Faith-based Drug Wars

Sun Aug 17 13:26:07 PDT 2003

I'm starting to worry less about Brinworld and more about the Republic of
Gilead...

Source: Working for Change
Pubdate: August 8, 2003
Author: Bill Berkowitz
Webpage: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15420

Faith-based drug wars 

08.08.03 - What do advocating "religious hiring rights," a $4 billion workplace
retraining bill, and the war on drugs have in common? The short answer: Bring on
the faith-based organizations! 

Although more than 30 months have passed since President Bush announced the
centerpiece of his domestic agenda -- his faith-based initiative -- and no
significant broader efforts to fund his initiative has emerged from Congress,
the administration continues to move ahead on a number of fronts. 

Bush's latest faith-based proposal involves enlisting religious youth groups in
the war on drugs. According to the Washington Times, the administration recently
printed 75,000 copies of a guidebook to the drug wars called "Pathways to
Prevention: Guiding Youth to Wise Decisions." The 100-page pamphlet "seeks to
teach youth leaders how to handle questions and concerns about substance abuse."
In addition to the publication, there's a new Web site and an e-mail newsletter.

The new anti-drug project is built around three premises which are spelled out
in a fact sheet titled "Marijuana and Kids: Faith": 

1) "Religion plays a major role in the lives of American teens;" 

2) "Religion and religiosity repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult
marijuana and substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can
lead to marijuana and substance use;" and 

3) "Youth turn to faith communities [but] most faith institutions [with] youth
ministries [do not] incorporate significant teen substance abuse prevention
activities." 

Krissy Oechslin, assistant director of communications at the Washington,
DC-based Marijuana Policy Project, the nation's largest marijuana policy reform
organization, is concerned about the faith-based effort. "We do not oppose
efforts to teach kids the truth about drugs. But the one thing that will likely
be conspicuously missing from this faith-based initiative is any discussion
about the effects of our drug laws," Oechslin told me in a telephone interview. 

"You can talk all you want about prevention and reducing demand but the fact of
the matter is, nearly 750,000 people were arrested for marijuana violations in
2001; nearly 90% of those were for simple possession," Oechslin pointed out.
"Despite the fact they are in a religious setting, they will likely avoid
significant ethical questions raised by the drug wars, such as whether kids
should be put into prison for using marijuana. If you talked with John Walters
about this he would probably say that these kinds of questions are irrelevant to
the conversation." 

Moving forward on faith

Bush's faith-based anti-drug effort is the latest in a series of moves advancing
his faith-based initiative. In late-June, the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Organizations spelled out its position on a concept called
"religious hiring rights." In a position paper titled "Protecting the Civil
Rights and Religious Liberty of Faith-Based Organizations: Why Religious Hiring
Rights Must Be Preserved," the administration argued religious organizations
that receive government grants should be allowed to hire anyone they darn well
please. 

At least two pieces of legislation with "religious hiring rights" provisions are
currently under consideration by Congress: "The School Readiness Act of 2003,"
H.R. 2210, allows religious organizations receiving government funds to provide
Head Start services to discriminate in their hiring practices; and the $4
billion Workforce Reinvestment and Adult Education Act -- passed by the full
House on a party-line 220-204 vote -- also included a similar faith-based
exemption. 

'Faith: The Anti-Drug'

At a press conference surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic community
leaders, John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
said: "Faith plays an important role when it comes to teen marijuana prevention.
We are urging youth ministers, volunteers and faith leaders to integrate drug
prevention messages and activities into their sermons and youth programming and
are providing them with key tools and resources to make a difference. 

"As long as [America's youth] have, in their minds, the expectation that drug
abuse comes as a rite of passage, we will continue to lose too many of our young
people." (Isn't it amazing how many press conferences Bush Administration
officials have held surrounded by Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious
leaders?) 

"The reality is a lot of people don't know how to talk about these issues," said
Jim Towey, the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives. "According to data from Monitoring the Future, 90 percent of teens
in the U.S. are affiliated with a religious denomination and 43 percent of
eighth graders attend religious services weekly. Churches, temples and mosques
are well positioned to cultivate anti-drug values and teach effective coping
tools to deal with negative peer pressure," said Towey. 

The new campaign's slogan -- "Faith. The Anti-Drug" -- appears to indicate that
Walters, appointed drug czar by Bush in May 2001, is turning down the volume
from an earlier anti-marijuana ad campaign focused on teens. That high-powered
effort was aimed at linking teenagers using marijuana to the funding of
terrorist organizations and support for terrorism. 

Walters, characterized as a "drug 'hawk' well known for his moral condemnation
of drug use and his criticism of Clinton's drug war techniques," by Salon's
Janelle Brown, pointed out that "we need to be candid" about the situation
confronting America's youth. Being candid, however, has not been one of the drug
czar's strong suits. 

If Walters were truly candid he would talk about the billions of dollars wasted
on the war on drugs; he would talk about the succession of cynical anti-drug
advertising campaigns run by high-powered and well-connected ad agencies whose
only success has been in lining its own pockets with tax-payer funds; and he
would talk about the hundreds of thousands of people languishing in prisons
because of marijuana-related convictions. 

In May, 2002, the Village Voice's Cynthia Cotts reported that a Wall Street
Journal article citing the results of a Walters-authorized survey -- conducted
by the private research firm Westat and the University of Pennsylvania -- "shows
the government's anti-drug ads have completely failed to slow down teen drug
use. Over the past five years," Cotts writes, "the feds spent $929 million to
spread the message, and what did they get? A quarter of high school seniors
still use illegal drugs, and after seeing the ads, some 13-year-old girls
started smoking pot." 

If the new emphasis on faith-based interventions sounds like the repackaging of
an old idea, well, that's because it very well might be. Last year, when the
president announced his National Drug Control Strategy, FY-2003, "compassionate
coercion" was the term coined and touted as a key element for success. Under the
heading "Healing America's Drug Users" a White House fact sheet said: "Getting
people into treatment -- including programs that call upon the power of faith --
will require us to create a new climate of compassionate coercion, which
begins with family, friends, employers, and the community. Compassionate
coercion also uses the criminal justice system to get people into treatment." 

Bush's advocacy of "religious hiring rights" and the administration's grafting
of faith-based organizations onto the drug wars cuts to the heart of
church/state separation, says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United
for Separation of Church and State. According to Lynn, this new anti-drug effort
is another administration attempt to blur those lines. In a Press Release issued
by Americans United Lynn said, "The Bush administration seems to think there's a
'faith-based' solution to every social and medical problem in America. The
project announced today is one very small part of a larger crusade that raises
troubling constitutional concerns." 

"The White House is ignoring vital constitutional safeguards," continued Lynn.
"The Constitution calls for a separation between religion and government, not a
merger." 

Lynn pointed out that Walters recently appeared at a Riverside, Calif. "Teen
Challenge" facility whose treatment program "relies on conversion to
fundamentalist Christianity as its form of treatment." Only evangelical
Christians are hired to carry out its work. In testimony before Congress in
2001, a Teen Challenge official noted that some Jews who participate in the
program convert to Christianity, becoming what he called "completed Jews." Many
Jewish leaders found the term offensive, the AU Press Release pointed out. 

This far, says Jeremy Leaming, Communications Associate at Americans United,
government funds have not been awarded to Teen Challenge or any other religious
organizations for John Walter's new anti-drug initiative. "But," he added, "we
are watching the situation closely." 

"Bush's whole drug policy is in reality one gigantic faith-based initiative,"
Bruce Mirken, the Marijuana Policy Project's director of communications,
commented in a recent e-mail. "It's sure not based on science or data,
particularly in regard to marijuana. The government's own figures show that
marijuana use by kids under 21 has gone up over 2000% since marijuana was
banned, and a National Research Council study commissioned by the Drug Czar's
office reported in 2001 that the evidence shows little or no relationship
between the severity of criminal sanctions and rates or frequency of drug use.

"If the government announced a program to reduce unemployment, and unemployment
subsequently rose 2000%, that policy would be toast faster than you can say
'Bill Bennett loves to gamble,'" Mirken pointed out. "But the administration
believes, with deep religious conviction that drugs are bad and must be banned.
It's truly a faith based drug policy, and it ruins lives every day." 

--
Parti Marijuana de l'Ontario Marijuana Party
http://ontario.mjparty.ca
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