Imani Woods*

FIVE YEARS AGO, IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT since black folks catch the most hell because of the way America reacts to drug use, I ought to be right up front in the struggle to institute harm reduction practices in the U.S.A.

Now hear me out! I know that 76 percent of all drug addicts are white, but I also know that 61 percent of all those prosecuted for drug-related offenses are non-white. It's got something to do with the way we look!

The other day, I'm listening to one of Malcolm X's speeches, and he points out why he believes that New York City's Harlem is a police state. Of sound judgment, the brother was reacting to the then-chief of police's contemptuous promotion of a "no-knock entry" statute.

As long as the law of this land says it's a crime to possess drugs, they can throw us up against the wall for any suspicion, and they will. This system has not rid our neighborhoods of unsterile, foul chemical mixtures which contain from 10 percent and upward of opiates such as heroin. Crack is plentiful everywhere. So what's the point? The point is, black and Latino folk get to be harassed, detained, jailed and dehumanized.

Racial disparity in prosecutions and convictions are not only the distinction of local and state law enforcement, but also endure on the federal level. Not a single white person has been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in federal courts serving Los Angeles since Congress enacted mandatory sentences for crack dealers in 1988. Los Angeles U.S. Attorney Nora Manella had to admit that federal agents have focused their energies in the black and Latino neighborhoods. Ninety-six percent of the crack defendants in federal courts nationwide are non-white.

Black and Latino people go to jail for 10 years minimum on an offense. Law enforcement and politicians have the license to lock us up, and that doesn't keep us from using!

European countries and the Australians have long ago gotten a clue. By the use of deductive reasoning, they came to a well-balanced, sensitive decision.

First they examined their drug dependency problem and discovered:

•    People use drugs because they want to;

•    People who become drug-dependent will practice drug-seeking behaviors;

•    When drug users have adequate stock of the required drug, they are pretty okay to deal with; and

•    It is poor public health practice to combine judgmental moralistic attitudes with life-sustaining efforts.

There is no way you can convince me that, if the majority of those incarcerated were white, the United States would not quick, fast and in a hurry find alternatives to its shamefully antiquated practice of treating users as adversaries. Disease, death, crime and unnecessary violence are dubious comrades of illicit drug use in the world's most industrialized nation. People ofAfrican and Hispanic descent disproportionately endure these consequences.

Drug czar Lee Brown believes that to accept harm reduction measures is to surrender. Surrender to what, my brother, if you're talkin' to me as an African-American woman, whose life has been effectively shackled by these inoperative methods? Why contribute to the corrupt notion that you can wi// a person who uses drugs into understanding that abstinence is like "doing the right thing"?

There should be full-service harm reduction programs here in the American nightmare, just like there are abstinence-based chemical dependency programs.

Justification for today's one-option approach to service provision for drug users is impossible to imagine. The Swiss and Germans have opened up injection rooms. These are the civilized equivalents of our dirty alleys and stairways. Clean cotton, clean cookers, sterile syringes and practitioners help stop the spread of HIV, Hepatitis B and other infections. Compare this with my brothers and sistas using cigarette filters and Pepsi can tops, and receiving determined hostility from health care providers. In no other area of technology or service provision is America so content with outdated, leftover strategies.

Black folk: We got to wake up! The intrigue is misleading, the forgery apparent. Harm reduction is our battle, too. Every time we see a sister pregnant and dope-sick, we should be outraged that some idiot is telling her she ought to get clean and sober — like she don't know that or long for abstinence, since that's all she's ever heard. As an example, my cousin James should not have to lose his job and not be able to support his kids due to his noncompliance with abstinence, as evidenced in a urine sample.

Negligence is the only way to account for a federal government that declares itself wise and expedient while it recoils from the dissemination of sterile injection equipment, declaring, "Just say NO!"

Hostility to harm reduction has other roots, no doubt, but we can overcome that ifwe step up and demand sensible, caring services for our brothers and sisters who are using.

Don't let this fight be about-pie-in-the-sky notions of a drug-free world. We all know better than to expect that. It's about helping our community. And it's about time.

* Imani Woods is a substance abuse education specialist at the University of Washington. This article is adapted from one in the Fall 1995 edition of Harm Reduction Communication, the newsletter of the Harm Reduction Coalition.