Drug data on parents and children
What’s race got to do with it?

Timely from the Top: An occasional column by Alice Ray

• New guidelines will begin to mitigate the huge disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine convictions that has fallen along racial lines, more severely affecting African Americans by ratios of 10 – 100 to 1.      
• Teens’ use of non-addictive, but illegal and potentially habituating marijuana is down; but their use of addictive prescription painkillers is up.

What do these two stories have to do with each other?

The artificial separation under the law of two forms of the same drug has contributed greatly to the disproportionate representation of African Americans at every level of the criminal justice system.  Beginning to undo this historical injustice can have positive “ripple effects,” not the least of which is returning many parents, especially fathers, to the communities where they have children. (Yes, most drug offenders are parents). However, unlike their more affluent, mostly Caucasian, drug using counterparts, these parents are at high risk to be involved in further crime just to continue to finance their addiction.  Without culturally competent, evidence-based intervention to address the underlying risk factors that give rise to that addiction, they are likely to continue to fill the prisons.

It’s great that fewer teens are using marijuana; at least it would be great, if they weren’t instead gravitating to the much more addictive drugs to be found in their parents’ medicine cabinets. In the last 30 days as many as 1 in 20 middle schoolers and 1 in 10 high schoolers have used prescription narcotics that were prescribed for someone other than themselves.  That use is illegal.  But almost no affluent abusers of prescription drugs will end up in prison.  Affluent parents and/or children – if they are lucky – will receive evidence-based treatment and recover from their addiction.  If not, they are likely to quietly – or at least secretly – tear apart their families. Children will undermine their education and parents potentially damage their careers, all without ever seeing a court room.

Race, class, and economics  (both corporate and underground trade in narcotics) all play a part in this dynamic and need to be addressed. Another obvious, yet rarely acknowledged factor in all of this is simple human pain.  

We need to find a way to ask “what hurts?” at both the collective and individual level.  We need to develop a personal and collective will to eliminate a lot of preventable pain, by addressing structural inequalities, and reducing expressions of human meanness.  But we also need to foster resilience, the capacity to endure a certain amount of discomfort in life and be strengthened, rather than defeated, by it.

Comments?

More Timely from the Top:
10/19/07 Birth control for 6th graders? Ripple Effects response
10/11/07 Fall out from school discipline... Two stories
09/25/07 In light of Jena
07/11/07 Alice Ray on Recent Supreme Court Ruling