It’s tough to be
poor and minority in America these days.
It’s harder to vote, harder to get healthcare, harder to get credit,
harder to get to work on public transportation, harder to get an education--and
now, it’s harder to be a parent.
If you live in New York and are poor, you don’t even have to commit a
crime or show evidence of neglect to have your children taken away from you. That’s what happened to Penelope Harris
when police found 10 grams of marijuana (about a third of an ounce) while
searching her Bronx apartment. She
contended the marijuana belonged to her boyfriend. The amount was also below the legal limit for even a
misdemeanor prosecution. And yet,
on the basis of this find alone, child welfare authorities took her son and her
niece, who was living with her as a foster child, and placed them in foster
care on neglect charges, her niece not returned to her home for more than a
year. Ms. Harris, who had no prior
criminal record, was forced to weather a lengthy neglect investigation as well
as a drug test, both of which exonerated her.
David Simon, the
genius creator of the TV series The Wire, calls
the War on Drugs “the war on the underclass.” And nowhere has this war been taken to new heights of
cruelty and absurdity in the recent cases in New York. Neglect charges have been brought
against parents based on sub-prosecutable amounts of marijuana found in the
home, or even, more ridiculously, on admitted past use. Some parents have even lost custody of
their children. Recreational
marijuana use is something that is de facto if not de jure decriminalized for the vast majority of Americans, but New York is
ripping children out of the arms of poor parents capriciously and with impunity,
not only breaking up families but ruining job prospects (should these neglect
charges stick, the parent may be barred from occupations that involve contact
with children).
In New York state,
marijuana has been effectively decriminalized. To be caught possessing up to 25 grams results in a
citation, similar to a traffic ticket.
But a recent article in The New York Times explored a current practice of welfare agencies taking children away
from parents on the basis of these non-prosecutable amounts of. For this, prosecutors have marshalled
the power (and expense) of the courts in a large-net sweep, breaking up
families and putting the burden on them to prove they are not unfit parents. But not only did the court system run
rampant on poor parents, who had little legal power or connections, but also,
tellingly, "these cases were rarely if ever filed against white
parents."
This Reefer
Madness all over again, revamped and reshaped into a cudgel with which to
torment the minority poor. The
original 1936 film was a melodramatic-campy fantasy of the dangers of marijuana, implying it
drove the most timid of smokers to rape, hallucinations, homicide, nyphomania,
and suicide (a particularly funny scene also suggests cannabis may cause bad
piano-playing), to help set the cultural atmosphere needed for marijuana’s
prohibition in 1937. A powerful
countermand was necessary to reverse the accurate perception of cannabis, which
had, prior to its criminalization, had been listed in the official U.S.
Pharmacopeia (USP), the official public standards-setting authority for all
prescription and over-the-counter medicines, as a useful, relatively safe and
effective analgesic and anti-depressive.
Not even a year
after its criminalization, a scientific panel commissioned by, ironically, New
York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, promptly recommended re-legalization. In 1988, DEA Administrative Law Judge
Francis Young restated that cannabis is "the safest therapeutically active
substance known to man."
Toxicologists agree that cannabis has almost no lethal dose, making it
safer than quotidian household substances such as alcohol, caffeine, even
water.
Perhaps
this could only happen in America, where large swaths of the population can be
convinced to shun perfectly obvious evidence from scientists, be it global
climate change, evolution, or cannabis, in favor of an absurdist,
politically-charged view, if that view is promulgated long enough and with
enough conviction and/or effectively uses fear to trump logic. The way racism and xenophobia were
exploited to push through the 1936 decision (marijuana being associated both
with illegal Mexican immigration and black jazz musicisns) this harmless plant
has once again taken on the mantle of “demon weed,” a synecdoche for insinuations
of negligent parenting among the minority underclass--simply for being poor and
minority.
The
new-old interpretation being used is against these parents is the “gateway drug
theory,” a particularly cynical
trope when considering that it was used to almost comical effect during the
McCarthy era by suggesting that marijuana caused communism (marijuana leads to
heroin, which comes from opium, which comes from communist China, etc.—that is,
if one wants to willfully forget that China’s opium was forced upon it by the
British, during the Opium Wars).
Numerous scientific studies have not only debunked this myth, but Harry
Anslinger, the anti-cannabis zealot largely responsible for the prohibition of
cannabis in 1936, later had to admit in front of Congress that the “gateway
drug” theory was false. Yet,
decades later, here is Michael Fagan, of the Administration for Children’s
Services, stating in the Times that “We
find that admitted marijuana use masks other substance abuse” a statement made
with no scientific backing, even with 2006 University of Pittsburgh study
suggesting the opposite is true.
In fact, lawyers for the accused families point out that investigators
brought the negligence cases first, then only retroactively searched for other
drug use. In the Harris case,
where the mother had two children removed from her home, drug tests showed she
wasn’t using any drugs, marijuana or otherwise.
Because marijuana
is still a controlled substance in this country, little scientific research has
been done on its effects on family life.
However, consider that a high-profile report this year by the Global
Commission on Drug Policy, which includes former U.N. chief Kofi Annan and past
presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, which urged ending the war on drugs,
particularly the criminalization
of marijuana. We have the examples
of highly developed countries, such as the Netherlands, where social and legal
acceptance of its recreational and medicinal use does not seem to have resulted
in troves of criminally neglected children. Even Mexico, a country we associate with drug violence, in
2009 decriminalized marijuana and cocaine, and so far the tsunami of child
neglect has not materialized.
While New York
prosecutors may believe that marijuana is somehow antithetical to a healthy
family, in California, suburban mothers were a major constituency pushing for
recreational legalization in the most recent elections. Certainly no one considers moderate
enjoyment of other psychoactive drugs such as alcohol or coffee to be grounds
for charging parent negligence, and yet these substances on a toxicology level
are much more dangerous to children than cannabis.
Our country has
become an odd amalgam of a Puritan past that casts suspicion upon anything that
gives pleasure, while its capitalistic nature encourages the rich to enjoy
their spoils. In this
quasi-theology, poor people are sinners and should therefore be denied any
pleasure in their life (a recent Fox News report disparaged the poor in America
as not even being really poor, as many enjoyed “amenities” such as
refrigerators); for the wealthy, being rich and successful is a virtue in
itself, and anything they do is wonderful, the same way poor minority
shoplifters go to jail for stealing infant formula while the upperclass rich
are thought of with amusement if not fondness for their “kleptomania.” Even more unfairly, while whites in New
York City use marijuana at roughly twice
the rate of Hispanics and blacks, according to data from the New York State
Division of Criminal Justice Services, Hispanics are arrested for marijuana
possession at 3.5 times the rate of whites, 7.8 times for blacks.
If the New York
agencies believe cannabis to be such a clear and identifiable danger to
children, we await the dragnets in affluent areas. Perhaps a suburban man who installs a wet bar in his rec
room also needs to have his children taken away from him by child welfare
authorities, as abuse of alcohol has
been found to be highly correlated to child abuse and neglect by numerous
studies. Further, all of the last
three American presidents--all parents—could have been under suspicion by New
York standards, having admitted to past marijuana use.
At a time of
strapped state budgets, as citizens we need to ask ourselves what is the cost
of prosecuting these marijuana cases that are not criminal to begin with, but
even more importantly, we need to ask ourselves what is the cost to society in
needlessly subjecting children to the trauma of removal from their homes, the
taint of presumed guilt on their parents, the time and money and psychic damage
borne by these parents who need to prove their innocence? With the stresses and strains on
today’s poor and minority families seemingly multiplying every day, it’s
madness to tear families apart based upon another cannabis fiction.
And more: California Doctors' Group endorses marijuana legalization.
