ClearTest

Everyone has a stake in ending the war on drugs. Whether you’re a parent concerned about protecting children from drug-related harm, a social justice advocate worried about racially disproportionate incarceration rates, an environmentalist seeking to protect the Amazon rainforest or a fiscally conservative taxpayer you have a stake in ending the drug war. U.S. federal, state and local governments have spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make America “drug-free.” Yet heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit drugs are cheaper, purer and easier to get than ever before. Nearly half a million people are behind bars on drug charges - more than all of western Europe (with a bigger population) incarcerates for all offenses. The war on drugs has become a war on families, a war on public health and a war on our constitutional rights.

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In 1986, the Reagan administration began to heavily promote drug testing in the workplace as part of the escalating War on Drugs. Since then, drug testing has proliferated from safety-sensitive jobs to non-safety sensitive jobs to pre-employment job testing to suspicionless drug testing of public high school students to mandatory drug testing of applicants for public benefits. Drug testing is also a near universal feature of the criminal justice system in the United States, with most probationers and parolees required to undergo drug testing regardless of the nature of their underlying offense or history of drug use.

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In April, my 85 year old mother-part blind, two hearing aids, two heart attacks and 17 years of drug war imprisonment of her only son G. Patrick Callahan behind her- tested positive with an ION Detector for illegal drugs at a federal prison in Seagonville, TX. My sisters were processed, but my mother was too deaf to understand that she was being told to leave the federal premises entirely. She’s also too old to put up with that crap, and she dissolved emotionally. Hunched over, with her head buried in her hands, she sobbed and wandered alone into the parking lot.

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Tyrone Brown, 33, is now serving a life sentence for testing positive for marijuana while on probation for a $2 holdup he committed when he was 17. Brown’s harsh sentence received national attention after his story appeared in the Dallas Morning News and on the TV show 20/20.

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