HR0275 102ND GENERAL ASSEMBLY

HR0275 LRB102 18309 ECR 26048 r

HOUSE RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse as "public enemy number one in the United States" and launched a failed, costly, and inhumane "all out offensive" War on Drugs; this War would prove to be the United States' longest and costliest war and ultimately a complete and shameful failure; and

WHEREAS, In January of 1972, President Nixon created the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) to wage a government war on otherwise peaceful and innocent Americans who voluntarily chose to ingest plants, weed, and intoxicants forbidden by the government; in July of 1973, ODALE was consolidated, along with several other federal drug agencies, into the newly established Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a new "super agency" to handle all aspects of the War on Drugs; and

WHEREAS, In 1994, President Nixon's counsel and assistant for domestic affairs John Ehrlichman revealed the real enemies of the Nixon administration were not drug abusers but were the anti-war left and Blacks Americans; he noted that the War on Drugs was actually designed as an evil, deceptive, and sinister policy to wage a war on those two groups; and

WHEREAS, John Ehrlichman claimed "we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did"; and

WHEREAS, The growing cost of the War on Drugs is now impossible to ignore; there have been billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed; and

WHEREAS, Between 1925 and the early 1970s, the male incarceration rate was remarkably stable at about 200 men per 100,000 population, or 1 U.S. male per 500, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics; by 1986, about a decade-and-a-half after the War on Drugs started locking up drug users and dealers, the male incarceration rate doubled to 400 per 100,000 population; and

WHEREAS, Within another decade, the male incarceration rate doubled again to more than 800 by 1996 before reaching a historic peak of 956 in 2008 (about one in 100); this was almost five times higher than the stable rate before the War on Drugs; and

WHEREAS, The arrest and incarceration data demonstrates that the War on Drugs had a significantly much greater negative effect on Black and Hispanics Americans when compared to White Americans; intensified enforcement of drug laws disproportionally subjected Blacks and Hispanic Americans to new mandatory minimum sentences despite lower levels of drug use and no higher demonstrated levels of trafficking when compared to White Americans; this makes the War on Drugs even more shameful for its devastating and disproportionately adverse effects on America's most disadvantaged populations; and

WHEREAS, While there could have been other factors that contributed to the increased male incarceration rate between the early 1970s and the peak in 2008, research clearly shows that the War on Drugs, along with mandatory minimum sentencing in the 1980s, were all significant contributing factors to the unprecedented rate of incarcerated Americans; and

WHEREAS, Since the 2008 peak, the male incarceration rate has been gradually declining in each of the last seven years of available data through 2016; this is possibly because of the decriminalization of marijuana at the city and state level, the legalization of recreational marijuana at the city and state levels, and the legalization of medical marijuana at the state level; and

WHEREAS, The War on Drugs has proven to be a costly, failed disaster that shamefully affected some of America's most vulnerable populations; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED SECOND GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we recognize the shameful and discriminatory history of the War on Drugs in the United States.