are convicted, cycle through jails and prisons, and spend extended periods on probation
and parole, often burdened with crippling debt from court-imposed fines and fees. Their
criminal records lock them out of jobs, housing, education, welfare assistance, voting, and
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much more, and subject them to discrimination and stigma. The cost to them and to their
families and communities, as well as to the taxpayer, is devastating. Those impacted are
disproportionately communities of color and the poor.” (Human Rights Watch, 2016).
Here we can use the findings of our theoretical research to understand the logic behind why the
writers of this report believe this framing would be persuasive to its audience. First, they claim
that our enforcement system is excessive, with an extreme focus on arrest and conviction (every
25 seconds). This appeals to the reader's sense of rationality and logic: even if drugs were a
problem, isn’t the idea of someone being arrested every 25 seconds too much? There is a definite
appeal to the reader's sense of being able to evaluate risks rationally and judge the dangers of drug
use are outweighed by the dangers of hyper-incarceration. It appeals to a reader who might view
quantification as a critical part of the persuasive argument and dedicates substantial space to
providing the reader with the statistics on incarceration. Similarly, why hyper incarceration is seen
as wrong is framed through the lens of individual liberty. While harms to the community are
mentioned, the primary focus is on the harm to the individual, including debt and denial of critical
resources. This can be read as attempting to establish empathy with the reader, asking them to
imagine being cut off from all these essential services and subjecting them to discrimination and
stigma. Finally, the reader is told this hyper-incarceration does not work and is even causing harm
to the reader by not deterring drug sales and wasting valuable tax money. The reader is thus tacitly
posited as a taxpayer who wonders why their resources are spent on a policy that clearly does not
work and causes so much harm.
Now that we have analyzed some of the underlying assumptions behind the “standard
model” of interpreting the harm of the War On Drugs, we can begin to apply a critical lens to this
argument. First, we can question the focus on the individual. As previously expressed in the
discussion of the distinction between the individual rational “cogito” subject versus the collective
“ubuntu” subject of African centered thought, focusing on the personal impacts of the War On
Drugs risks obscuring its collective implications. Consequently, a larger, historical understanding
of the War On Drugs stems from a desire to control specific racialized populations. Todd Clear in
book Imprisoning Community denotes how targeted hyper-incarceration, primarily driven by the
War on Drugs, has undermined the capacity of communities to develop civil society institutions
that could create meaningful alternatives to the street economy. This creates conditions for more
crime, thus more policing, further undermining community civil society institutions. Hyperincarceration
doesn't just hurt people; it locks entire communities into cycles of violence which
secure in perpetual violence, a perspective which risks being obscured with a focus on individual
liberty. Moreover, the specific form of liberty used in the standard narrative reflects a “negative”
view of freedom. Negative freedom, freedom from government constraint of individual behavior,
is often contrasted with a “positive” view of liberty, as in establishing an affirmative right for
individuals and communities to have the resources they need to flourish and the autonomy to
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decide how to use them for themselves. While the Human Rights Watch would seem to affirm a
more positive view of freedom discussing the denial of critical social services, it does not establish
a positive right to be free from hunger, poverty, or miseducation. It merely suggests inclusion into
existing institutions which themselves are woefully inadequate. This is a critical bit of ideological
work, where even the ostensibly radical position of decriminalizing drugs ultimately affirms the
right of individuals to not have drug use exclude them from the current political order. But it fails
to inherently seek to challenge the existing order. It furthers an inability to create conditions of
positive freedom, human rights, and self-determination for oppressed individuals and
communities.
Finally, the core assumption behind the narrative on the harm of the War on Drugs assumes
that the reader will be able to use a rational, objective critique of the excesses of hyper incarceration
to make political change. This implies that the core assumptions guiding the construction of the
contemporary War on Drugs are a rational desire to address the perceived dangers of drug use,
which has simply spiraled out of control due to the ignorance of voters and lawmakers. Scholars
of the War on Drugs challenge this notion, explaining that it is not merely that the War on Drugs
was inaugurated and supported by racist assumptions, but rather that drugs serve a critical social
function at the core of affirming the very civilization project of the West. In a Western society
which prioritizes rational as the condition of possibility for the community, scholars have argued
that the fear of drug intoxication reflects a concern of the “rational” west reverting society to a
violent “state of nature,” with irrational, racialized “others'' threatening the very fabric of civilized
society. This concept fundamentally challenges much of the assumptive logic of the research on
the War on Drugs and drug decriminalization. It will be foundational in setting racism and antiblackness
at the core of this paper’s subsequent finding. Birkbeck School of Law professor Kojo
Karam is quoted at length in attempting to provide context for this argument:
“To appreciate the social function of the concept of drugs helps us to understand the moral
panic that they engender and why their prohibition often takes the form of reinforcing the
old colour line now ostensibly discredited within liberal political discourse. Drugs are not
seen as mere plant life in the manner that they appear in nature, nor are they seen as
commodities, as natural resources to be exploited for capitalist gain. Drugs are instead
discursively produced as ‘transgressive substances’, elements of the natural world that can
call upon the negation of the characteristics that define ‘humanity’. As Desmond
Manderson argues, the fear of drugs is not merely the fear of the substances themselves;
rather, ‘what lies beneath is undoubtedly a fear of contamination’, a fear of the failed state
of humanity they are commonly read as bringing about. Drugs are taken to facilitate
movement between different states of being, transferring consumers from the realm of the
human to the non- human. The contemporary conceptualization of drugs takes much from
the classical notion of pharmakon, which Derrida recovers to describe the discursive
process for how difference is produced. The pharmakon facilitates ‘the movement and the
play … (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.)’
threatening any notion of ‘internal purity and security’ within a social order. Furthermore,
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unlike the nineteenth-century notion of scientific racism, drugs are not presumed to impact
only those who are afflicted; a key element to grasp in order to appreciate the fear that
underwrites drug prohibition is to understand that prohibitionists see a mimetic or
contagious power within drugs. The fear that drugs might consume the subject who
themselves sought to consume the drug is not only a fear of the damage drugs might cause
to that specific consumer but that this damage will spread amongst the other members of
the community. The fear of these drugs is that they threaten the stability of the social order
as a whole, functioning as what Stanley Cohen termed as the societal folk-devil, spreading
the addiction amongst the whole community. David Courtwright states that ‘absent the
idea of addiction, the whole system of controlling drug supply that has developed over the
last two centuries would make little moral or practical sense.’ I would add to this that an
understanding of the fear that drug addiction causes, and importantly spreads, the
denigration of an idealized figure of the human is necessary to understand why the drug
laws have persisted despite the devastation they have brought upon already oppressed
peoples. Early drug prohibition campaigns in the US at the start of the twentieth century
found much of their success through equating particular drugs with particular groups of
racial others – opium with Chinese labourers, marijuana with Mexican migrants, etc. The
US’s earliest recorded drug law, the 1875 City Ordinance Against Opium Dens passed in
San Francisco, was a law produced on ‘strictly ethnic grounds’, aimed against ‘Chinese
immigrants’ practice of smoking opium’ and fuelled by a popular media obsessed with
‘images of “yellow fiends” debauching white women and the youth of the nation’.
Particularly relevant is the way in which the threat of these drugs was seen as not merely
contained to the communities of the racial others, the real danger was how they could spill
out into White communities. In short, drugs as ‘transgressive substances’ are read as
having the power to transform even the most rational, autonomous, enlightened and
sovereign European ‘man’ into the lazy, violent, depraved figure of the sub-human. The
correlative response to this fear is the aim of expelling these ‘drugs’ from the collective
social order, along with those who might be addicted or particularly susceptible to an
addiction to these substances. The metaphysical quality read into drugs is easily
transferred into the very material bodies of those already traditionally constructed as being
a threat to the boundaries of humanity: racially othered populations.
Sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard adds a further element to this argument
with his own reading of how indebted the fear of ‘drugs’ is to a Weberian conception of
the economic and social good in western society. For Baudrillard, the West arrogates onto
itself a specific capacity for delayed gratification and it is this capacity taken to underlie
presumptions of civilization. The condemnation of drugs therefore functions as a stand-in
for the fear of the threat of the loss of that capacity for delayed gratification, the defeat of
reason and the will, at the hand of the appetite in Aristotelian terms. Baudrillard argues
that ‘traces of this long-standing condemnation linger on in our own vision of modern
drugs and of the occult power they derive from their ancient symbolic virtues.’ As opposed
to the ‘evil’ of drug addiction residing in the drug itself and infecting western modernity
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from the outside, Baudrillard shows us how the ‘evil’ is instead a consequence of the very
logic of the system, of the excessive logic and rationality of a system – in this case society
in the Industrialized countries – which, having reached a certain level of saturation,
secretes antibodies which express its internal diseases, its strange malfunctions, its
unforeseeable and incurable breakdowns.
Within the discourse of European modernity, where the social relations between subjects
is presumed to be fully secularized and consequently solely mediated through mutual
recognition of each other’s humanity, the fear has been that ‘drug use threatens the social
bond’ and summons up the spectre of the sub-human that persists within.” (Karam, 2019).
The implications of this theory cannot be overstated. If Karam is correct, then many in society
don’t see incarceration of drug users as a waste of tax revenue, but rather as productive investment
in societal stability. Excluding the drug user from the realm of the rational precludes analysis of
“evidence-based” drug treatment from being seen as a productive alternative to incarceration;
addicts are not seen as sensible individuals capable of taking advantage of new services, but their
addiction itself is seen as excluding them from the community of the rational. Ironically, this
obsession with rationality is in itself irrational, suffused with racialized assumption around the
Black/Brown others fundamental irrationality being expressed through intoxication. The racial
disparities of the War on Drugs are not a “bug” in the criminal legal system, they very much are a
feature, where Black and Brown drug users are seen as needing to be contained, lest their deviant
cultural traits spread to the broader white community.
Some would counter that the recent turn in research toward more compassionate views of
drug users refutes Karam’s analysis. Here it is essential to remember Schiele’s discussions around
the importance of thinking in diunital, rather than dichotomous patterns. Indeed, many have
viewed the increasing interest in “public health” approaches to addictions as explicitly reflective
of a racialized trend in addiction treatment, with the rise of opioid addiction in white communities
being seen as the impetus for this shift. Netherland and Hansen argue it is an explicitly racialized
fear of “wasted whiteness” with the contagion of addiction impugning white subjects' ability to
productive neoliberal citizens as responsible for this shift. That explicitly notes a romanticized
view of Whites in Appalachian Maryland as worthy of compassion because of their “hard lives of
manual labor.” The ideological justification behind this shift makes their analysis particularly
crucial for this project, as they write:
“...Alcoff, for instance, argues that “White supremacy is itself incoherent and can manifest
itself quite differently depending on historical periods and social groups” (2015: 15).
Representations of drugs and the people who use them are influenced by the complex
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intersections of class- and race-based disadvantage (Pruitt 2015). White drug users who
are disparaged appear linked primarily to rural poverty. Abuse of prescription opioids first
surfaced in rural Maine, Maryland, and then Appalachia among the rural poor, likely
because the isolation made prescription opioids more accessible than street drugs and
because of a high prevalence of pain syndromes related, in part, to “hard lives of manual
labor” (Inciardi and Cicero 2009: 106; Tunnell 2004). Known as “hillbilly heroin,” the
use of oxycontin in rural Appalachia was linked with crime by local law enforcement and
politicians despite the fact that crime rates did not increase (Tunnell 2004, 2005). Several
studies of methamphetamine have rooted the construction of that drug as white in the
growing economic and class insecurities of rural whites. Garriott (2011, 2013) argues that
meth production and use grew in rural communities for a number of reasons, including the
need to supplement income in areas where jobs are scarce and low wage and to help
workers in monotonous, repetitive jobs (like the poultry industry) perform better. Even
within class, there are important distinctions to be made between rural, suburban, and
urban Whites (Pruitt 2011). Beori and colleagues, in their study of suburban meth users,
found that many had been introduced to meth as a means of enhancing their performance
and productivity at work and “maintaining a suburban lifestyle (2009: 14). Adderall, a
stimulant very similar to methamphetamine, is routinely used by students to perform better
on tests with little stigma attached to its use (Hanson et al 2013)..
The stories of the deaths of white people are considered tragic in part because of the
underlying assumption of promise and privilege lost. If affluence is a constitutive element
of whiteness (Pruitt 2015), then the loss of that affluence (whether realized or aspirational)
is tragic. Because of drugs, people normally expected to be “productive” cannot fulfill
obligations and expectations (a neoliberal) society has for them. As Lane DeGregory of
the Tampa Bay Times notes, with the increasing opioid crisis in white communities: “Hard
workers can no longer hold jobs. Smart students drop out. Good moms neglect their kids,
drain their bank accounts, steal from family members (2011).” Part of the implied tragedy
is that of squandered whiteness and a system of advantages to which black and Latino
people have limited access. The ways that this systemic advantage is built on racial
inequality goes unflagged. Nor do these accounts of white opioid use mention the criminal
justice system that disproportionately disciplines blacks and Latinos.
In addition to efforts to differentiate and make exceptional white opioid use by treating it
as novel and explaining its causes in ways that humanize the white drug user, whiteness is
also maintained by shoring up the geographic boundaries between white and black or
Latino communities. Whiteness is always being reinterpreted and subject to internal
contestation (Alcoff 2015). Right now whiteness is under particular threat as
demographers and the U.S. census bureau are predicting that between 2042 and 2050
whites will no longer be a majority in the U.S. (Alcoff 2015). In the face of such a “threat”
and the increasing porosity of the boundaries between racial groups, the maintenance of
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geographic boundaries between Black and white becomes ever more imperative for those
wishing to maintain white racial dominance.
This geographic separation is evident in reports of increases in suburban heroin use as a
consequence of tightened restrictions on opioid prescribing leading to dwindling
prescription opioid supplies (NIDA, 2014). As one paper from Fargo put it: “That's a
direct conduit... They were using diverted pain meds, then the price for too high. Some
switched to heroin (Nowatzki and Benshoof 2011).” In our analysis, we found that the
transition from prescription drugs to heroin is often couched in a theme of contagion – that
is, the transition from prescription pills to heroin is leading to a mixing of suburban and
urban drugs and drug users. For example, a Chicago Daily Herald article reported:
“Suburban teens who fall into the trap of heroin use often drive to West Side...to buy the
drug” (Daily Herald 2001).
White people searching for drugs in urban areas are not only crossing geographic
boundaries, they are crossing boundaries that lead them from the imagined safety of the
suburban and rural white community and exposing themselves to the violence that
supposedly characterizes the inner city drug markets. As Elijah Anderson points out, white
and black spaces are perceived as distinctive, and black spaces are seen as dangerous by
many whites: “[f]or the larger society, from the nightly news and media reports of rampant
black-on-black crime ... images of the black ghetto loom large” (2015: p.13). In addition,
the contagion runs both ways. Just as white people are portrayed as seeking drugs in urban
areas, so too drug dealers from urban areas are portrayed as infiltrating white
communities. As this account from Madison, Wisconsin explains:
[T]he drug is being transported by street gangs and drug trafficking
organizations along the interstate system from Chicago. Communities from
the state line to the Fox River valley, and through the east side of the state
from Milwaukee on south, have been inundated with the drug [Elbow 2011]
The problem being described here is the breakdown of the segregation between white,
supposedly drug-free, non-violent communities and black and Latino supposedly drugfilled,
violent communities. This threat of miscegenation logically calls for reinforcement
of the social-geographic boundaries between white and black or brown neighborhoods,
symbolically undergirding disparate policy responses.” (Netherland and Hansen, 2016).
This analysis contextualizes the quote explicitly from the Human Rights Watch around the tragedy
of the War on Drug being seen in the exclusion from social services, which were never sufficient
for racialized populations. But for White America, this exclusion marks an explicit “squandering”
of “whiteness.” Moreover, their analysis of the racialization of the concept of “contagion”
implicates public health methodologies as themselves reflecting racialized logics of “containment”
in service of “racial dominance” and reflective of racial anxieties around miscegenation. This is
important for researchers, as even research projects which use a public health frame for addiction
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in service of humanism and “good science” risk being redeployed by those seeking to protect
whiteness from the racialized “fall from whiteness” that is addiction.
The analysis of Karam, Neatherland and Hansen reflects much of what has previously been
stated around the importance of challenging eurocentric norms around how to evaluate data and
pursue research. His analysis of the fear of intoxication as reflective of a fear of spiritual
“possession” validates Schiele and Akbar’s interpretation of the importance of an understanding
of cultural psychology and incorporating “spirituality” into an analysis of law and so-called
“objective” research. It also reflects the necessity of viewing culture as a real, material force that
must be taken into account in order to understand the policy. At the same time, rationality and
critical thinking may be universal, the idea that a rational individual capable of delaying
gratification and holding onto their rational objective faculties is so essential to this society’s view
of safety. Those who are deemed to not reflect these ideas deserve violent exclusion from society.
Additionally, social control is a characteristic specific to Western cultures under modern
imperialism and anti-Black violence, and this must be taken into account in order to understand
the evolution of drug policy. Finally, it challenges the positivistic and progressive notions that
underlie many assumptions behind research and the scientific method. Rather than research almost
axiomatically being better by applying the scientific method to problems, research risks becoming
a tool that furthers the cultural project of policing boundaries of the rational and irrational.
Researchers position themselves as exemplars of rationality and relegate those who disagree with
them as absurd “others.” Thus, research should be pursued with appropriate levels of humility and
care.
This analysis allows us to return to the “standard model” drug decriminalization argument
and further interrogate its assumptions, now with a specific focus on the “decriminalization”
portion of the argument. Decriminalization is seen as essential to control dangerous diseases, and
presents Portugal’s model as an alternative which creates social benefits for everyone, even the
police. Domolawski writes:
“Responding to drug use and possession with the tools of law enforcement means that
public health suffers. Drug dependencies largely go untreated; inside most prisons there
is no access to needle exchange, opiate substitution or other treatments. HIV and Hepatitis
C spread easily. Large numbers of inmates take up drug use in prison, and many overdose
shortly after release. Prison is simply not the answer to drug use and minor drug-related
offenses. We need to find a better, more humane response.
The basis for this response can be found in a growing international movement led
by scientists, health practitioners, drug users, policymakers, and law enforcement officials
who are committed to effective, enduring, and humane solutions to the challenges of drug
use. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, whose members include four past presidents,
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a former UN Secretary General, and a Nobel Laureate, launched a report in June 2011
that condemns the war on drugs and calls for governments to seriously consider
alternatives such as decriminalization. The Lancet, a renowned British medical journal
published a special issue in July 2010 to address the problem of HIV among drug users.
The 2010 Vienna Declaration, signed by the heads of UNAIDS and the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, bears 20,000 signatures in support of drug
policies that are rooted in science. A global campaign led by AVAAZ—End the War on
Drugs—gathered over 600,000 signatures.”
Surprisingly, Portugal—a small country known for its conservative values, strong
Catholic tradition, and recent emergence as a democracy—has become an international
model for drug policy reform. In a dramatic departure from the norm, Portugal
decriminalized drug possession in 2000. By moving the matter of personal possession
entirely out of the realm of law enforcement and into that of public health, Portugal has
given the world a powerful example of how a national drug policy can work to everyone’s
benefit. In the past decade, Portugal has seen a significant drop in new HIV infections and
drug-related deaths.
Instead of languishing in prison cells, drug dependent individuals in Portugal now receive
effective treatment and compassionate programs that integrate them back into society.
Even law enforcement has benefited, as police officers are now free to focus on intercepting
large-scale trafficking and uncovering international networks of smugglers. As a result,
public safety has increased.” (Domosławski, 2011).
With an understanding of epistemology and the cultural context behind research paradigms, we
can apply the same scrutiny to this statement around the advocacy of drug decriminalization, just
as was pursued around explanations on the harms of the War on Drugs. Again, rather than a
political ethic based upon solidarity and examination of racialized moral panic behind fear of
intoxication, the report uses the language of public health to justify decriminalization. First, it
raises the specter of disease spread, assuming a universal conception of either self preservation
(protecting the larger public from dangerous diseases) or human empathy around the pain of
suffering from disease will convince the reader on the value of decriminalization. An
understanding of Karam’s analysis casts doubt upon this assumption, as it is equally likely that
those reading the text may citge fear disease spread among drug users as reason to keep them
incarcerated, and view their suffering as necessary to create a incentive for individuals to “hit
bottom” and free themselves from their drug addiction. In the extreme, one could imagine, as was
argue in the mist of harm reduction debates in Vancouver, canada, that lawmakers will view
increase overdose rates as a social good, arguing that if enough drugs addicts die there would be
no one left to overdose, thus solving the overdose epidemic (Lupick, 2018).
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Moreover, the frame of the decriminalization argument, which centers public health, locks
in a politics of scientific expertise which itself reflects a focus on “objective”, quantitative science,
a spiritual reasoning critiqued in Part I. The quote from Domosławski cites numerous international
treaties, Nobel Laureates, and prominent non profit institutions. This can be read as an attempt to
launder a seemingly radical idea of drug decriminalization through borrowing the institutional
credibility of these institutions. While understandable as a tactic, this process has limitations as it
limits the frame for the forms of evidence that are “admissible” under this frame. Rather than
expanding the discursive framework to allow “subjugated knowledge” to come to the fore, as
Schiele states, the report seeks to recenter the reader within dominant notions of scientific
respectability. This creates a premium on truth claims which meet the characteristics of eurocentric
research outlined by Schiele - reductive, quantitative, centered on visual analysis of the discrete
phenomenon, rather than the more spiritual and comprehensive forms of research advocated by
the African Centered Research Paradigms. More directly, the report isolates a political theory of
change, which can be seen as stemming from the assumptions guiding the research. The report
argues explicitly that the decriminalization movement is being led by a coalition of “ scientists,
health practitioners, drug users, policymakers, and law enforcement officials.” The idea that drug
users and law enforcement officers could be locked in an antagonistic relationship, or a relationship
drought with centuries of racialized violence, is completely absent from the analysis. Pointedly, it
ignores the public safety risks that continue to justify racialized violence even in the face of an
attempted shift to public health.
It might be more precise to say it assumes what public health is for whites is what it would
be for racial minorities, despite the continuous realizations that for racialized minorities public
health itself has been used as a tool for racialized social control. Rail and Jette use the concept of
“biocitizenship” to frame how public health discourses are deployed to justify racialized visions
of “unworthy” biological subjects unable to effectively manage their health through proper
internalization of discipline; and thus, need experts to inculcate proper biological morality into
them for their own good. They write:
Biomorality thus corresponds to the moral demand to be happy and healthy. Biomorality
engenders biocitizens. Following Foucault, Rose and Novas (2005) argue that biocitizens
are “made up” from above (by medical and legal authorities, public health professionals,
insurance companies, etc.), but they also make themselves. Active biocitizens inform
themselves and live responsibly, adjusting lifestyle and all areas of their physical and
social environments so as to maximize health. But those who made up biocitizens and
virtuous sub-populations also contrast them to dangerous Others. These are the weakwilled,
the lazy, the amoral, the unruly, those who do not live responsibly and engage in
“risky” behavior or do not get involved in preventive behavior, in brief, those who are
“made up” as domestic bioterrorists who exploit the tax-supported institutions that
produce health and well-being. We call these individuals “bio-Others” (Rail, 2011) as the
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health imperative seems to justify them being robbed of their full citizenship. Bio-Others
are dangerously undisciplined and in great need of policing. Given the ambient
biomorality, coercion to leave the company of bio-Others and join that of biocitizens takes
many forms, including surveillance, marginalization, abjection, public blaming, digital
bullying, police brutality, and economic discrimination and exploitation. In Western
societies, history shows how many social groups have been designated as the
contaminating “Other” against which public health measures were undertaken (Peterson
& Lupton, 1996). At one point or another and in many countries, the working classes,
Indigenous people, immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, disabled individuals, and non-
Europeans have all been the target of biopolitical projects that we now regard as classist,
xeno-phobic, sexist, homophobic, ableist, racist, colonialist, and/or genocidal. (Rail and
Jette, 2015).
While some will be tempted to see these as artifacts of a problematic but long conquered past, Rail
and Jette see this obsession with biocitizenship replicated in the various “savior” missions pursued
under the guise of inculcated public health for various “Bio-Others.” Using post-structural
analysis and theories of Michel Foucault, they present a comprehensive critique of seemingly
benevolent public health interventions which deserve to be quoted at length, writing:
Today, in neoliberal societies, all of these projects are still on-going, but with the
advent of biomorality and phenomena such as genomics, securitization, age-ism,
Islamophobia, and transphobia, many more bio-Others are being “made up.” Public
health discourses, in particular, have performative powers and often produce the illnesses
that they describe, as well as construct social identities for those who are not well.
Everywhere, the “white” individual is used as a reference point against which bio-Others
are measured and contrasted.
**Rescue Missions to Save Bio-Others Rescue missions are trendy. Popular media are
thirsty for stories of White men saving Others. Reviving the spirit of 19 th century
philanthropists, many biomoralists seek to reach out from their own perfectly constructed
world. Public health officials are equally adept at designing programs aimed at saving
the degraded and abject. Many rescue missions are weapons of mass conviction but are
couched in humanitarian rhetoric that renders them palatable. Such missions are designed
to save Bio-Others and take many forms.
**Provisionist. The provisionist mission consists in asking bio-Others what they need and
then attempting to give it to them. The mission occludes social structure and implies that
Bio-Others are unwell because they lack something quite basic to attain or maintain their
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wellbeing (e.g., a green area in their neighborhood, access to nutritious food, a soccer
ball, an antidepressant, a gym pass). In theory, providing bio-Others with what they lack
will save them.
**Culturalist. This approach similarly erases social, economic, and political factors. In
theory, it encourages those in the health and wellness business to play a role by
establishing trust with bio-Others and intervening in a way that is culturally sensitive. If
culture is the problem, it can also be the solution. Examples of this type of mission abound
in Canada and the United States where federal programs to restore the health of
Aboriginal people involve a return to traditions including hunting, fishing, harvesting
traditional foods, dancing, and playing games. Here, interventions are performative in that
they produce the “Aboriginals” that they describe on the basis of cultural relics previously
wiped out by colonization.
**Biopedagogical. This type of mission does not question patriarchal or colonial
hierarchies either. Being taught to be well is often similar to being told to be well. Current
biopedagogical missions work on the premise tha the bio-Other has a unified self and a
fixed subject position. It assumes that, for such a subject, knowledge necessarily leads to
desired behavior and therefore that, as this subject becomes more informed about health
and how to attain it, he or she will behave in ways that lead to such health. The
biopedagogical approach draws upon a neoliberal notion of individualism that positions
the bio-Other as capable of, and responsible for, changing his or her lifestyle and therefore
in effecting his or her health. Underlying notions of “Buying Green” and “Going Organic”
or shows such as the Biggest Loser or Jamie Oliver’s Kitchen is the belief that a set of
historical, social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic issues can be put aside
in favor of a simple intervention meant to teach folks how to live life the “right way.”
**Participatory. Against the background of the health imperative, many experts have spent
time exploring ways to engage bio-Others. With this fourth type of mission, bio-Others are
encouraged to partake in decision-making processes leading to predefined objectives
related to health. Many feminists have drawn attention to the limitations of a conception
of participation that implicitly excludes women or certain women (e.g., poor, less educated,
racialized, queer, disabled, and so on). Other authors lament the fact that participatory
models almost always involve a hierarchy of knowledge where expert knowledge is
considered superior to non-expert knowledge.
Participatory missions also involve a “community” of bio-Others in need of saving, but
there is often a reification of this “community.” Indeed, the concept of “community” means
a shared identity of interest among some people, but there is little recognition of other
shared experiences linked to health status, cis status, size, class, race, ability, and so on
that intersect or conflict with place-based identities (Peterson & Lupton, 1996). Missions
that involve community participation (e.g., to change the food landscape in an area or to
reduce sedentary living or to decrease drug use or alcoholism) call upon bio-Others to
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discipline themselves in conformity with the collectively decided activities and to utilize
their agency in fulfillment of pre-set health objectives. Involvement in such a decisionmaking
process and chosen activities presupposes willingness, and an entire range of
personal attributes, skills, attitudes, and commitments.
**Empowering. The last type of mission focuses on empowerment. Unfortunately,
empowerment has been co-opted by neoliberal managerial discourses. While at some
point, it was associated to critically analyzing, resisting, and challenging structures of
power that create wellbeing for the few and misery for the masses, it has been recuperated
to mean that a benevolent, humanitarian agent of empowerment works to help people
develop capacities to act successfully within the existing system. Attempts to empower
marginalized bio-Others via a neoliberal variety of empowerment mission may be
regarded as one more way of defining, regulating, and normalizing bio-Others. It is reliant
upon the use of strategies that position bio-Others as acting of their own free will and in
their own interests to reach or protect their own health, guided by agents of empowerment
possessing rationality and expert knowledge. But, who is positioned to empower? How are
empowerment and humanitarian missions historically embedded? And what are some of
their foreseen and unforeseen consequences? What does an anti-racist and anti-colonial
lens reveal about past and present empowerment interventions? What are the paradoxical
relationships between humanitarism and imperialism? And what are the equally
paradoxical relationships between empowerment and status quo?
In the end, all five types of rescue missions insist that bio-Others “do it” by themselves and
for themselves. Such insistence on personal responsibility is the perfect corollary to a
politics that aims to legitimize injustice, poverty, and un-wellness. McAll (2008) has used
the concept of “health transfer” to characterize the distribution of health in Canada. We
would like to extend his analysis to speak of health in a globalized world. Health is
unevenly distributed and, in general, more present among those few who are positioned to
appropriate the resources and the work of others. It is notably via the exploitation of the
work of many Others (usually female, poorer, darker) that the (usually male, richer, whiter)
few forge their wealth and wellbeing. The richer few get Others to work in a way that
exempts the former from brutal working conditions. The richer few also protect their
wellbeing by appropriating resources (e.g., green spaces, better housing, leisure time)
linked to health and this leads to the social exclusion of Others who are then, less healthy.
In this way, there is a transfer of health between sub-populations, and exploited Others
often become bio-Others. At the global level, the health of workers in the South is
transferred for the health and wellbeing of those in the North.
To sum it up, biomorality leads to rescue missions that are generally afflicted by the savior
syndrome. Such missions have a depoliticizing effect. They entrench existing power
structures, exacerbate class divisions, and reproduce patriarchal and colonial hierarchies
that pave the way to the transfer of health from the masses to the lucky few. Ironically then,
biomorality connects to “psychopathology” in the sense that an entire section of the world
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population is antisocial, sometimes a criminal, and lacks of sense of moral responsibility
for the health and wellbeing of others. This is how bio-Others come to have “disposable
bodies” as Karam (2014) has shown, and why their lives are at times “ungrievable” as
Butler (2009) would say. (ibid)
This text sets up a vital touchpoint in this analysis. Rail and Jette set a touchtone in isolating many
of the conceptual justification and technologies public health uses to launder racist, sexist, classist,
and ableist assumptions through a lens of benevolent intervention. By presenting populations with
the illusions of control and participation, Rail and Jette note that these populations are ultimately
made responsible for their suffering, as the public health interventions are engaged outside of the
context of more substantial structural change. Even under a seemingly culturally competent
approach, these strategies reduce culture down to abstractions and artifacts (dance, food, clothing).
It seeks to use culture in the context of a reductive, transactionalism vision of empowerment where
in exchange for proving productive bio-citizenship, the culture of oppressed people comes under
attack, and its origin recognition is erased. Even in the seemingly most benign “provisional” model
of public health interventions, where oppressed populations tell officials what they want and then,
ostensibly, get it, experts and lawmakers are still positioned as the power brokers and are
positioned to shape the contours of what interventions are “givable” or even “askable” in the
context of this engagement. One wonders what would happen if communities gathered and told
public health officials they wanted “reparations for the War on Drugs” or even “the banishment of
racist public health institutions from their neighborhoods” as part of these “empowerment”
sessions. Rail and Jette note that the goal of these sessions is often to round down visions of
sweeping political change to an idea of social repair, which creates healthy biocitizenship within
a racist, neoliberal framework. You can get fresh fruit at the corner store, but you can’t challenge
the political economy of neoliberalism, which forces you to buy fast food and cook quick meals to
get to your service economy job.
While Rail and Jette set up some useful analysis in critiquing the assumptive logic of public
health interventions, they should not be seen as necessarily representative of an African Centered
Research Paradigm. As Schiele notes, the African Centered Research Paradigm should not be
confused with a poststructuralist critique of power relations.While the Post Structuralists seek to
name and call out power and engage in “archeological” analysis of the historical complexity and
contingency of so-called “objective” truth claims to point out how they seek to reify power and
constrain individual freedom, the African Centered Research Paradigm aims to see the world
through a communalist lens. Rather than merely identifying power to analyze how best to
undermine it, the African Centered Research Paradigm builds new institutions which manifest
visions of collective empowerment and freedom. For example, while equally critical of superficial
and “culturalist” interventions, an African Centered Research Paradigm would be sure to not
assume that just because a racist neoliberal view culture as an abstract force, that this should not
be continued as indicating all attempt to leverage the cultural resources of the community to
address a social problem. Moreover, while Rail and Jette attempt to adopt a comprehensive vision
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of critiquing power, the African Centered Research Paradigm attempts to understand the
specificity of how Anti-Black and Eurocentric thought systems function in the reproduction of
inequality and violence. The goal is not to avoid the wielding power, but instead, explicitly build
it for oppressed people. This is also not to say that all forms of oppression can be reduced to race;
white supremacy serves as an epistemological frame through which other forms of identity, such
as gender and sexuality, become salient.
The violence of the modern state formation has been so centrally formed by Eurocentric
institutions operationalized white supremacist violence. Having a grasp on the functioning of this
system is an essential part of guiding the approach of more comprehensive strategies of liberation.
For example, while acknowledging that medical violence has impacted all oppressed people, it is
also critical to analyze the unique ways in which chattel slavery changed the “doctor-patient”
relationship for people of African descent. As Harriet Washington notes, the very idea of a “doctorpatient”
relationship obscures the “master/slave relationship,” which was at the core of Black
people's relationship to the medical profession from the inception of American medicine
(Washington,2015). Washington explains that under American chattel slavery, the doctor had no
ethical obligation to the enslaved African they were treating, but solely to the owner, as the goal
of medicine was render the slave fit to work, not to return them to any abstract notion of true
“health” (ibd). John Hoberman writes in his analysis of racism in the medical professions that
doctors at times seem to mirror police officers in their authority over black bodies, exercising
freedom from democratic accountability that allows anti-Black ideologies to flourish among their
ranks. He writes:
As one physician-author noted in 1988, “doctors are unwilling to blow the whistle on other
doctors. It’s somehow bad manners or breaking the faith of the medical profession to report
a bad doctor.” In this sense, the practice of medicine, like police work, is more of a
fraternal order than a scientific community that recognizes and acts upon its responsibility
to monitor and correct the deviant and dangerous misconduct of its practitioners.
Another powerful factor that shields doctors from scrutiny is the “halo effect” that wraps
physicians in an aura of benevolent power. “Doctors,” a New York Times writer noted in
2009, “have a degree of professional autonomy that is probably unmatched outside of
academia. And that is how we like it. We think of our doctors as wise men and women who
can combine knowledge and instinct to land on just the right treatment.” The combination
of benevolent intent and the power to heal has traditionally conferred upon doctors “a
degree of professional autonomy” that can make them appear as sages who have earned
a status that puts them beyond the judgments of observers who do not belong to the guild.
The physician’s authority and autonomy can promote a socially conservative identity that
resists both personal self-examination and social reforms. Social conservatives may not
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see the causal relationship between self-scrutiny and a willingness to promote social
change, including the profound social changes that antiracist policies require. Even today,
social conservatives (and others) retain the option of preserving the traditional racial
hierarchy and its racist folklore inside their heads, while conforming to antiracist public
norms that enforce public civility and a degree of racial integration within “disciplined”
workplaces such as hospitals and clinics. There can be no doubt that many doctors choose
this option, thereby disciplining their social conduct but not their racial imaginations.
The research I have done for this book confirms that physicians share the racial attitudes
of their fellow citizens. Indeed, their intimate involvement with medically afflicted black
bodies and minds may even create and intensify feelings about the racial differences they
perceive. There is, then, no evident reason to assume that doctors feel greater sympathy
toward or possess a greater understanding of African Americans that most whites do. On
the contrary, it is probable that many doctors, like police officers, are exposed to more
than their fair share of extreme and unattractive behaviors of the troubled and the indigent,
a disproportionate number of whom may be black. These experiences do not produce racial
goodwill. Consequently, as one African American physician commented in 1990: “The
problem is not that medical providers are ethically deficient compared with the public, it
is that we are no longer any better. Our ranks include racists and virtually every other
variety of impaired citizenry. (Hoberman, 2012).
This has profound implications for the theory of change laid outlined by Domoslawski. The idea
that doctors and law enforcement officers, who are both structurally inoculated from accountability
specifically to Black populations and given legally sanctioned authority over the lives of
oppressed, can engage as a political “equals” with racialized drug users, specially Black drug users,
is ignorant of not only political economy which creates a massive power imbalance within this
“coalition”, but the “libidinal” economy undergirding vision of racialized drug users as threats to
white society and the authority of the very cops and doctors Domoslawski and those like him are
asking drug users to work with.
It could be argued, in Domosławski’s defense, that he is specifically a Polish journalist
writing about his observations around drug decriminalization in Portugal, which does not have the
same racialized history around policing that the United States has. Rather than challenging this
critique of eurocentric research paradigms, this argument precisely proves why it is so dangerous.
In the physical sciences, research findings can be translated from one country or language to
another with confidence that the physical properties underlying the interactions will not change
from country to country. The notion that anything analogous can be done with social science
should be on face ridiculous, given the specific contextual histories of social formations (and
specifically, racialized violence) and how it differs from nation to nation. Yet there are attempts to
treat the social science question of addiction as if biological processes involved in chemical
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dependency occur objectively outside of the context of the society which produces these addicts.
Here the “disease theory” of addiction risks locking researchers into an inadvertent ignorance of
how transposing “objectively” productive institutions into an American context can create a
hazardous situation for racialized (specifically Black) “bio-others.”
On Portugal- The Dangers in Implementing Colorblind, ”Disease Model” Reforms
for Addiction
Portugal is the most prominent example held up by advocates of drug decriminalization as
the model of good policy which many argue should be a model for reforms in the United States.
No report on drug decriminalization could be complete without referring the Protugese experiment.
Given the bevy of resources available summarizing the Protugese experiment, and previous quotes
which allude to the Protugese model, it is logical to directly analyse the limitations and culturally
assumptions behind the elevation of the Protugese model to examination and limitations and
potential to create new forms of control and bias.
While the details of the Portugal model can be explored through subsequent analysis, the
historical narrative around Portugal is a useful place to start, as it reveals several essential points
of analysis an African Centered Research Paradigm can add to drug decriminalization research.
Domosławski presents what is a common narrative around explaining how Portugal “descended”
into an addiction crisis. He writes:
“After the Second World War, Portugal, alongside Spain under General Franco, was the
only European country where authoritarian power was still exercised by fascist-oriented
political groups originating in the 1920s. Portugal was a firmly Catholic, traditional,
conservative society governed by the authoritarian dictatorship of Antonio Salazar. Under
the Salazar regime, the Catholic Church gained significant influence.
Salazar’s Portugal was also an autarkic country, closed to new ideas, changes in
Western societies, and new trends in culture and customs. The counterculture movements
of the 1960s that celebrated drug use as a component of fashion and culture largely passed
over Portugal. Drug use (mainly LSD) was accepted within Portugal’s relatively small
communities of artists and bohemians, but it was sporadic and had little cultural or social
impact
.
It was not until the late 1970s that drugs became a noticeable problem in Portugal.
A number of factors potentially contributed to increased drug use in Portugal: the end of
the colonial war in Africa and the return of people from the colonies (including soldiers of
the Portuguese empire), and the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974, which resulted in
a very closed country quickly opening to the world. A recurrent observation made by
interviewees in this study was that drug use, or, to be precise, cannabis use, started to
become more visible in Portugal when Portuguese citizens returned from colonies where
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marijuana was grown and used openly. Others maintained that with Portugal’s opening
after 1974, drug use was simply part of a large “package” of issues that it began to share
with other Western societies as the country, pursuing more multilateral cooperation with
other countries, became exposed to new ideas, trends, and fashions.
After a half century of isolation, the Portuguese were ill-prepared to confront the wave
of changes that came with greater openness in the late 1970s. They possessed no common
knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what
problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what
kind of social problems they caused.
In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and
marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s. Heroin smuggled from
Pakistan and India through the former colony of Mozambique by Portuguese of Pakistani
origin was sold on Portuguese streets in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, when two
large gangs smuggling heroin through Mozambique were broken up, heroin started
flowing from the Netherlands. Because heroin smuggling in Portugal consisted of so many
small groups and individual smugglers, the authorities found it impossible to stop. Heroin
use was also changing at this time, as consumers started to smoke as well as inject the
drug.
In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal
became a subject of social concern. Many people in Portuguese society concluded that the
country had a serious drug problem and high drug consumption. At the time, this
conviction was not based on any research on consumption, but simply general impressions
and anecdotal evidence. A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug
consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and
visible. A EuroBarometer survey conducted in 1997 showed that the Portuguese perceived
drug-related issues as the country’s main social problem. Four years later in 2001,4 when
the new law decriminalizing drug possession and use was implemented, drugs occupied
third place on the list of issues that gave rise to social concern among the Portuguese.
(ibid).
Domosławski inclusion of Pakistani and Mozambique being seen as the progenitors of a heroine
epidemic in Portugal should be read within the analysis given by Netherland and Hassan. In this
context, Portugal’s understanding of addiction is deeply linked to narrative of protecting whiteness
from deviant otherness. It can also be read within the context of Karam’s analysis, with cannabis
and LSD seen as “mind expanding” “soft” drugs which can coexist with and maybe even facilitate
the functioning of whtie subjected rationally engaging with the world and affirming archetypal
white characteristics of self control, while heroine is seen as a drug which threats whiteness and
creating idleness and robbing its “victims” of their rational facilities (i.e. racially “blackening”
them). Finally, Portugal can be read within Alexander’s analysis of “psychosocial” integration and
socials structures as being the superstructure which creates the context for addiction. The transition
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from military dictatorship to democracy required the destruction of old institutions built to support
the military regime and the refashioning of a democratic civil society; this is a recipe for disrupting
psycho-social integration and under Alexander’s theory it is logical under these conditions
addiction would increase. Indeed, one could use Alexander’s theory to present the hypothesis that
as decmoratic civil society reasserts itself, psycho-social integration could be reestablished and the
addiction “epidemic” could largely resolve itself, a hypothesis supported by the fact that, in 2001,
only 8% admitted drug use, putting Portugal's drug use rates among the lowest in Europe even
before the rolling out of the “revolutionary” drug decriminalization regime (ibid). While it’s
possible that self reported drug use rates can under count actual drug use rates, as individual may
feel a self of shame (especially in a concervative society like Portugal), one could imagine similar
dynamics being at play in all the European nation’s who self reported data. That Portugal's drug
use rates did not seem to be beyond the norm for a European country further supports the notion
that a proper analysis of Portugal's drug addiction “crisis” must include the context of racialized
fears of “wasted whiteness” being part of the impetus driving policy changes.
This is important not only in understanding the context which produced the sense that there
was an “addiction crisis” in Portugal in the 2000s, but also to understand the solutions which were
proposed and why they were deemed acceptable in that specific period of time. The Portugal
experience is often narrated as the rise of science and reason overwhelming political inertia,
leading the creation of an enlightened solution through differing to expertise, as Domosławski
write:
“The Portuguese government’s actions in 1998 went precisely against all of the typical
and expected “emergency” policy responses. Instead, the government appointed a
committee of specialists—doctors, sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, and social
activists—and asked the committee to analyze the drug issue in Portugal and formulate
recommendations that could be turned into a national strategy.” (ibid).
Given Ani’s analysis of “scientific rationality” and “objective reason” being use as tools to
promote European superiority and domination, it is important that researchers be skeptical of this
narrative. For example, it was not objective, expert led political debate, but the specific
circumstances of Protuguese society that to drug decriminalization laws passing in the early 2000s.
During the late 90s and early 2000’s, Domosławski report that their was still a feeling in Portugese
society that remember the abuses of power under the military dictatorship and creating a unique
sense of sympathy for folks suffering under the boot of state authority, writing:
“The fact that there was opposition to the new law and reforms serves to underscore a
constant and fundamental question about the process in Portugal: why did the government
adopt the new policy so decisively? Some of those interviewed for this study explained it
simply as the government having a fundamental conviction and the political will to have
what it saw as the right path prevail. Another interviewee from the IDT noted that after
years of living under a dictatorship, the Portuguese public was sensitive to the needs of the
aggrieved and society’s weaker members; bearing this in mind, the government could feel
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confident that the electorate would be able to see drug dependent persons as people who
were ill, rather than as criminals, and would therefore react favourably to the new policy.”
(Ibid).
At a surface level, this is important for this project, as research projects often assume that creating
by rationally conveying the objective benefits of Portugal’s model, this will help the prospects for
decriminalization in America. These notions should be deemed questionable given the specific
circumstances that created a sense of solidarity in Portugal, i.e. a military dictatorship, do not exist
in America. Moreover, an analysis of whiteness should help further refine an understanding of
why drug addicts were deemed sympathetic, a sense of shared whiteness. Given the analysis of
Karam, Neatherland and Hassan, racialization of addiction, it seems that it is unlikely that
consensus around a genuinely compassionate approach to addiction is likely to flourish in
America, unless it fits Rail and Jette’s model of inculcating productive “biocitizenship”. With this
as a fame, the specifics of Portugal’s legal interventions around decriminalization can be analyzed
within their proper context.
Despite being framed as a “anti-criminalization” model, the Progugese model has
embedded into it numerous points of discretion where criminal legal system authority can assert
itself. For example, officers continue to have discretion to bring relatively minor drug possession
charges back into the preview of the criminal legal system. Domosławski notes that even drug
possession charges at or under the legal limit for deferment, law enforcement officers have the
discretion to determine whether the accused was actually intending to sell the drugs, raising the
charge for possession to possession with intent to distribute and thus mandating criminal legal
system involvement, writing:
“There was initially a disconnect between the thresholds laid down by statute and those
followed by the courts. However, the courts in general were grateful to be relieved of some
of their workload. Under the practice that now prevails, all parties view the threshold
quantities as indicative rather than binding. For example, it should be stressed that the
charts indicate what amount may be for personal use, but it is the task of the police to
determine what a person intended to do with the substances they possess. If a person has
an amount that may be considered for personal usage but he or she is caught selling it, this
remains a crime. (Domosławski, 2011).
While defenders of the model might not that the police typically use appropriate discretion, in the
American context the persistent racial inequities seen in the criminal justice system should make
the prospect of this being equally applied highly dubious. Despite the well established reality that
many individuals who sell drugs are selling to feed their own addiction, the Protuguese model does
not create accommodations for this, deeming intent to distribute, or even the suspicion intent to
distribute through the possession of baggies or scales, as an inherently criminal matter. Despite
how the deferral commissions are portrayed as a solution to overdose, the vast majority of
individuals referred to the commissions are young cannabis users, with 50% under the age of 29
and 73% being sent for cannabis or hashish use (ibid). While this is logical as drug use skews
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young and their are for more cannabis smokers than hard drug users, it does challenge the
assumption that the deferral commissions should be read centrally as a “compassionate” response
for hard drug users, as the majority of their work deals with lower level cannabis possession. Many
would say that the inclusion of lower level cannabis offenses proves the value of decriminalization,
as it keeps low level cannabis offenders out of the criminal legal system. However, Monaghan and
Bewley-Taylor offer a different interpretation for this dynamic, relaying interviews done by
journalist Glen Greenwald which presents different interpretation of this data, writing:
“The following paragraphs illustrate some of the areas of concern regarding policing
issues. In his review of the Portuguese decriminalisation ‘regime’, published in 2009,
Greenwald notes that:
The effect that the decriminalization regime has had on police conduct with regard to
drug users is unclear and is the source of some debate among Portuguese drug policy
experts. There are, to be sure, some police officers who largely refrain from issuing
citations to drug users on the grounds of perceived futility, as they often observe the cited
user on the street once again using drugs, leading such officers to conclude that the
issuance of citations, without arrests or the threat of criminal prosecution, is worthless.107
However, he continues:
Other police officers, however, are more inclined to act when they see drug usage
now than they were before decriminalization, as they believe that the
treatment options offered to such users are far more effective than turning users into
criminals (who, even under the criminalization scheme, were typically back on the street
the next day, but without real treatment options). (Geoffrey Monaghan and Dave Bewley-
Taylor, September 2013)
This raises the specter of “net widening”, or the expansion of the categories of individuals subject
to disciplinary institutions. It is possible that decriminalization led Protugeses police to send
individuals to deferral commission who otherwise would have simply been let go, under the belief
that they are actually helping the individual by sending them to the commissions. This should be
seen as a practical application of the theoretical analysis of discourse and cultural epistemology
this report has peruse, as this net widening should be seen as polie showing a desire to inculcate
positive “biocitizenship” in populations of drug users. While some decrim advocates claim
Portugal as an unqualified success, this analysis raises several questions around this narrative.
Even one of Portugal's most laudable accomplishments, a decrease in HIV infection rates, need
to be questioned, as these statistical trends were prevalent throughout Europe during this
timeframe, including nations that did not decriminalize drugs (UNAIDS,2020). This presents the
real possibility that the benefits of decriminalization could be overstated.
In addition to creating discretion for the criminal legal system to take over, the
“decriminalized” process of the deferral commission also contains a surprising degree of punitive
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potential, even without directly involving the larger criminal legal system. Domosławski give
some details around the possible sub- incarceration punishments these deferral commission can
levy, writing;
“If a person fails to attend the Dissuasion Commission, an administrative sanction may be
applied in their absence, such as a fine, revocation of a driving license or license to bear
arms, community service, or a prohibition from being in a certain place.25
...Other administrative sanctions include social work, regular reporting to the
commission, the withholding of social benefits, or six weeks of group therapy instead of a
fine. Similar sanctions may be applied to drug dependent persons at the first meeting if
they do not voluntarily undergo treatment; however, such individuals are generally not
sanctioned because the commission is trying to persuade them to go into treatment, not
force them into doing so. By law, a financial fine can never be applied to a drug dependent
person since it is thought that this could result in further crimes being committed in order
to obtain money to pay the fine.
For those not ready to engage with treatment, the commissions take an individualized and
flexible harm-reduction approach. They have the power to escalate sanctions, but rarely
use it,unless the person is deemed to be a recreational user involved in small-time
trafficking but against whom there is insufficient evidence to charge, or if the person is
repeatedly caught in the vicinity of a school. Most commonly, written warnings are given
for those not ready to be dissuaded, but the commission also can be more creative and, for
example, extend the suspension period when further infractions arise; this usually happens
when a person is engaging with treatment and interventions, but not yet ready to reduce
their drug use or is doing well with regards to harder drugs, like heroin, but still smoking
hashish on the side. An IDT member described taking a “lighter approach” for such
individuals, saying:
“if we have in front of us a heroin addict who is successfully maintaining their treatment
but still smoking some hashish on the side, quite frankly, that’s the least of their
problems!”27 Failure to comply with an administrative sanction constitutes the criminal
offense of disobedience and can be referred to a court. However, an interviewee from the
Lisbon Dissuasion Commission stressed that cases of noncompliance are very rare.28 If a
sanction is complied with, or a procedure is suspended, the case cannot be referred to a
court. (ibid)
There seems to be very little data on how often these punitive measures are applied, with most
sources say that coercion is rarely used and is a last resort only when someone doesn’t attend the
deferral commission. Nonetheless, the possibility of pretty serious punishments, including
necessary government benefits being stripped away, seems to challenge what many lay people
would think when they here the concept of “drug decriminalization”. Within the concept of a
“Portugal style” drug decriminalization regime being modeled in the United States, as much of the
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litureates seems to advocate for, this assortment of punitive tools becomes even more worrisome.
While a comprehensive analysis may be beyond the scope of this report, it is safe to say that every
punishment offered at the Deferral Commission risks having serious disproportionate implications
for Black communities in America. Black communities are already subject to higher level of
racialized surveillance while driving, taking away their licenses would merely make these
instances of “driving while black” a more effective feeder for racial inequity in the criminal justice
system. Black communities are already deemed inherently criminal and dangerous, eliminating
pathways to legal gun ownership raises the specter of Black residents being convicted of illegal
gun possession, a crime which comes with substantial jail time. Moreover, within the racialized
public conception of addiction this raises the possibility that the american legal system might argue
that since poor Black communities have disproportionate addiction issues, they have essentially
forfeited their 2nd amendment rights to self defense, a reality which is especially unacceptable
given the rise of racialized violence in the country. Much has been written about the political nature
of social work, with state officials often applying racist conceptions of the inherent deviance of
Black family life to justify breaking up Black families and criminalizing Black behavior (Martin
and Martin, 1995, Chapman and Withers, 2018)). Moreover, while the literature says individuals
are typically given alternatives to mandated treatment, mandated treatment does not seem to be
beyond the scope of the deferral commissions authority, and while this option may be rarely used
in Portugal, Karam’s analysis of racialized drug user as a threat to the very fabric of society makes
it unlikely that this option would be the same sort of “last resort’ here in America. Many who have
studied the treatment system of in america have noted that it, like social work, is festooned with
racist logic, specifically around racialized applications of 12 step ideology around viewing Black
addicts as excessively “willful” and needing to embrace powerlessness and submission as a
precondition for being render productive “biocitizens” (Mckim, 2018). With mandated treatment
creating the threat of incarceration of a patient is deemed “noncompliant”, addiction counselors
end up wielding vicarious carceral authority, which they can use to coerce racialized performances
of acquiescence in the name of sobriety (ibid). One wonders is, in the American context, a system
capable of calling on these levels of violence deserves to be called “decriminalization” at all.
The term “decriminalization” might be misleading as an adjective for the Protugese model,
as it does incorporate enhanced policing into parts of the model. Specifically, Portugal increased
police presence in schools as part of what it calls its “Safe school” program, with the intention of
creating a deterrent to drug dealing near youth (Domoslawski, 2010). Given not only the history
of “drug free school zones” in America increasing racially unequal level of incarceration, but the
nationwide concern over police brutality, specifically the notion of police engaging in violent
interactions with students and discussion around the so called “school to prison pipeline”, this
provision seems especially likely to expose Black citizens to enhanced level of risk of criminal
justice involvement, going counter to the very notion of “decriminalization”.
Finally, there is one more potential punishment the Portugauese deferral commissions have
access to which, from the perspective of a research using an African Centered Research Paradigm,
might be the most concerning. Alex Kreitt relays the under reported fact that the deferral
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commissions have the authority to ban individuals from visiting certain areas and having
relationships with individuals the court deems inappropriate, writing:
For offenders who do not fall into the dismissal category, the panels can take a range of
action, including issuing a warning to the offender, requiring the offender to check in with
the panel at specified times, ordering the offender to enter into a treatment program, and
even banning the offender from visiting certain places or associating with certain people…
(Kreitt, 2010).
When operating from an understanding of the functioning of Anti-blackness, few things could be
more concerning than a public policy which creates legal authority for viewing entire communities
as deviant and/or dangerous. While this concept is prominent in contemporary american law
enforcement, with parole violations automatically applying to certain individuals found in “known
drug trafficking areas”, these notions have been critical tools in justifying systemic over policing
of Black neighborhoods, deemed as inherently criminal and deviant. It seems unlikely that large,
predominantly white suburban communities, despite having equal rates of drug use as poor and
working class urban areas, would receive these sort of “no go zone” designation, creating a
powerful tool for replicating racial bias. However, one need only have a basic understanding of
human nature and the culture of people of African descent to understand how problematic this
authority can be. If there is any proof to Alexander’s theory of “psycho-social integration”, or the
connection between individuals and feeling of having a social support system and community,
being a critical part of the addiction epidemic, there are few easier way to create a crisis of psychosocial
integration than to legally ban individuals from engaging with people in their community.
While some in this community might create factors which drive people toward addiction, others
in the same community are likely key to creating alternative forms of psycho-social integration
that can create the social networks needed to prevent drug use from sliding into full blown
addiction. Beyond the meta level analysis, social connections in community are essential for
individuals to find jobs and housing, necessarily stabilizing factors to create social stability. All
of these factors are magnified when seen through the lens of people of African descent. The notion
of ubuntu is also known as “collective subjectivity”, with the individual seeing the basic unit of
social and political life as the community, not the wetern, autonomous, “rational” individual (Ani,
1994). From the perspective of a culture which operates through collective subjectivity, cutting
individuals off from the community is not only a punishment for the individual, it is a punishment
for the entire community, who see their relationship with the excluded individual as a necessary
part of their own subjective flourishing. All this needs to be seen within the context of anti-black
notion of the need to “rescue” Black people from their pathological and devinate Black
communities. What Ibrahim X Kendi call an “assimilationist” impulse, i.e. the notion that Black
people need socialization and civilization influence by engaging with whtie people, white
communities, and whtie institutions, has been an essential fulcrum of Anti-Black policy and
practice in America since the 1600s (Kendi, 2017). Few policies more neatly fit within Anti-Black
assimilationist assumptions than banning individuals from being around their community and
potentially forcing them into forms of drug treatment which, as 12 Step derived drug treatment
often does, argues for “cutting off” individual in your past life of using drugs or any “negative
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influences” from your past as a precondition for sobriety. Given these realities, researchers
interesting in productive and emancipatory research must challenge the simplistic notion that
Portugal represents a ”best practice” in drug decriminalization which should be copied in America,
lest one risk ignore a myriad of ways in which the Portugese model can be applied in a manner
which could reflect Anti-Black sentiment and even risk expanding Anti-Black social control and
violence.
This analysis of the Portugese model helps establish the implications of deconstructive,
African Centered Research on meta level analysis of policy recommendations. We can now apply
the deconstructive model to look more directly at research methods and begin to isolate specific
questions and finding which may be useful for “heuristic” research.
Research Methodology and Anti-Blackness. On the Form and Function of Drug Policy
Research
In analysing a cross section of research on drug decriminalization, research methodologies
and practices which are problematized by an African Centered Research Paradigm. For example,
Kozlowski et al pursued a very interesting and potentially useful research project attempting to do
a quantitative analysis of the impacts of cannabis decriminalization in Prince George's County
(Kozlowski et al, 2019). While the findings of these articles will be taken up later in this analysis,
for this section it is the methodology that is under examination. In an attempt to find a variable
which shows statistical significance when used as a lens through which to view their data, the
researcher’s made what, from an African Centered Research paradigm, is a very interesting choice,
writing:
“Additionally, we included an indicator of physical and social disorder, measured as the
proportion of all misdemeanor enforcements within a beat-year that involved a disorderrelated
incident.6 Lastly, we included percent female headed households (in 2010) as an
indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage, measured as the percent of all beat households
(with at least one dependent) that are female-headed. Four other measures of socioeconomic
disadvantage – percent unemployed, percent in poverty, percent without a high
school diploma, and percent receiving public assistance – were also considered for
inclusion.
However, whether as individual variables or collapsed into two indices along with female
headed household, none of these four variables were statistically significant. The only
variable that significantly contributed toward accounting for overall beat-level variation
in marijuana enforcement was female headed household, so we included this variable as
an indicator of beat-level disadvantage.” (Kozlowski et al, 2019)
The idea that female headed households are a symbol of disadvantage may have fits the short term,
instrumental needs of the researchers in the movement, but given the historical context of how
Black communities have been deemed inferior because of their prevalence of female headed
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households, this is a research tactic which deserves scrutiny. Politicians and theories such as Daniel
Patrick Moynahan used an analysis of female headed households as a sign of social economic
disadvantage to recommended an assimilationist politics seeking inculcate socially appropriate
patriarchal values into the Black community, including recommending more Black men be sent to
war as a tool to combat this dangerous amtriacrhical excess (Moynihan, 1965). This analysis was
roundly criticized as not only reflecting anti-black bias, but also fundamentally misunderstanding
the family structures of people fo African descent, which typically do not fit a simple, nuclear
framework. Rather than seeing the possibilities within the extended, non-nuclear family structures
within Black communities, Moynahian sees them as different and therefore deficient, and while
these researchers don’t seem to share Moynahan’s views, they use similar research methodologies
by embracing the notion of “female led households” as a salient measure of social -economic
distress. While this is clearly not the intent of the researchers, one wonders if they felt an
appropriate sense of urgency of finishing an alternative metric of socio- economic disadvantage in
order to not risk replicating the pernicious myth of there being something inherently wrong with a
frame headed household. That the researchers made this choice within the context of research
related to the War on Drugs makes the choice particularly ironic, as it is the hyper incarceration of
men, specifically Black men, which created the context for the predominance of female lead
households in the Black community (Clear, 2010b). This historical context, as well as a potential
alternative historical metric for evaluating the data (historical arrest rates) is ignored, and the
researchers isolated female headed households as if it was some neutral lens through which to
evaluate historical socio -economic disadvantage.
Researchers around drug decriminalization have also commonly makes argumentative
choices which risk limiting the scope of political analysis. The Human Rights Watch reports makes
one of these choices when it chooses to focus a large chunk of its analysis on the innocence of the
individuals swept up in the War on Drugs dragnets, writing:
“Numerous interviewees in each state we visited said they had pled guilty even though they
were innocent. Many said they did not feel they had any other real choice. Defendants,
defense attorneys, judges, and prosecutors in different jurisdictions used the language of
gambling: would the defendant “roll the dice” and go to trial? Most defendants said no,
because the odds were against them and the stakes were too high.
In Texas, where defense attorneys said laboratory scandals and faulty roadside drug tests
had raised concerns, Harris County began testing drugs in possession cases that had
already been closed. Since 2010, there have been at least 73 exonerations in Harris County
for drug possession or sale where the defendant pled guilty for something that turned out
not to be a crime at all. In 2015 alone, there were 42.279
Of the 42 exonerees in 2015, only six were white.280 Most or all had been adjudged
indigent, meaning they could not afford an attorney and had either a public defender or
another attorney appointed for them. One of those attorneys, Natalie Schultz, said a
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significant number of them were homeless.281 When the laboratory finally tested their
drugs, it found only legal substances or nothing at all.
For example, in July 2014, police arrested Isaac Dixon, 26, for possession of a substance
that field tested positive for Ecstasy. Two days later, Isaac pled guilty to felony drug
possession and was sentenced to 90 days in the Harris County Jail. More than 14 months
later, the substance was tested by a laboratory, and the field test was proved faulty. No
drugs were found—only antihistamine and caffeine.282” (Human Rights Watch, 2015).
The intent here is clear enough, as the author is attempting to convey the reality that innocent
people are potentially subject to incarceration due to the policing regime under the War on Drugs.
However, focusing attention on whether individuals arrested for drug possession were actually in
possession of drugs risks obviating the core argument of drug decriminalization, the drug
possession ought not be a crime. Calling upon the narrative of innocence risks making the
conversation harder for individuals who are clearly “guilty”, specifically individuals who might
be convicted of possession with intent to distribute or face charges related to weapons possession.
John Pfaff notes that drug decriminalization risks creating a “Squeeze the Balloon” effect where
even as states reduce penalties around drug possession, the increase charges for crimes related to
accusations of violence, writing:
“In reality, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges—
and very few of them, perhaps only around 5 or 6 percent of that group, are both low level
and nonviolent. At the same time, more than half of all people in state prisons have been
convicted of a violent crime. A strategy based on decriminalizing drugs will thus
disappoint—and disappoint significantly.”...
At the same time, for all the talk of “low-hanging fruit,” there doesn’t
appear to be anyone building ladders to pick the fruit higher up the tree.
Prison reform has been on the political radar since about 2000, and it has
been taken seriously since about 2008; that’s somewhere between nine and
seventeen years. Yet reform efforts are still aimed entirely at this “lowhanging
fruit,” and there seems to be no effort to move the discussion on to
tougher issues.
In fact, the situation is arguably worse that this makes it sound. It isn’t
just that reform bills focus only on those convicted of nonviolent crimes,
but that, as we’ve seen, reform options, such as drug diversion, often
explicitly exclude those convicted of violence. Even more troubling, many
states generate the political support for lessening property and drug crime
sentences in part by toughening those for violent crimes. To belabor the
metaphor, far from building taller ladders, we seem to be burning the wood
we need to build them. If the goal is real, substantial reform, this approach
is untenable. The sheer volume of violent offenders in prison acts as a
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arrier to deep cuts built solely on nonviolent offenders.
Maybe deep reforms really aren’t the goal. Maybe the goal is merely to
release prisoners who really don’t scare us, but otherwise leave things
untouched. That, however, doesn’t seem to match the rhetoric of
transformative change coming from both the Left and the Right.
Furthermore, even if the goal is only the modest one of releasing those who
“don’t scare us,” we should still be less punitive toward many of those who
are serving time for violent crimes. Our current approach to punishing those
convicted of violence is almost entirely blind to mountains of sophisticated
research about violent behavior. The harsh sentences we impose on people
convicted of violent crimes are not buying us the security we think they are:
they incapacitate people longer than necessary and provide little deterrence
in exchange. It’s a situation that begs for real reform.” (Pfaff , 2018b).
When decriminalization attempts to tactically limit its frame to non-violent drug offenders,
this creates a strategic limitation to comprehensive de-incarceration. Moreover, decriminalization
advocates have often explicitly made the point that decriminalization would allow more resources
to focus on “more serious crimes”.
“Along with changes in medical marijuana laws, more recent state-level reforms have
decreased the criminal punishments related to low-level possession or have legalized lowlevel
possession altogether.Since 2012, when both Washington and Colorado approved
legislation allowing for adult recreational use, 10 states and Washington, D.C., have
legalized small amounts of recreational marijuana for adults (as of year-end 2018).
Additionally, some states have decriminalized or depenalized small amounts of marijuana
possession for adult recreational use (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2019).
These permissive policy changes of the last decade occur in stark contrast to the policies
of the “War on Drugs" era of the 1980s and early 1990s, which criminalized drug use and
prioritized enforcement of drug offenses. Depenalization, decriminalization, and similarly
permissive policies aim to do the opposite — reduce enforcement of low-level drug offenses
in exchange for increased resources to be allocated toward the prevention of more serious
(e.g., violent) crimes (DeAngelo, Gittings, & Ross, 2018; Makin et al., 2019; Ross &
Walker, 2016).” (Kozloski et al., 2019)
Given calls to #DefundThePolice, and the standing reality of racial bias in the criminal legal
system, the question of whether defacto increasing police resources is a desirable outcome is
debatable. This is especially glaring when contrasted with an alternative of reinvesting this money
in communities most impacted by the war on drugs, a prospect which is rarely mentioned in
decriminalization literature even though discussion of reorienting resources from drug
enforcement to other organs within the policing apparatus.
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The conversation around decriminalization allowing for more efficient policing, research
around policing has shown the limits of this. While there is an underlying notion that
decriminalization is important because it is a “compassionate” act towards victims of crime as it
would allow more police to spend less time hunting down drug users and more time “protecting
them” the reality of policing challenges this narrative, writing:
“The legalization of marijuana undoubtedly resulted in the opportunity for agencies to
reallocate resources, and as mentioned earlier, the level of resources available in police
agencies is one important organizational factor that may influence clearance rates.
Although some research finds little evidence of a resources-to-clearance rate connection
(Cloninger & Sartorius, 1979; Greenwood et al., 1975), considerable evidence does exist
in the research literature that resource availability does make a difference. For example,
Stolzenberg, D’Alessio, and Eitle (2004) found that an increase in the number of police
officers is associated with improved clearance rates for violent crime. In one of the earliest
studies undertaken in this area, Chaiken (1975) found that officers’ effectiveness in solving
crime improved with the increase in departmental resources used for criminal
investigation. Similarly, a more recent study conducted by Wong (2010) revealed that
resources available—as measured by police expenditures—are positively associated with
the clearance capability of the police.
These studies demonstrate that police resources do matter in the provision of public safety
outcomes. However, the likelihood of clearance of a crime is contingent on the availability
of policing resources devoted to investigation, including the ability to actively search for
evidence and to spend time on the development of leads (Benson, Rasmussen, & Kim, 1998;
Borg, Parker, & Karen, 2001). Indeed, as Cooney (1994) has noted, police resources
typically are not evenly distributed across cases even within the same type of crime.”
(Willits et al, 2018).
This is an even handed attempt for researchers to balance the literature around increased resources
helping police clearance rates with discussions around the limitations of this approach. However,
this analysis would benefit greatly from applying an understanding of anti-blackness and the
African Centred Research Paradigm. When the authors write “police resources typically are not
evenly distributed across cases even within the same type of crime”, they open the door to a more
nuanced understanding of how decriminalization relates to policing, one which points to the reality
that crimes involving rich, respectable (read white) citizens are more vigorously investigated than
crimes involving poor, none respetable (read Black) citizens. Often researchers refuse to make
points like this, as they feel it make them appear non-objective in their analysis. While this is
understandable, an African Centered Research Paradigm understands that policing is a life and
death issue for Black people, and as such would believe that point is sufficiently important to
warrant an analysis beyond the “both sides have a point” faux objectivity presented by the
researchers. Indeed, to get information back up the claim that police resources are dolled out along
racial lines, one need only look at the text of the article the researchers are citing, as Coony
explicitly presents race as a critical factor in the allocation of police resources, writing:
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Investigation also varies with the social characteristics of civil- ian victims (e.g., Simon
1991:19-20). The police treat some cases as "big" or important and investigate them in
considerable detail. Crimes committed against high-status victims are especially likely to
be treated this way (e.g., Skolnick 1966:176-77). A clear exam- ple is the assassination of
a political leader or a media celebrity. Here investigation by police and others may
continue for de- cades or even centuries. But the same principle applies, less dramatically,
in crimes against ordinary citizens. When wealthy, re- spectable people are
victimized, police are likely to seek physical evidence such as fingerprints, tire tracks, and
hair samples at the scene of the crime, interview large numbers of potential witnesses and
informants, and conduct extensive in- terrogations, polygraph ("lie detector") tests, and
"line ups" (sessions at which suspects are viewed by victims or witnesses through a oneway
mirror). (Black 1980:16) As the victim's social status declines, the probability that
these investigatory measures will be undertaken decreases. Thus, in cases where the
victims are of decidedly low status, even the most obvious investigative leads may not be
pursued, regardless of the legal seriousness of the incident. A study of homicide in a rural
Mexican community, where the victims are poor farmers, reports: "There is never any
questioning of suspects or attempt to solve the crime by officials" (Nash 1967:461).
Similarly, minimal investigation also appears to follow homicides committed on American
Indian reservations (Matthiessen 1991:193) and skid row (Black 1989:6-7). In a Georgia
case I observed,6 a young black man, whom the police strongly suspected of being a drug
dealer, shot and killed a close friend, another young black male also believed to be in the
drug business. The killer turned him- self in to the local jail the day after the shooting, and
told the authorities he was prepared to make a statement to the police. Seven months later,
when the case came up for trial the prosecut- ing attorney complained that the investigating
officer had still not taken a statement from the defendant. Busy with other cases, the killing
of one street-level drug dealer by another was simply not high on the detective's list of
priorities.
That evidence is uncovered is no guarantee that it will be use- ful or important. A
considerable amount of legal strategy re- volves around excluding or suppressing
information that is avail- able to at least one party (see, e.g., Mann 1985). However,
without investigation legal actions are difficult to sustain. In the above case, for instance,
the lack of evidence resulted in the assis- tant district attorney accepting a plea of
involuntary manslaugh- ter instead of pursuing the murder conviction he had initially
sought. Another aspect of social status affecting the thoroughness with which cases are
investigated is the victim's respectability. One student of police homicide investigators has
noted that "nothing deflates a detective more than going back to the office, punching a
victim's name into the admin office terminal and pulling out five or six computer pages of
misbehavior, a criminal history that reaches from eye level to the office floor" (Simon
1991:177). But any deviation from conventional standards of behavior can weaken a
victim's claim. A study of Canadian detectives cites the following two cases to illustrate
this point.
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In the first, an alleged rape, the detectives "spent five hours trying to talk the victim into
following through with her com- plaint and giving a written statement on it. ... [They]
willingly worked a continuous 16 hour period on this case, on behalf of a victim they
characterized as 'naive' and 'respectable' and in need of police assistance to develop and
sustain the case" (Ericson 1981:106). In the second, an alleged assault, a young man got
into a fight while attending a party, receiving injuries which ne- cessitated him spending
four days in hospital. The detectives spent a total of 15 minutes on the case. After visiting
the victim in his disheveled apartment a detective commented, "Did you see the way he
lives? He's probably glad he got hurt so that he had an excuse not to be working." Although
the case was one of the most violent encountered during the research, the detectives filed
the case without ever contacting the two eyewitnesses or the suspect. The reason they cited:
lack of evidence (Ericson 1981:106-7). Legal officials often cite lack of evidence as a
reason for the attrition of criminal cases. Examples such as these demonstrate that the
designation has an evaluative component linked to the social status of the parties, and that
statistical presentations which employ it tend to contain embedded partisan effects (see,
e.g., Boland, Mahanna, & Sones 1992:35-48). (Conney, 1994).
While there may be a debate as to the role of resource allocation in aggregate impacted clearance
rates, there does not seem to be much debate as to whether drug decriminalization will help poor,
minority victims of crime, as these crimes are subject to the resource allocation decisions that deem
their crimes less of a priority independent of drug decriminalization. An african centered research
paradigm would understand how this argument around using decriminalization to protect victims
of crime through policing deserves careful attention. Not only does the argument risk generally
expanding the power of the carceral state, but feeds anti-Black notions of police as benevolent
institutions which, if only freed from the tedium of drug prohibition enforcement, could be more
effective in their assimilationist mission of inculcating discipline and respect for authority into the
Black masses. Not only does this argument not detract for the researchers core mission, it enhances
it, as Kozlowski et al present this analysis specifically to frame a discussion around how cannabis
decriminalization in Prince George's County did not solve racial disparities in cannabis
enforcement, it may have created net widening effects with Black residents receiving more
citations post decriminalization. They write:
“... Examining arrests and citations for marijuana possession separately provides some
evidence for the claim that criminal citations replace arrests for marijuana possession in
later analysis years, implying that the 2013 shift to criminal citations had the intended
result of reducing arrest rates for marijuana possession. However, while arrests are
declining over the period and citations are rising through 2014, we did not observe a
complete displacement effect of arrests to citations. This point is best illustrated by
examining the total enforcement rates during the period. If marijuana possession arrests
were simply being replaced with criminal citations (in 2013-2014), then we would expect
the total enforcement rate to remain stable or decline over this period. However, the
opposite is true. Considering all county beats, the total enforcement rate steadily increased
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from a low of 2.49 per 1,000 in 2010, to a peak of 5.87 per 1,000 in 2014, the second (and
last) year of implementation of criminal citations for possession of less than 10 grams.
We see a similar pattern for high frequency beats, though the peak average total
enforcement rate (7.34 per 1,000) occurred one year earlier in 2013, the first year of
implementation of criminal citations. The most dramatic impact on arrests and total
enforcement rates came later, in 2015, the first full year of implementation allowing civil
citations for possession of less than 10 grams...
One possible explanation for the divergent trends in arrests and criminal citations draws
on the concept of substitution or replacement effects. That is, individuals who were arrested
for marijuana possession of less than 10 grams in the pre-change period (2010-2012)
would instead be criminally cited (starting in 2013). However, considering the overall
increase in total marijuana possession enforcement rates (arrests and citations combined),
during the period between 2010 and 2014 (as shown in Table 2),
it appears that the addition of criminal citations as an enforcement option for lower-level
marijuana offenses had a net-widening effect. That is, individuals who previously received
no enforcement (or received an unofficial sanction, like a warning) for low-level
possession of marijuana were then (in 2013-2014) issued criminal citations. Therefore, in
addition to replacement effects (that are likely occurring for some fraction of the
enforcement population), arrests remain relatively stable over the period while citations
are increasing, resulting in a greater number of total possession-related enforcements
during the two-year period of criminal citations.” (Kozlowski et al, 2018)
A more comprehensive understanding of anti-Blackness would add to the researcher’s
findings, as it would help explain the social context which might produce a net widening result in
light of decriminalization. Despite this reticence, the researcher’s do incorporate some analysis of
anti-blackness into their “objective”, “data centric” approach, noting that, even accounting for
racism and bias against Latinx peoples, the net widening effects specifically are seen in Black
communities, writing:
“Proximity to Washington, D.C., is also positively related to the 2014 marijuana
enforcement rate, suggesting that beats adjacent to Washington, D.C., had higher rates of
marijuana enforcement. We elaborate on this finding in two ways. First, Prince George’s
County wraps around the northeast and southeast borders of Washington, D.C., which
contain some of the city’s most disadvantaged communities.
Second, the numerator of our outcome measure includes D.C. residents who were subject
to enforcement by PGPD (the census data used for the denominator does not include D.C.
residents). In 2014 specifically, D.C. residents accounted for approximately 16% of all
marijuana possession arrests and 12% of all marijuana possession citations. So, the
positive relationship between D.C. proximity and marijuana possession enforcement rate
may be partially attributable to the greater presence of D.C. residents who are subjected
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to arrest or citation in those beats.10 Proportion Hispanic is negatively related to the 2014
marijuana enforcement rate, indicating that beats with higher proportions of Hispanic
residents have lower rates of marijuana possession enforcement. Interestingly, there is
substantial overlap between the
few beats with high Hispanic populations and D.C. adjacent beats. The negative coefficient
for proportion Hispanic indicates that, despite their proximity to D.C. (positively
associated with enforcement rates), beats with higher concentrations of Hispanic residents
have a lower enforcement rate, all else being equal. (ibid).
The research indicates that, in predominantly Black Prince George’s county, the net widening
effects are concentrated in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods Near Washington D.C., but not
the Latinx neighborhoods. The researchers, however, do not state the logical conclusion of this
analysis, that the potential net widening effects are driven specifically by policing in poor, Black
communities. Kozlowski et al are doing research related to decriminalization in Maryland and
engage in deep, quantitative analysis around the implications of decriminalization, including its
potential to inadvertently increase some racial disparities. As such few articles are more potentially
useful for an analysis of decriminalization of drugs in Maryland. These criticisms are not to
diminish the reports findings, it is to attempt to outline how subsequent research efforts could
expand upon their work to incorporate an explicit analysis of anti-blackness and create even more
productive research findings via utilizing a African Centered Research Paradigm.
The research indicates that racial disparities existing post decriminalization can be found
beyond Prince George's county. Tran et al find similar levels of specifically Anti-Black policing
post decriminalization in Philadelphia, writing:
“Marijuana arrest rates were high among African Americans prior to decriminalization.
We found that African Americans experienced greater absolute reduction in arrest rates
once marijuana possession was reclassified as a civil offense compared to Whites;
however, arrest rate disparities, specifically for sales/manufacturing, increased
betweenAfrican Americans and Whites. For instance, relative reduction for
sales/manufacturing-based arrest rates was nearly 3 times lower for African Americans
than their White counterparts after decriminalization. This is similar to recent work
documenting increases in relative arrest rate disparities despite decreases in absolute
disparities followingmarijuana legalization between Whites and African Americans
(Firthet al., 2019).There are two possible rationales that may explain the differential
patterns in arrest rates by race. One rationale is that our data do not reflect actual law
enforcement behaviors, particularly biases in the criminal justice system, that would
contribute to the continual dis-parities in arrest rates (Gelman et al., 2007; Milner et al.,
2016; Mitchelland Caudy, 2015;Ulmer et al., 2016). This may explain, in part, how African
Americans continue to be unfairly targeted by law enforcement officers relative to White
individuals. However, recent work suggests that perceptions around policing of small drug
use and purchases are changing among law enforcement officers (Rouhani et al., 2019).
Theother rationale posits that arrest rates disparities may be partially explained by
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differential purchasing patterns that place Africans Americans at greater risk for arrest,
including purchasing marijuana out-doors, from strangers, and far from their homes
(Ramchand et al.,2006). These hypotheses, however, require further evaluation to disentangle
the mechanisms contributing to the persistent arrest rate dis-parities between
Whites and African Americans.Our results also suggest differential impact of
decriminalization by sex. Males experienced greater absolute/relative reduction for
possession-based arrests, but females appear to experience a higher relative reduction for
sales/manufacturing, which the percent decline among females was twice as much as it
was among males. This heterogeneity of effect may, in part, be a result of the preexisting
gender differences in arrest rates prior to decriminalization. Females had an overall lower
arrest rate before marijuana decriminalization, thus, any declines in arrest rates, even
small ones, can result in a large relative reduction.Further exploration of gender-based
differences following decriminalization is warranted.Finally, the impact of
decriminalization appears to be somewhat similar across age groups. This is congruent
with prior work to show that decriminalization policies lead to significantly lower rates of
pos-session-based arrest (up to 75%) for both adults and youths (Plunket al., 2019). Our
research, however, further extends prior work to show that, even though absolute
differences may be similar between age groups, there were relative differences for
sales/manufacturing-based arrest rates by up to an order of 3-folds. It has been speculated
that law enforcement officers may compensate for their inability to arrest youths for
marijuana possession by arresting them more frequently for mar-ijuana
sales/manufacturing (i.e., possession with intent to distribute) (Smart and Kleiman, 2019).
This was not supported by our data. In fact, sales/manufacturing-based arrest rates did not
increase following marijuana decriminalization for any of the demographic groups in our
analyses.” (Tran et al, 2020).
This article, published this month, shows how the field of decriminalization research is constantly
evolving, but having a conceptual understanding of anti-Blackness can be useful to provide a frame
through while to view and process this evolving literature base.
Tran et al also raise an important, though often overlooked, demographic component within
research, the importance when possible of disaggregating data between Black men and Black
women. An African centered research paradigm understands that white supremacy impacts Black
men and Black women differently, and this disaggregation seeks to acquire more specificity within
its analysis around how gender impacts drug policy. As Tran et al, as well as a bevy of others point
out, drug policy has specifically, though not exclusively, targeted Black men, and it important that
disparity analysis be supplemented with meta level analysis showing no only how policy changes
create disparities between white and Black communities, but also centered communities most
impacted by these policies. While, as previously stated, these policies impact the entire Black
community, Black men appeared to particularly be targeted by these forms of policing. This is
important, as the current trend toward “intersectional” analysis has at times attempted, laudably,
to centre a diversity of marginalized groups, specifically showing disparities between black women
and white women to show how Black women’s experiences differ from white womens. While this
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is important, it is also important to be analytically precise by pointing out that Black men are the
most impacted by War on Drugs policing. In fact, many scholars have pointed out that this violence
should be theorized through an “intersectional” lens and be seen as anti-Black misandry, a specific
form of gendered violence which targets Black men for their rmale gender (Curry, 2017). This is
a logical extension of the analysis of Karam, Netherland and Hassan, as
a. The Black male subject is seen as specifically dangerous in the midst of their drug
intoxication in light of a perceived physical and cultural affinity for violence
And
b. The fear of miscegenation, from historical lynchings to contemporary fears of “drug dealers
coming to the suburbs” has specifically been targeted at the fears of Black men
impregnating white women.
These points are raised not to diminish any carceral violence targeted towards Black trans people
or Black women. It is included to address what Curry and other have seen as a understandable but
none the less analytically imprecise tendency in research on Black people, a belief that fidelity to
“intersectionality” means you must show how many issue impacts Black people evenly, or even
to focus on the harms towards Black women and Black trans under the misled assumption the
intersectionality the Black women and Black trans are always, already the most impacted by any
particular issue. A more nuanced and precise application of intersectional analysis, one more
accurately reflected within data on the War on Drugs and drug decriminalization literature, is to
include Black male gender as a itself an intersectional frame and analysis policy within the
historical understanding that Black men have being specifically targeted for discrimination and
violence speifically because they are Black and male. While some conceptions of intersectionality
incorporate a simplistic assumption that patriarchy dictates men are always the beneficiaries of
privilege and never the victims of it, an African Centered Research paradigm challenges this
assumption and correctes places anti--Black misandry within its research methodology.
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Part III. Recommendations and Suggestions for Future Research
An important prerequisite to establishing a research paradigm and strategy to study
decriminalization is to define the scope and definition of decriminalization. Jordan Blair Woods
uses an analysis of the decriminalization of certain traffic offenses to argue that decriminalization
advocates often have a narrow focus on criminal sanctions, failing to address fundamental
questions of policing authority. In his conclusion, he offers an interesting analysis on how
decriminalization should be evaluated, questioning whether “cost benefit analysis” should be the
operative frame for evaluating decriminalization police, writing
“It is difficult to propose bright-line rules or methodologies about when legislative
judgments will weigh in favor of restricting police authority and discretion during
decriminalization efforts because of the diversity of contextual factors at play. Limiting
police authority and discretion against the backdrop of decriminalized traffic offenses
might be viewed as posing qualitatively and quantitatively different harms and costs to
civilians and to the state than does restricting police authority and discretion against the
backdrop of other decriminalized offenses. Further, even if a cost-benefit analysis weighs
in favor of not restricting police authority and discretion in specific contexts, the extent to
which cost-benefit paradigms should define the scope of individual protections (whether
constitutional or statutory) in policing contexts is debatable.398 There may be certain
civilian harms stemming from policing that laws and doctrine should not tolerate or
encourage, even when that approach is viewed as not cost-efficient (especially to the state).
Regardless of methodological choice, approaching decriminalization as a process that
implicates more than criminal sanctions encourages deeper and more systematic
conversations about policing costs and fairness in situations involving decriminalized
conduct. In focusing on sanctions, narrower accounts of decriminalization do not offer
meaningful frameworks to evaluate the full scope of these policing matters, regardless of
whether lawmakers and other criminal justice actors ultimately conclude that they weigh
in favor of sustaining police authority and discretion.” (Woods, 2014).
Even if preserving some police authority could have some positive effects, Woods offers the
possibility that the potential harm of racialized violence through police traffic stops warrants a
more comprehensive reduction of police authority through an expanded conception of
decriminalization. He also notes that even after decriminalization, police stops continued , as
decriminalization had so deeply focused on whether the driver would receive a criminal or civil
sanction from traffic violations, that they did not address the authority police have to pull people
over in the first place. It is useful to remember Akbar’s assertion that there is a domino effect
involved in research, with the underlying assumptions determining the methodology pursued to
collect data, which then determines the conclusions researchers achieve through evaluating their
data. If decriminalization is seen as a primarily legalistic process of changing the legal sanctioning
related to the criminal legal system, more fundamental questions around the nature of punishment
and power risk being obscured:
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“As this example illustrates, the criminal justice process entails much more than
sanctioning wrongdoing. Along line of sociological and criminal justice literature
describes the criminal justice process along a spectrum involving complementary
institutions of social control (for example, police, courts, and corrections)” including the
following stages: crime is detected or reported, police investigate and arrest suspects,
suspects make court appearances, claims of innocence and guilt are adjudicated, and the
guilty are punished (the so-called “sanctioning" stage).11 Even though sanctioning is only
one stage in this progression, it dominates discussions about decriminalization.
If decriminalization proponents take their normative commitments seriously, then
modifying sanctions should represent only the beginning of the decriminalizafion process.
Sanction-focused approaches to decriminalization fail to capture the harms to civilians
and to the state that formal institutions of social control impose at earlier stages of the
criminal justice process. This Article focuses on one formal institution of social control
with a central role in the criminal jusfice process: law enforcement.” I argue that
decriminalization ought to involve not only modifying the sanctions that attach to
particular kinds of conduct but also modifying the ways law enforcement entities police
that conduct.
Sanction-focused approaches to decriminalization have perpetuated the idea that the chief
goal of decriminalization is to reduce or to eliminate punishment. But this view is much
too narrow. Advocates of decriminalization should expand their view and attend to the
multitude of ways in which diffusing different types of social control—including
punishment—might be made possible.” (ibid)
It is important that researchers expand the frame for decriminalization beyond the nature
of formal sanctioning, as the reality of the legal system complicates the assumed clear divided
criminal between the civil and criminal realms. Just as criminal law serves a social function of of
“blaming”, decriminalization must not assume that civil punishments would absolve marginalized
populations from stereotypes which subject them to increased risk of policing, as Woods
continues:
“By advocating for decriminalization approaches that include both formal sanctions and
restrictions on police authority, I am not arguing that civil-criminal classifications should
categorically govern the scope of statutory or constitutional rights in all contexts. At the
same time, accepting the notion that there is no meaningful difference between the criminal
and civil realms would render decriminalization a meaningless process. Rather than
abandoning the entire idea of a civil-criminal line, it makes more sense to engage in deeper
conversations about the contexts in which civil-criminal classifications do meaningful
work to reduce social control, and the contexts in which they do not (or in which other
types of distinctions do more meaningful work).377 In one insightful attempt to resuscitate
the criminal-civil distinction, Carol Steiker has argued that criminal punishment operates
as a distinctive “blaming” mechanism.378 Based on this view, she posits that a special
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procedural regime for criminal cases is necessary to limit the state’s ability to resort to
blaming through punishment, especially against political enemies and minorities in a
state.379
Expanding conversations about decriminalization to capture restrictions on police
authority and discretion in a more coherent way broadens this inquiry to consider how in
today’s policing era, “blaming” through punishment is not the only way that the state
controls, stigmatizes, and condemns its political enemies or minorities. Rather, police
authority and discretion are also key sources of control, stigma, and condemnation. As the
previous discussion has highlighted, the harmful and disempowering consequences of
police discretion can take force against members of different minority communities
regardless of whether criminal punishment is ever applied. For instance, police discretion
facilitates and perpetuates stereotypes that put transgender women—especially
transgender women of color—at risk of being perceived as sex workers by the police
whenever they walk in public.380 In addition, police discretion during the “war on drugs”
over the past few decades, and the more recent “war on terror,” has facilitated and
perpetuated stereotypes that force many members of minority communities—especially
young men of color—to live with the everyday stigma of being perceived as “suspicious”
by others.”(ibid).
Woods presents some of the clear analysis of the limitations of critical elements of the standard
model of decriminalization. Including a deeper analysis of Anti-Blackness, and an analysis of the
net widening analysis from the previous section of this report, it appears possible that
decriminalization can present new avenues for anti-Black bias to manifest itself. Thus, the first
and most salient recommendation this report presents is that, in order to pursue research which
most effectively reflects a comprehensive understanding Anti-Blackness and reflects an African
Centered Research Paradigm, the research must have as one of its underlying assumption a desire
not merely to study decriminalization of drugs, but to place its analysis of decriminalizing drug
within a larger context of seeking decriminalize the social communal life of marginalized
communities, specifically people of African descent. This finding has implications for the research
methodology and policy recommendations stemming from drug decriminalization research.
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Recommendations
We have created this document to serve as an example of how to apply an African-centered
research paradigm. It is undertaken with the understanding that the methodology used in this paper
may not be entirely applicable to future research, given the unique experiences of the author, and
this information is conveyed with the hope that this research will inspire future researchers to
incorporate elements of this process into their understanding and methodology. It is difficult to
reduce an evolving understanding of how to approach research to discrete recommendations.
However, this section will attempt to distill our findings into specific observations and suggestions
for future researchers. Operating on the understanding that this is not presented as a definitive or
exhaustive list of “requirements” but as an attempt to clarify how our findings up to this point
could be applied to future research.
It is important to be precise in understanding that, though every research project document
will likely be engaged by a variety of individuals and institutions, researchers should be clear in
whom they see as their audience. Based on the findings of a preliminary conversation, advocacy
organizations are likely to be a key audience for this project. As such, the information must be
presented in a way that is easily accessible and shareable. This lends itself to a more narrative
model and less towards a data-centric, academic-style form of presentation. It is important,
however, that researchers not assume that the primary benefit of their research is to inform
advocates on best practices around drug decriminalization. Whether intentional or not, the
decisions made by researchers on what to center conceptually serves as forms of messaging and
media. Presenting to the audience a theory on how to frame debates and interpret information.
Netherland and Hassan comment on this point in the conclusion of their report, noting:
“Racial and ethnic inequalities are symbolically imbedded in U.S. popular and political
cultures as well as medicine and are reliably and imperceptibly reproduced in U.S.
institutional practices. Specific interventions are required to counterbalance their hold on
drug policy. If policy and clinical responses to addiction are to be racially inclusive, a
racial/ethnic impact assessment is one way to predict and document the effects of health
policies and clinical practices on racial and ethnic inequalities. Racial ethnic impact
statements have been implemented in a few states, such as Iowa and Connecticut, and
proposed in others, such as New York (London 2011; Mauer 2009). They require
policymakers to conduct a formal assessment of how a specific policy proposal is likely to
ameliorate or exacerbate racial disparities, particularly in the criminal justice system.
These statements, modeled on fiscal and environmental impact statements, are meant to
avoid policies that purport to be colorblind or race neutral but, in fact, result in differential
treatment. These policy assessments could go a long way in heightening public awareness
of the ways that racism is institutionally reinforced...
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Our study of media portrayals of race and opioids points to the critical role of racialized
imagery and narratives in generating public support for disparate policy responses in drug
control. The extent of unmarked, naturalized discourses of white deservedness and
humanity in the face of opioid addiction indicates the degree to which racially disparate
drug laws require extensive cultural work to justify and maintain against political
challenges. The flurry of media activity around white prescription opioid use represents a
considerable investment of public relations effort. It may also indicate the vulnerability of
racialized constructs of race, addiction and criminality to social analysis and organized
alternative readings of drug policy. Media analysis is a political act, one piece of a multipronged
effort that will be necessary to challenge drug war punishment and as racial
violence in contemporary form.” (Netherland and Hassan, 2016)
The notion that “policy assessments could go a long way in heightening public awareness of the
ways that racism is institutionally reinforced” is noteworthy and requires further interpretation in
terms of what an African-centered research paradigm might see as desirable framings of policy
issues and how these might differ from much of the current literature on drug decriminalization. It
may be useful to expound upon where an African-centered research paradigm might recommend
caution. As previously stated, narratives of the “inno[cent] victims” of the War on Drugs are
fraught with danger, as they presuppose a search for a “perfect victim” who is “rational” and
“respectable” and thus worthy of sympathy. In addition to potentially working against the larger
mission of legitimizing and containing addiction, recreational illicit drug use, and the drug selling
that often accompanies addiction, these frames of innocence and respectability are deeply
racialized. However, in line with the “diunital” thinking previously introduced, that does not mean
this argument need play no role in making an emancipatory case for drug decriminalization. The
HRW “Every 25 Seconds” report introduces the concept of “false positives” from police drug tests
done in the field. They write:
“Like Isaac’s conviction for drug possession, dozens more in Harris County in 2015 were
ultimately vacated and the charges dismissed, but only because authorities took the time
to have the drugs tested, after the case dispositions. The exonerations required laboratory
testing, defense and prosecution filings for habeas corpus relief, trial court
recommendations, and eventual dismissal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.283 In
the meantime, defendants had to endure pretrial detention, probation, sometimes a jail
sentence, and the prospect of a felony conviction for action that was lawful.
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As the exonerations in Harris County demonstrate, people plead guilty to drug possession
even when they are innocent, because the system makes them feel they have no choice.
These cases also show that field tests often produce false positives and yet are sometimes
the only evidence of drug possession. Fortunately for the defendants, Harris County
invested the time and resources to test drugs after conviction. Harris County Public
Defender Alex Bunin told us that if other jurisdictions undertook the same effort, he
expected we would see that around the country indigent defendants plead guilty to drug
possession when they are innocent.” (Human Rights Watch, 2016).
This is interesting not merely from the perspective of promoting the “innocence” narrative, but
specifically because it impugns the ability for cops to be perceived as competent and effective
adjudicators of guilt and innocence under drug prohibition. As such, a research project that focuses
on limiting policing to be able to test for drugs accurately, with an explicit focus on the police’s
ability to “game” the test or the fundamental issues of field tests essentially taking the place of jury
trials in establishing guilt and innocence, would help delegitimize the very notion that drug
possession can be adjudicated in a criminal manner and thus help foster a drug decriminalization
narrative. Additionally, funding for a project, as was done in Texas, that attempts to exonerate
those convicted of drug possession based on false positive field tests could be a productive research
inquiry. This would also meet the objective of “heuristic” or applied research in that it would have
real-world results towards furthering the goal of the material liberation of oppressed people. It
would help individuals craft appeals that could lead to their exoneration and freedom. While this
would feed the myth of “innocence,” the real world material contribution to liberating people from
prison makes this effort a fruitful research effort. Again, these efforts must explicitly be defined
by researchers as delegitimizing the very notion that police should have the authority to police
drug possession, lest these efforts be recast by police “reformers” as a means to give them more
researchers for better and “more professional” testing. Researchers must be cognizant of deeply
embedded pro-police assumptive logic embedded in American society which can make even
efforts designed to challenge police authority into reasons to give them even more money and
support in the name of “reform”.
Moreover, researchers should be cautious when confronting the notion of empathy and
emphasizing the illegitimate suffering of the victims of the War on Drugs. While it is the
assumption that this sort of humanization creates identification with victims which is politically
productive, it assumes the experiences of those who are victimized are knowable to the audiences.
A reality which is dangerous as it creates the assumption that white audiences are able to
understand and identify with the suffering of African peoples on the terms of African peoples.
Where what more often happens is the deep suffering of people of African descent gets transposed
into political and moral narratives that are familiar to white audiences (Hartman, 2010). Columbia
University professor and MacArthur Genius award recipient Sidiya Hartman presents this analysis
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within the context of a critique of the reproduction of slave narratives, which often presents graphic
violence done to enslaved Africans in the name of educating the audiences. This creates suffering
as a spectacle which demands cathartic recognition. Obscuring the direct need for material change
and ignoring the uncomfortable dynamic of voyeurism and racial sadism that accompanies these
representations (ibid). Drug policy is an especially apt space for this critique, as no matter how
graphic the suffering of addicts is presented, it will lead many to argue this suffering was necessary
for the individual to “hit their bottom.” With a twelve-step ideology as a particularly powerful
frame to justify structural violence as necessary for the moral and spiritual awakenings which some
argue are prerequisites for sobriety. As such, researchers should not assume that graphic depictions
of suffering are politically productive for the communities they are attempting to advocate for.
Instead, they should focus extensively on an analysis of the institutions engaged with the issues of
drug decriminalization, the interactions between them, how the status quo exacerbates the
deracination of institutional capacity of communities to solve their problems, and how drug
decriminalization can be one tool to add capacity for the ability of communities to self determine
their futures. Not only does this express the ability of an African-centered research paradigm to
shift the frame of analysis from the individual to the collective, but it also expresses what Schiele
calls the “universalist” impulse of African-centered research, as this collective institutional
analysis must be equally applied to white and Latinx communities as it is for Black communities.
For example, calls for decriminalization must account for the reality that hyper incarceration, in
addition to being a racialized social control program for Black populations, is also a jobs program
for rural and suburban communities (Pfaff, 2018). Policing and prisons are some of the few sources
of jobs that provide middle-class salaries and benefits with no need to obtain a college degree
Creating a powerful incentive for these institutions to hold onto their power and a deep conception
in many communities that these institutions are economic pillars of their communities.
Decriminalization research has often presented alternative visions of policy formation around the
sanctions of drug possession. They have not presented an alternative vision for social
organizations that could undermine the institutions that benefit from the current arrangement, a
reality the African-centered vision of heuristic research sees as an oversight.
African-centered research also presents recommendations for the institutions that focus
their efforts on analyzing drug decriminalization.. First, policing must be seen comprehensively as
an institution, accounting for the heterogeneity among distinct policing entities and even the
diversity within policing institutions. There is no singular Maryland drug prohibition entity but a
variety of them that overlap and influence each other in often chaotic ways. State troopers enter a
variety of jurisdictions and may have distinct enforcement patterns than local police. Within local
police departments, different formations may be pursuing different strategies related to the
enforcement of drug prohibition. All of these institutions interact with federal law enforcement
entities, which, in addition to typical incentives and influences as Byrn illustrates, also engage with
federal institutions like fusion centers which can help shape local enforcement patterns and
practices. The recent data dump from “Blue Leaks” presents extensive data on the role fusion
centers play in engaging local policing and creating a culture within police departments that are
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conducive to aggressive, heavy-handed War on Drugs policing (Martinez and Lee, 2020). It might
be useful for researchers to look through this data dump and see if there is any relevant information
pertaining to Maryland. Moreover, no account of War on Drugs policing in Maryland would be
complete without an in depth analysis of the machinations around Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task
Force, which used the War on Drugs’ delegitimation of street level drug sellers as leverage to
violently attack and rob drug dealers, themselves becoming drug traffickers and engaging in other
forms of violence against the citizens of Baltimore (Lopez, 2018). Viewing the Gun Trace Task
Force not as the machinations of a few rogue cops, but as the interactions of the power imbalance
between the community and the police force, helps to clarify how having a more “expansive
research frame on police statutory authority,” as Woods recommends, might look within the
context of an Afrocentric research paradigm. This would mean analysis of drug decriminalization
must include analysis of civilian oversight institutions, including the limitations of their oversight
capacities because of legal obstacles such as the Maryland Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of
Rights. This would also require understanding drug prohibition as what John Pfaff describes as a
comprehensively broken legal system with several structural factors beyond the War on Drugs
which must be addressed in order to challenge the perverse incentive towards over-policing,
overproduction, overcharging, and the lack of support for public defenders. Researchers would do
well to engage his critique of the “standard model” explanation for hyper incarceration, centered
on an over-focus on the War on Drugs and “nonviolent drug offenders,” as it will be a useful
starting point for expanding frames of analysis for research on drug decriminalization.
Given the uniqueness of the American criminal legal system and our analysis of the
limitations of the Portuguese model, researchers should be dubious of claims that data from other
nations can serve as sufficient proof of the efficacy of drug decriminalization. Not only because of
the role of structural racism and anti-Blackness in America, but because of the clear difference in
medial infrastructure for the poor. Illustrated by the fact that America is one of the few
industrialized nations which still does not offer a guarantee of some basic form of universal health
care for its population. This does not, however, mean that other nations' experiences are not useful
places for research. An African-centered research paradigm would advocate for an increased focus
on nations which more accurately mirror the United States in their racial dynamics, such as Brazil
and South Africa. While these nations are typically ignored in decriminalization literature, both
have court rulings on cannabis decriminalization. Which, according to many, are typically not
enforced on the ground, have nascent legalization movements facing pushback, and are not linked
to larger social justice movements, both of which may serve as a necessary cautionary tale for the
efficiency of decriminalization in the United States (Nel, 2018; Veit, 2019).
It is within the methodology of institutional analysis and assessing community capacity
that we can offer suggestions on how to answer a critical research question in more detail: how
exactly does one define decriminalization. As previously stated, the standard model has an
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overreliance on the civil and criminal punishment paradigm and ignores the more comprehensive
frames of the criminalization of oppression endured by entire populations. How this might be
applied within the specific context of researching solutions to drug prohibition requires researchers
to engage the voices of individuals subjugated by dominant research methodology and to
understand their voices as critiques to the epistemic and political limitations embedded within
research on drug decriminalization. Afrocentric researchers have conveyed an understanding of
drug policy as epiphenomenal of the larger structure of anti-Black and anti-poor violence
embedded within American society, arguing that only comprehensive reorganization of American
society can address the root causes behind addiction. On this point, addiction researcher Burce
Alexander and African-centered researcher Jerome Schilie agree. Both argue that macro-level
reorgnaization of society, ranging from universal job guarantee and reparations for slavery to
wholescale elimination of neo-liberal globalizaed captialism, are nessessary to address the
sutuructral violence which drives individuals to problematic drug use (Alexander, 2010; Schiele,
2010). While these recommendations go beyond the scope of many research projects, this can
serve as a starting point to understand how these frames can be applied to research at a state-wide
level. First, this frame would caution researchers against the “decriminalization would save
money” frame of analysis. s Pfaff suggests, despite lofty claims, cost savings from incarcerating
fewer people is likely small and often projected. Indeed, he argues well-meaning researchers may
often inflate cost savings in an attempt to “strengthen” the argument for reform. In addition to
tacitly falling into a frame of austerity, this frame ignores the reality that many individuals see
investing in drug prohibition as a necessary investment in social stability. Trying to convince them
of the efficacy of decriminalization through the touting of cost savings is a largely futile exercise.
Drug policy reform analysis has often reflected a tacit libertarianism that argues that individuals
should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies without state regulation as long as no
one else is directly hurt by those actions. While this should be lauded in that it rejects as assumed
legitimacy of the authority of the state to extend regulation to individuals bodies, it fails to account
for the community-wide implications of the War on Drugs. Harms which requires the active
redress by the guilty party. In this case, the state of Maryland. This sentiment is best encapsulated
by a quote from African freedom fighter Malcolm X, who once said:
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress.
If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the
blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They
won't even admit the knife is there.” (MALCOLM X, TV interview, Mar. 1964)
When it comes to drug policy, decriminalization of drugs is equal to taking the knife out.
For researchers to produce analysis which reflect emancipatory praxis, an African research
paradigm would necessitate research and analysis on how to heal the wound. Several authors have
commented on the necessity for reparations for the War on Drugs, and given the possible
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legalization of adult use cannabis in Maryland producing a large pot of new tax revenue, it would
seem logical for researchers to link the analysis on drug decriminalization to calls for reparations
for the War on Drugs (Grandpre, 2020). Detailing the specifics of these reparations regimes is
beyond the scope of this analysis and likely beyond the scope of any subsequent research. What is
critical, however, is how reparations is framed centred on the notion of communities themselves
having the funding, capacity, and autonomy to decide for themselves how to repair the harm caused
by the War on Drugs (ibid). The assimilationist impulse Kendi presents in his research merely
points out harms to communities is not only insufficient, but potentially counterproductive. As the
dominant impulse in the face of it all shows the suffering of the Black community to believe
individuals must come into their community from the outside. Bringing them enlightenment and
refinement through inculcating ideologies and, most importantly, the institutions, of the dominant
society. From an Africancentered research paradigm, there would be no worse outcome from a
research project than for readers to see research on the harms of the War on Drugs and to interpret
this data in a manner where they convince themselves the solution to the harms done is to replace
the prison industrial complex with the nonprofit industrial complex. An assemblage of
philanthropic institutions are equally (sometimes even more so than police department) without
any formal mechanism of accountability to oppressed communities and are tasked with managing
and containing the suffering and social upheaval produced by a white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy rather than eliminating them (INCITE!, 2007). To counter the gravitational pull of
assimilationist thought and its tendency to believe the solution to the suffering of the Black
community is to transpose the ideology and infrastructure of the white community upon them, it
is necessary for research to explicitly reject the politics of assimilation and to present analysis
around how research suggests are the best ways to empower communities to use their own
institutions and cultural resources to address issues of addiction and violence in their communities.
While there are a bevy of community level interventions into addiction and violence in the
Black community, these interventions are woefully understudied by mainstream researchers.
Fortunately, there are several examples researchers may use as a starting point for further research.
Schile presents specific recommendations for future research on projects touching on addiction,
arguing it should incorporate an analysis on the intergenerational effect of slavery and whether the
“surviors guilt” of relatively affluent Blacks could be a factor in addiction, writing:
“Although much is made over the point that some affirmative-action policies punish
contemporary European-American males who had nothing to do with slavery and past
institutional racism, and thus represent a "two wrongs don't make a right" policy agenda,
less attention is devoted to the innocent victims of historic institutional racism and slavery
and the adverse corollaries this victimization has had for generations of families of color.
This is why the Afrocentric paradigm recommends that more re-search be funded for, and
devoted to, unraveling, identifying, and analyzing the long-term, intergenerational effects
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of slavery and institutional racism on not only the economic conditions of African-
American families but also the psychosocial functioning and well-being of these families.
If substance abuse is viewed partly as a reaction to severe psychosocial stress and
economic albatrosses, the opportunities provided by affirmative-action policies might help
to diminish substance abuse in the African- American community. Hence, future research
should examine the impact of enhanced educational and employment opportunities on
African Americans' level of substance use and abuse.
The latter recommendations focus on the victims of racial oppression, but what about the
political and economic beneficiaries of racial oppression? Since it was argued that their
privileged status can place them at risk of substance abuse, what can be done to alleviate
the fear, anger, and guilt associated with this privilege that can contribute to substance
abuse? Fundamentally, the system of racial oppression has to be eliminated to completely
destroy these feelings. Although the abolition of racial oppression may take just as long as
its creation and evolution, a few steps can be taken that might help ease, but perhaps not
eliminate, these feelings, particularly those of fear (i.e., anxiety) and guilt.” (Schile, 2013).
Jerome Schiele presents a summation of the research of Kobi Kambon, who argues that
programming which promote what he called an “African self-consciousness” (ASC) could have a
protective effect for Black people in relation to addiction, writing:
“The African self-consciousness (ASC) construct, discussed in the last chapter, can be
employed as an indicator of an African American's level of group commitment to other
people of African descent when one examines the four dimensions of the construct
presented by Kambon (1992, p. 56):
1. Awareness of one's African identity (a collective consciousness) and African cultural
heritage, and sees value in the pursuit of knowledge of self.
2. Recognition of African survival and positive development as one's number one priority.
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3. Respect for and active perpetuation of things African: African life and African cultural
institutions.
4. Maintaining a standard of conduct of resolute and uncompromising resistance to all
things anti-African.
Together, the dimensions of ASC echo a common theme: ethnic con-sciousness engenders
group commitment. Regarding drug abuse, it is assumed that as a youth's ASC
decreases,his or her level of substance abuse is likely to increase. It is further assumed that
when an African-American youth does not internalize high ASC, he or she will probably
not be as concerned with eliminating the oppression that black people face and, thus, would
have little desire to advance black people politically, culturally, and economically. To the
extent that a youth is not conscious of the oppression of people of African descent, one may
be unaware of the manifold subtle and insidious ways the system of oppression maintains
control over African Americans. The over availability of illicit drugs and liquor stores in
many African-American communities probably would not be recognized by persons with
low ASC as a possible strategy to dominate and manipulate African Americans. Therefore,
youths with this mind-set may be at a greater risk of abusing substances because they lack
understanding of the political and economic function of substance abuse within the context
of oppression, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Moreover, persons with low ASC, as
opposed to those with high ASC, may be less likely to participate in black liberation
struggles and, therefore, may fail to acknowledge that substance abuse significantly
inhibits their ability to optimally contribute to these struggles.
Some evidence suggests that the ASC construct may help to explicate self-destructive
behaviors among African-American drug abusers. In the only study uncovered that has
examined the effects of ASC on African-American drug abusers, Dixon and Azibo (1998)
found that African-American male crack-cocaine users who had ASC scores that
represented a higher level of group commitment tended to participate less in exploitative
means to earn a living than those who had ASC scores that demon-strated lower levels of
African-American group commitment. Earning a living via exploitative means was defined
by the authors as participation in thefts, robberies, selling stolen goods, and hustling
people in licit and illicit ways. Although Dixon and Azibo did not examine whether lower
ASC places one at greater risk of using or abusing drugs, their findings are important in
that ASC may help to explain the variance in criminal behavior among African-American
crack cocaine users and abusers. Future research needs to explore the effects of ASC
orientation on African Americans who become drug abusers and those who do not. In the
Dixon and Azibo study, all of the subjects were drug abusers.
Although not using the ASC construct, Gary and Berry (1985) found a significant
relationship between awareness of racial oppression and attitudes about substance abuse
among 411 randomly sampled African Americans. Awareness that racial oppression was
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a reality in the United States was a major dimension of what the researchers referred to as
a racial consciousness scale. When racial consciousness was correlated with their measure
of "attitudes toward substance abuse," respondents who had higher racial consciousness
were significantly less likely to tolerate substance abuse than those who had lower racial
consciousness. Indeed, in this study, racial consciousness was more important in
explaining substance abuse attitudes than were gender, age, church involvement,
education level, marital status, and community involvement.
When commitment to one's ethnic group has been conceived as an outcome of drug abuse,
adverse consequences also have been reported. Westermeyer (1995) demonstrates how
substance abuse can be pernicious to one's ethnic affiliation and cultural participation.
The abuse is adverse because it can cause what he refers to as cultural disruption, a
disruption not only in one's participation with the group but also in one's internalization
of the group's values, norms, and customs. In other words, the person becomes less
committed to the ethos and interests of his or her cultural group. Westermeyer also
suggests that the relationship between cultural disruption and substance abuse is
reciprocal in that the disruption can increase the severity of the abuse. This is indicated by
his statement that "The longer that these [cultural disruptive effects] have been present,
the longer the substance abuse is likely to have been present. If the cultural disruption is
extensive, the substance abuse is likely to be severe" (1995, p. 596). Applying
Westermeyer's ideas to this discussion could imply that lower levels of ASC for African-
American youths are tantamount to cultural disruption and could place them in jeopardy
of drug abuse and addiction. (Schiele, 2013).
This analysis fits well with Bruce Alexander’s analysis of the protective effects of “psycho-social
integration” in relation to addiction. If Alexander is to be believed, then it is a logical inference
that the programming most likely to produce effective psycho-social integration for Black
communities will likely be programming that explicitly pulls from the culture and resources of
African people and reflects their unique experiences here in America. This is furthered by the
findings of other researchers, such as Wilkinson and Pickket, who argue that the relative economic
equality of the Netherlands and Sweden has fostered cohesion and is a protective factor in limiting
addiction in these nations (Wilkinson and Pickket, 2014). Researchers impacted by the
assimilationist impulse might assume this research should be applied to America by arguing Black
Americans need deeper social cohesion with white America, necessitating deeper social-economic
integration between these communities. An African centered researcher would however
understand that addressing poverty within the Black community and establishing institutions
which build up Black civil society can also promote social cohesion within the Black community,
creating a similar protective effect. In relation to addiction, there are several examples of Black
human social service practitioners using African-centered thought to produce culturally
competitive addiction services (Rowe and Grillis, 1993; Longshore et al, 1998; Jackson, 1995;
Fairfax, 2016; Oshodi, 1999).
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This concept of promoting socio-economic cohesion and social integration within the
Black community also serves as a starting point to address another critical element of the drug
decriminalization debate which researchers must address. The fear of violence and the interaction
between street level drug sales and violence. Researchers within the standard narrative of
addiction, as previously noted, have argued that decriminalization would free up police resources
by eliminating the need for enforcing drug prohibition, allowing these resources to flow to
addressing more serious crimes. In addition to reflecting a misunderstanding of how policing
works, this argument fails to address the role fear of crime and specifically the spectre of violence
plays in relation to Karam’s analysis of Black bodies being a repository of societies fear of the
irrational, racialized “other”. By claiming decriminalization helps to stop violence, researchers risk
reinforcing the myth of the irrational racialized other which drives calls for prohibition. It is
important to point out the reality that, in aggregate, violence rates for whites and Blacks are
relatively similar, with condensed poverty being an aggravating factor in both communities
(Wilson, 2015). However, in an attempt to avoid feeding into the myth of Black on Black crime,
researchers risk downplaying the very real dynamic of increased Black morality though homicide
in impoverished urban areas and increased Black vulnerability, particularly Black males, to violent
death in general and regardless of class. Berthelot, alongside other researchers, presents a clear
summation of the data in regards to Black vulnerability to violent death, writing:
“To highlight racial variance, race-specific predicted probabilities of victimization
risk were calculated and are presented in Table 3. All predictors were set at their mean
with the exception of the structural disadvantage index and family income, which were
adjusted to assess predicted probabilities of victimization risk at various levels of individual
and aggregate deprivation. The probability that a Black individual in a commu-nity
with average levels of disadvantage and average family income will be murdered is 6 times
greater than that for a comparable White person. If the same Black individual lives in a
highly disadvantaged area, their risk grows to nearly 7 times that of a similarly situated
White person. In contrast, if the same Black person resided in a more affluent area he or
she would reduce their risk to only 5 times that of a similar White individual. To further
illustrate racial distinctions, a Black individual in the least deprived area with family
income in the 90th percentile, experiences a 2.1 times greater likelihood of being murdered
than a low-income White in a highly disadvantaged area.” (Berthelot et al.)
Rather than seeing this as an argument to be glossed over in the name of making an argument for
drug decriminalization, an African-centered research paradigm would view the increased rates of
violence-related mortality as a very real issue for people of African descent. This view would then
be used as an argument in favor of decriminalization. It is true that there is clear evidence of
increased violence in Black communities, but there is little clear evidence that increased funding
for police operations has any long term deterrent effect on this violence (Alexander, 2020).
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Scholars of the history of African culture have analyzed this dynamic for decades. One of the
most insightful theorists of why historical violence towards people of African descent relates to
their current vulnerability to violent death is former City University of New York professor Amos
Wilson. In his seminal work titled “Black-on-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-
Annihilation in Service of White Domination”, Wilson makes the argument that individuals in the
Black community that commit homicide should be viewed as the externalization of a suicidal
impulse, writing:
“The rites of passage through racist White American-dominated society is extremely
stressful for Black youth. This is more so the case for the Black male since he receives the
bnint of the White supremacist attack against Black America. Stripped of appropriate male
support, guidance, protection, education, and other important coping skills by a White
racist system which fears his Afrocentric competence, he is lefi vulnerable to the thousands
of little nicks and burns, physical and psychological insults, which cumulatively push him
toward self-annihilation. Not allowed the privileges and status of full and unfettered
manhood by White racist male domination, a significant number of African American males
are miniaturized or are often led to express their “manhood” in self-destructive ways: in
ways harmful to other Black males and the Black community in general. Immaturized by
White racist oppression, void of overarching and long-term Afrocentric goals which
provide them with maximum and healthy control over their impulses (including impulses
to kill themselves) they may commit suicide. Without Afrocentric self-definition, possessed
by an introjected alien identity, and racked by neurotic and psychotic conflict, the Black
male readily becomes subject to White racist psychopolitical, psychopathological
promptings and persecutions. Consequently, he may come to think that the only efi‘ecfive
solution to his problems lie in physical or mental self-abnegation.
To be an African American male in White America is to live with anger and hostility, to
feel the need to attack, to violently retaliate, to even the score. These murderous feelings
without appropriate catharsis, sublimation, channeling, or targets yet in need of outward
expression are often turned inward resulting in self-annihilation. White racist American
society, harboring a poorly concealed death-wish against its Black captives, generally
leaves but a few outlets for the release of societally provoked Black male rage: all
inappropriate! They include the abject submission to oppression, narcosis by drugs or
religion, deliberate ignorance, unending, unrewarding protests, futile sub rosa grumbling,
over- compensatory status striving, criminality, and homicidal attacks on other Black
males or on himself suicide). Having internalized white racist values and attitudes, having
been possessed by his introjected white racist demon, the suicidal African American blames
his victimized self. Identified with his implanted alien spirit, he harbors a death-wish
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against the victims ofWhite racist oppression amongst whom he himself is numbered.
Looking at the world through jaundiced white racist eyes, he sees the enemy:
And the enemy is himself.” (Wilson,1990).
Analysis of Black suicide rates have revealed that the Black suicide rate, far lower than the
rate of suicide in the white community, is nearly made up by a high number of Black homiciderelated
deaths. Though correlation is not causation, the relationship between these two rates fits
perfectly into Wilson’s theory (NPR, 2013). This insight not only places homicide rates in the
Black community within the proper historical context, it presents a path towards solutions to the
issue, one that, coincidentally, mirrors Kambon’s research on drug use. Creating institutions which
can address internalized self-hatred through the establishment of psycho-social integration within
the Black community and African identity. Schiele presents ideas on how policy could address
these dynamics, specifically among Black young people. Arguing that human social service
interventions which center on spiritual work can address violence, writing:
“The fundamental recommendation that ensues from the latter discus-sion is to alleviate
and eliminate spiritual alienation from the sociocultural fabric of the United States. Most
of these activities would have to occur in the macroarenas of human service work, but there
is an important role for microlevel human service interventions as well. First, major
knowledge validation and information dissemination institutions in the United States
should reexamine concepts of the inherent nature of human beings. Institutions such as
religious organizations, schools, and the media need to reexplore the value in promoting
the pessimistic, inherently mischievous image of humans and the implications it has for
fostering unfavorable and antagonistic human relationships. This, of course, requires these
institutions to reevaluate some of the core values of Eurocentric culture and their
contribution to an extraordinarily violent society.
In regard to young people, these institutions must be particularly sensitive to youths
because they are impressionistic and because they represent the hope of improving society.
One strategy that might be used to alleviate spiritual alienation in these institutions is to
encourage a more holistic, spiritual, and optimistic concept of human beings and for adults
to serve as greater behavioral models of this notion. This can be achieved by promoting
and teaching holistic reasoning among youths to offset the focus on fragmented or analytic
reasoning, which some say lays the foundation for the objectification and, ultimately, the
exploitation of human beings (see Ani, 1994; Burgest, 1981; Schiele, 1994).
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Holistic reasoning or logic is thinking predicated on at least two properties: the first is the
union of affect (feeling) and thought (Ani, 1994; Bell, 1994), and the second is the
spiritualization of human beings. The union of affect and thought recognizes the
epistemological importance of both feelings and thoughts and that both can be seen as two
transparent and penetrable sides of the same coin. Acknowledging the interconnectedness
of feelings and thought allows youths to make decisions that more completely tap the
multidimensional makeup of their being. This allows young persons to get in touch with
latent aspects of themselves that can serve as
new avenues through which to achieve a greater capacity for positive potentiality and
change. The spiritualization of human beings is the belief that at the core of the human
being is a spiritual essence that releases vast capabilities for interconnectedness, or what
Nobles (1980) calls "spiritual oneness." Bringing youths into spiritual oneness helps them
(1) to understand that they are spiritually, socially, and mutually connected to others; (2)
to acknowledge the sacredness of all human life; and (3) to appreciate the many shades
and variations of human beings and human experiences. This transformation from
materialistic/individualistic thinking to spiritual/holistic thinking among those who seek
professional help can be brought about by a therapeutic process known as the Belief
Systems Analysis (see Myers, 1988).
Although this helping/healing process can be conducted through direct, one-on-one
practice, it should be noted that the Afrocentric paradigm of human services invariably
views the broader society, in which the individual exists and in which the Eurocentric
worldview prevails, as being the primary target for change.
There also is a role for human service workers who are policy practitioners. The
government, at the federal, state, and local levels, can promote holistic logic and spiritual
wellness by supporting and enacting legislation that speaks more to meeting the holistic
and spiritual needs of citizens as well as their material needs. One of the reasons for the
existence of spiritual alienation is the downplaying or repudiation of a holistic concept of
humans by governmental agencies that place substantive emphasis on material and
physical needs. Although these needs are certainly important, this predominant focus
communicates, though subtly, to the citizen that needs of the soul and interpersonal
relationships are less critical. The domain of social welfare policy has been too restricted,
and social welfare policy analysts and practitioners should work more to reconceptualize
the meaning of "welfare" to highlight human needs that speak more to spiritual and
interpersonal development. Using their skills as analysts and practi--
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tioners, these human service professionals should then endeavor to interject this
conceptualization into public and social legislation by influencing the thinking of elected
officials, executives, and the larger citizenry. The roles discussed by Jansson (1994) can
be applied to achieve this objective. (Schiele, 2013)
It is these sorts of Black-led interventions that center on spiritual elements of psycho-social
integration which should be researched as the solutions to addiction and the violence so often
associated with drug addiction and the illicit drug trade. It is understandable that researchers might
not want to tie their research outcomes to explicit recommendations as there is a risk of
confirmation bias. But it is important researchers explicitly study the degree to which community
capacity to address issues like addiction and violence has been so deeply disrupted by systemic
poverty and the War on Drugs. Researchers must also study roads these communities could take
to reverse this structural deracination. One researcher who does this well is Todd Clear. He has
attempted to demonstrate, through data analysis, that hyper incarceration undermines community
capacity to build civil society because it leads to increased crime. It might be useful to look further
into the footnotes of Clear’s work to see if there are other researchers who give recommendations
on how to quantify the ways hyper incarceration impacts civil society in targeted communities.
Clear’s work is useful in that it describes the ability of social organization, social cohesion, and
community stability in having a protective effect in deterring crime. Though it appears that his
findings have not been applied specifically to addiction nor have they been analyzed from an
African-centered research perspective, which accounts for anti-Blackness. Such an approach
would challenge Clear’s use of the logic of mainstream criminology. For example, the viewing of
social institutions as being necessary because they produce “informal social control”, a frame
which centers on the elimination of crime and not the flourishing of community as the goal of
public policy.
Finally, it is necessary that research study historical precedents in the context of
decriminalization in the United States. In the earlier mentioned discussions of the
decriminalization of cannabis and traffic infractions, Wood describes the decriminalization of
sodomy as an example of the need to account for expanding the frame of decriminalization. He
also expands his analysis on the limitations of decriminalizing traffic violations by citing an
example of judicial decriminalization being rolled back by a state legislature, writing:
“In 1971, Colorado was the fourth state to follow this approach.77 An important feature
of Colorado’s repealed antisodomy law was that it included a solicitation provision78
against oral copulation, which made LGBT civilians vulnerable to over-policing in public
settings.79 Through established vice squads in major police departments (including the
Denver Police Department), police officers conducted concentrated police surveillance,
sting operations, and raids in public places and establishments known to attract LGBT
people. These aggressive tactics not only encouraged police harassment against LGBT
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people in public and commercial establishments, but also fuelled their arrests for
solicitation even when no act of oral copulation occurred.80
After Colorado repealed its antisodomy law, one would expect that police regulation of
same-sex affection and intimacy would decline. Yet, it increased.81 One motivating factor
for this increase was that when the Colorado legislature repealed the antisodomy law, it
simultaneously passed a public indecency law that criminalized (1) making a “facility”
available to be used “for or in aid of deviate sexual intercourse,” and (2) ”lewd fondling
or caress of the body of another person.”82 Police invoked these new criminal provisions
to harass LGBT people by raiding gay and lesbian establishments and arresting clientele
simply for holding hands or kissing. As William N. Eskridge has explained, the effect of the
new provisions changed little more than the technical crime it was that LGBT people were
harassed and arrested under.83 In Denver, police harassment against LGBT civilians was
so rampant after the repeal of Colorado’s antisodomy law that hundreds of members of the
main Denver gay and lesbian organization—the Denver Gay Coalition—protested at
Denver City Council meetings.84 In 1973, the coalition filed a lawsuit against the police
department for a pattern of harassment and the selective enforcement of Colorado’s public
indecency law, which was settled the following year.85 In the settlement, the city agreed
that Denver police officers (particularly, officers in the department’s vice squad) would
stop raiding gay and lesbian establishments and initiating arrests for “kissing, hugging,
dancing, [and] holding hands.”86 Nevertheless, arrests doubled within a year of the
settlement.87 In addition, police regularly stood outside of Denver’s most popular gay and
lesbian bar and issued jaywalking tickets to clientele.88
This example can be interpreted in at least two ways—the second of which more clearly
speaks to the gap between pure decriminalization and policing. On one hand, Colorado’s
simultaneous repeal of the antisodomy law and creation of the public indecency crime
arguably reflected legislative intent to constrain same-sex affection to the domestic private
realm. Some evidence supports this view. For instance, as Eskridge has discussed, the
Colorado legislative committee justified the provision aimed at same-sex caressing on the
grounds that it considered those acts a “gross flouting of community standards.”89 Under
this view, the legislative reforms did not serve to constrain aggressive policing of LGBT
people in the public and commercial realms. On the other hand, the Colorado reforms
illustrate the limits of confining the force of pure decriminalization to the domain of
sanctions. Colorado’s pure decriminalization of sodomy eliminated possibilities for the
state to punish LGBT people for private consensual sexual conduct. At the same time, the
reform failed to capture many significant aspects involving how police used the antisodomy
law in practice to harass LGBT populations and to regulate same-sex affection and
intimacy in public settings. Therefore, the example further illustrates the high stakes that
the gap between pure decriminalization and police authority involves, especially for overpoliced
minority communities…
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Notably, the trial and appellate courts decided the case on Fourth Amendment and state
constitutional grounds. The Supreme Court of Washington, however, stressed that it need
not address the complexities of the constitutional issues because it had a statute at its
disposal delineating police authority during civilian detentions based on noncriminal
traffic offenses.283 Therefore, the court was able to prevent the pedestrian’s noncriminal
traffic violation from serving as a gateway into the criminal justice system in light of this
existing statute. As explained infra Part V.B, expanding conceptions of decriminalization
beyond sanctions to capture police authority might open possibilities for more of these
types of Restrictions.
Unfortunately, the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington had the opposite effect.
After the court’s decision, the Washington Legislature amended the statute to permit
officers to “check for outstanding warrants” during stops involving any traffic
infraction.284 After the amendment, courts upheld the authority of police officers to check
for outstanding warrants against the backdrop of both noncriminal traffic violations
involving vehicles285 as well as the noncriminal jaywalking violation.286 Thus, on one
hand, the amendment illustrates the unwillingness of some lawmaking bodies to restrict
opportunities for police to control civilians through access to personal information in ways
that have possible criminal ramifications, in spite of decriminalization efforts…
(Woods,2014)
Washington state’s efforts to decriminalize serves as a warning to researchers. Even when it seems
that successes have been achieved without addressing the social infrastructure around prohibition,
short term policy victories face the possibility of producing net-widening effects and even being
rolled back in its entirety. Colorado shows that a police force motivated by a desire to enforce laws
in a discriminatory manner can find justification even in the face of decriminalization. As net
widening effects will likely dull enthusiasm for decriminalization, the effects should be studied
and analyzed in-depth. If the presence of net widening in Prince George’s County in regards to
cannabis decriminalization were mirrored in Baltimore City or other Maryland jurisdictions,
researchers might do well to analyze what this could mean for the possibility of the
decriminalization of other drugs in Maryland. This may be a fruitful avenue for further research.
At a fundamental level, researchers should understand that, despite the seductive desire to
fall into the standard model of decriminalization research, an issue as comprehensive as the history
of the carceral state of violence requires comprehensive analysis. There is no one African-centered
research paradigm, nor is there a static set of findings that research using these methodologies
must produce. Researchers must use all the tools at their disposal to provide the most accurate
information available on the topics they set out to understand. More than anything, the Afrocentric
research paradigm argues that existing methodologies, despite their illusions of objectivity, are
woefully lacking in their attempt to provide comprehensive analysis of issues. Despite
mischaracterizations of African-centered research paradigms as being dangerously “non-
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objective,” they are essential to correct the bias tacit embedded within the current system. It is
understandable that researchers might want to project the Portugal decriminalization experiment
in the most positive light possible, but our understanding of the dangers of applying this model to
the United States shows how necessary African-centered research is as a corrective to the bias
within contemporary research. Researchers must remain humble in the face of addressing such a
complex issue, willing to adjust and readjust their preconceived notions in relation to their research
process. More than anything, the admonition of scholars of African descent that all research is
political must be remembered. This may feel like a daunting realization for researchers acclimated
to the belief of themselves as dispassionate arbiters of objective data. Researchers should put this
realization into context: white supremacy is a global system of control which precedes the
contemporary era by at least 500 years. A recognition of the political role of research is not a
demand to address whtie supremacy in its totality with complete accuracy. Such thinking actually
over-estimates the role of the research, positing them as holding the responsibility to “save”
oppressed communities with their research. The goal of the researcher is to do their small piece to
produce knowledge which explains to the world how white supremacy has inhibited the ability for
communities to save themselves and to use data, coupled with intense analysis, to present
advocates and lawmakers with the tools to help restore that capacity. The hope is that this analysis,
and the tools presented herein, can set researchers on the path towards achieving this goal.
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