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

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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