War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
War on Drugs Affirmative
War on Drugs Affirmative .............................................................................................................. 1
Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 2
Glossary of Terms (1/2) .............................................................................................................. 3
Drug War 1AC (4-min Version) (1/4)......................................................................................... 6
Drug War 1AC (Short Version) (1/7) ....................................................................................... 10
Drug War 1AC (Long Version) (1/8) ........................................................................................ 17
Harms Extensions: War on Drugs is Racist ............................................................................. 27
Solvency Extensions: Decarceration creates opportunities for freedom ................................... 28
(Solvency Ext) Answers to: Policing Continues ....................................................................... 29
Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance remains............................................................................ 30
Answers to: Reforming War on Drugs will solve ..................................................................... 34
Answers to: Weed Legalization Fixes the System .................................................................... 35
Answers to: War on Drugs Stop Criminals ............................................................................... 38
Answers to: Utilitarianism ........................................................................................................ 39
Discourse Impact Extensions .................................................................................................... 42
Answers to: State Solutions Bad ............................................................................................... 43
Answers to: State Level Surveillance........................................................................................ 46
Answers to: Status Quo Solves ................................................................................................. 47
Ans to: Topicality – Dom. Surv. = Terrorism (JV/V) ............................................................... 49
Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage- Marijuana Legalization now (N, JV, & V)....... 53
State Decriminalization CP Ans - Solvency (JV & V) ............................................................. 58
State Decriminalization CP Answers - Racism (JV & V) ......................................................... 61
State Decriminalization CP Answers – Perm (JV & V)............................................................ 64
Drug Surveillance Reform K Ans – Perms (V only) ................................................................ 67
Drug Surveillance Reform K Answers – Link Turns (V) ......................................................... 71
Drug Surveillance Reform K Answers – Alt Fails (V) ............................................................. 73
Answers to Reformism K – Reformism Works Ext (V) ........................................................... 74
Answers to Reformism K – Alt Fails Ext (V only) ................................................................... 75
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Summary
The War on Drugs is the combination of the prohibition of drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and
heroin and the utilization of military and law force to enforce that prohibition. In the context of
the affirmative, the War on Drugs would be utilizing surveillance technology (like wiretapping,
metadata gathering, etc.) to stop the illegal drug trade. Currently, the illegal drug trade in
America is largely supplied by cartels from Mexico. This summary gives a good outline of how
the War on Drugs has developed:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/paradox/htele.html
This affirmative argues that the war on drugs is used to police and arrest communities of color.
Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin arrests disproportionately target African American and Latino/a
people. According to the Department of Health and Human services, young white people smoke
more marijuana than black people, but black people make up 75% of the drug arrests. In large
cities like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, black people are arrested 13 times more for drugs
than white people. This implies that racial profiling is an inherent aspect to the War on Drugs,
and it ought to end.
The affirmative also argues that ending the war on drugs is a launching pad to ending and
protesting the larger issue of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. While the war
on drugs isn’t the only tool of mass incarceration, it is by far the largest one. The affirmative
isn’t the ultimate and final solution to policing and institutional racism, it’s the starting point for
understanding how the prison system functions and to start generating strategies it.
The affirmatives best argument against the reformism K is that the permutation: the alternative’s
strategy of changing the cultural norms regarding racism works very well with the affirmatives
strategy of ending the war on drugs. In fact, they often go hand-in-hand with one another because
the law, while not the perfect solution to the problem, can take meaningful steps to ending
racism. In fact, prominent abolitionists in America right now like Angela Davis and Julia
Sudbury who argue for the ending of all prisons think the law can make meaningful advances
against the prison system.
To answer the negative’s state decriminalization counterplan, the affirmative ought to argue that
decriminalization is a failed strategy to end policing against communities of color.
Decriminalization (like the word implies) ends the criminal penalties to drug use and possession.
It does not end civil penalties like tickets, fines, etc. and it is still illegal to hold a large amount of
drugs with the intent to sell. New York decriminalized marijuana in 1977 and it didn’t do very
much to end the war on drugs, but stop-and-frisk laws were put in place which ended up policing
communities of color even more than before. The civil penalties also disproportionately targeted
communities of color as well so policing still continued.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
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Glossary of Terms (1/2)
1. Neoliberalism -- An approach to economics and social studies in which control of economic
factors is shifted from the public sector to the private sector.
2. Black Body – A reference to the representation of Blacks as a commodified object.
3. Incarceration – The state of being confined in prison or detained.
4. Institutional Racism – any system of inequality based on race in institutions such as public
government bodies, private business corporations, and universities.
5. Decarceration – The process of removing people from places of imprisonment such as
prison or decreasing the rate of imprisonment. It is a term the represents the literal opposite of
incarceration.
6. Utilitarianism – A philosophical view that argues that actions are ethically right are useful
or for the benefit of the majority. The greatest number should be the guiding principle of
conduct.
7. Whiteness – a social construction that provides material and symbolic privileges to whites,
those passing as white, and sometimes honorary whites.
8. Prison Industrial Complex – a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of
government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to
economic, social, and political problems.
9. Criminalization – the process of turning an activity or act into a criminal offense legally,
socially, or culturally.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
10. White supremacy – the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races,
especially the black race, and should therefore dominate society.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Glossary of Terms (2/2)
11. Reformism – the assumption that gradual changes through and within existing institutions
can ultimately change a society’s fundamental economic system and political structures.
12. Existential Threat – a threat to something’s survival.
13. Hegemony – leadership or dominance by one country over the international system.
14. Pedagogy – the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or
theoretical concept.
15. Codification – The process of arranging laws or rules into a systematic code.
16. Biopolitics – a concept in social theory used to examine the strategies and mechanisms
through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge,
power, and the processes of subjection.
17. Necropolitics – the ultimate expression of sovereignty. It is the power and capacity to
dictate who may live and who may die.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
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Drug War 1AC (4-min Version) (1/4)
Contention One: The War on Drugs is nothing more than a federal surveillance
program. It reaches every aspect of life in communities of color in an attempt to
maintain the racial hierarchy.
Adams-Fuller, Associate Professor of Sociology at Howard University, 2009
[Terri, “Racial Profiling” in Institute for Public Safety
& Justice: Fact Sheet, http://www.ipsj.org/publications/RacialProfiling.pdf
In recent years racial profiling on American roadways - commonly referred to as DWB (driving while
black) - has come to the forefront of popular discourse. The phenomenon of pulling over
persons of color on spurious traffic violations based on preconceived conceptions is a
common travel experience for many people of color. For years African American and
Latino/Hispanic Americans have known that their communities have been the recipients of
an inordinate amount of police surveillance.
The general American public has just recently become aware of the magnitude of this problem during the latter end of the 1990s, as the media
began to increase its coverage of this phenomenon. Although communities of color have always suffered more police surveillance than other
communities, this scrutiny has elevated during certain periods in history, often dictated by politics. The African American and Hispanic/Latino
communities increasingly became the subjects of police surveillance fol1owing President
Reagan's declaration of the nations "war on drugs" in 1982. The increased frenzy that surrounded the
"war on drugs" prompted many law enforcement agencies around the country to intensify their inspection
of supposedly "suspicious" persons. These increased efforts have disproportionately been
targeted towards communities of color (Walker, et al. 1996). Across the country profiles are utilized by
many law enforcement agents, which are often largely based on racial or ethnic characteristics.
According to a 1999 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, in
1986 the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) launched
"Operation Pipeline" a drug prohibition program that trained over 27,000 police officers
from 48 participating states to "use pretext stops in order to find drugs in vehicles." It has been
reported that some of the materials used by the DEA in Operation Pipeline "implicitly if not
explicitly" encourage police to target minority motorists (Harris, 1999). Thus the nations highest drug
enforcement agency has lent the appearance of legitimacy to the use of racial profiles.
6/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (4-min Vsn) (2/4)
Contention 2 is The war on drugs systemically destroys lives and communities
Brown Watch, 2012
(Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75 Years of
Racial Control: Happy Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brown-watch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-waron-black-brown-men-75-years-of-racial.html)
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people
stopped. This is not limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be
arrested for marijuana, 12 times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana
charge, and 3 times more likely to go to prison with a marijuana possession charge. The
strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and imprison poor and minority populations
must stop NOW. In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of the benign nature of the
marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the rampant
misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering
that a marijuana CONVICTION can bring.
In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A
drug conviction in America
is the gift that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can
prevent employment, home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be a parent. The
issue of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author
of Drug Warriors and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State, presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness.
Miller suggests that drug
laws, such as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation
aimed at poor and minority populations. Miller poses that drug laws are designed to identify,
ostracize, confiscate, concentrate, and annihilate these populations by assigning the label of
drug user, criminal, or addict, seizing property, taking away freedom and institutionalizing
entire communities in our ever growing prison system. We can stop this from happening. Marijuana was deemed
illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later, 50% of the population supports marijuana legalization, and
families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal sanctions associated with its use. The
most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison industrial complex
out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S. every 38
seconds, we have no time to waste, tax and regulate now. Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering
a more sensible and humane approach to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots this November.
7/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (4-min Vsn) (3/4)
Thus, we offer the following plan: the United States federal government will end the
war on drugs by dismantling its domestic surveillance operations.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (4-min Vsn) (4/4)
Contention 4 demonstrates that we are a strategy of decarceration. A launching pad
for politics that can abolish prisons and promote freedom.
Berger, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, 2013
[Dan, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be
Done?”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals
for reducing the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink
the prison system through a combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, openended critique. It is reform in pursuit of abolition. Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic
launch pad for the politics of abolition, providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework
with a course of action. 32
Rather than juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the
strategy of decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension. It is a strategy in the best
tradition of the black freedom struggle. It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of
political conditions without sacrificing its political vision. Today we are in a moment where it
is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to
confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity. 33 Prisons bring together
diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, HIV
status and beyond. The movements against them, therefore, will need to bring together diverse
communities of resistance. They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition
underlying groups such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA. The
fight against prisons is both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social
justice. These movements must include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us
all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012. The challenge is to maintain
the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a
political program.
9/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (Short Version) (1/7)
Contention One: The War on Drugs is nothing more than a federal surveillance program. It
reaches every aspect of life in communities of color in an attempt to maintain the racial
hierarchy.
Adams-Fuller, Associate Professor of Sociology at Howard University, 2009
[Terri, “Racial Profiling” in Institute for Public Safety & Justice: Fact
Sheet, http://www.ipsj.org/publications/RacialProfiling.pdf
In recent years racial profiling on American roadways - commonly referred to as DWB (driving while
black) - has come to the forefront of popular discourse. The phenomenon of pulling over persons of
color on spurious traffic violations based on preconceived conceptions is a common travel experience
for many people of color. For years African American and Latino/Hispanic Americans have known
that their communities have been the recipients of an inordinate amount of police surveillance.
The general American public has just recently become aware of the magnitude of this problem during the latter end of the 1990s, as the media began to increase its
coverage of this phenomenon. Although communities of color have always suffered more police surveillance than other communities, this scrutiny has elevated
during certain periods in history, often dictated by politics. The
African American and Hispanic/Latino communities
increasingly became the subjects of police surveillance fol1owing President Reagan's declaration of the
nations "war on drugs" in 1982. The increased frenzy that surrounded the "war on drugs" prompted many law
enforcement agencies around the country to intensify their inspection of supposedly "suspicious"
persons. These increased efforts have disproportionately been targeted towards communities of color
(Walker, et al. 1996). Across the country profiles are utilized by many law enforcement agents, which are often
largely based on racial or ethnic characteristics.
According to a 1999 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, in
1986 the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) launched "Operation
Pipeline" a drug prohibition program that trained over 27,000 police officers from 48 participating
states to "use pretext stops in order to find drugs in vehicles." It has been reported that some of the materials
used by the DEA in Operation Pipeline "implicitly if not explicitly" encourage police to target
minority motorists (Harris, 1999). Thus the nations highest drug enforcement agency has lent the appearance of legitimacy to the use of racial profiles.
10/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (2/7)
In Contention Two we highlight the injustice of the War on Drugs
1. The drug war causes mass incarceration and creates the predominant mode of racist social
control.
Alexander, Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School 2006
[Michelle, Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice, Chapter pp. 219-228]
Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they wereextraordinary and immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown people. However, few
believe that a similar form of social control exists today. What I have come to recognize is that, contrary to popular
belief, a new form of social control does exist, as disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow-the
mass incarceration of people of color. There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of
the criminal justice system in resurrecting, in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political
disenfranchisement, and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of
color, particularly African Americans.
The story begins with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white supremacy . A recent twist has
been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court
decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has
more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10 Although
African
American men comprise less than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the prison and
jail population.11 Today, one out of three African American men is either in prison, on probation, or on
parole.l2 Latinos are not far behind. They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal
inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the War
on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights. Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as attacking
affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging manifestation
of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (3/7)
2. The War on Drugs is simply the latest structure of Black surveillance motivated by fear of
the black body. This surveillance comes in multiple forms of violence to Black communities
Kundnani and Kumar, lecturer at New York University and Associate Professor of Medical Studies at Rutgers, 2015
(Arun and Deepa ,“Race,
surveillance, and empire”, International Socialist Review http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire)
The War on Drugs—launched by President Reagan in 1982—dramatically accelerated the process of racial
securitization. Michelle Alexander notes that At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most
important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with
public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and
dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.52
Operation Hammer, carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988, illustrates how racialized surveillance was
central to the War on Drugs. It involved hundreds of officers in combat gear sweeping through the
South Central area of the city over a period of several weeks, making 1,453 arrests, mostly for teenage curfew
violations, disorderly conduct, and minor traffic offenses. Ninety percent were released without charge but the thousands
of young Black people who were stopped and processed in mobile booking centers had their names
entered onto the “gang register” database, which soon contained the details of half of the Black youths
of Los Angeles. Entry to the database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five
handshakes and wearing red shoelaces. Officials compared the Black gangs they were supposedly targeting to the National Liberation Front
in Vietnam and the “murderous militias of Beirut,” signaling the blurring of boundaries between civilian policing and military force, and between domestic racism
and overseas imperialism.53
In the twelve years leading up to 1993, the rate of incarceration of Black Americans tripled,54
establishing the system of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander refers to as the new Jim Crow.55 And yet those in
prison were only a quarter of those subject to supervision by the criminal justice system, with its
attendant mechanisms of routine surveillance and “intermediate sanctions,” such as house arrests,
boot camps, intensive supervision, day reporting, community service, and electronic tagging. Criminal
records databases, which are easily accessible to potential employers, now hold files on around onethird of the adult male population.56 Alice Goffman has written of the ways that mass incarceration is not just a matter
of imprisonment itself but also the systems of policing and surveillance that track young Black men
and label them as would-be criminals before and after their time in prison. From stops on the street to
probation meetings, these systems, she says, have transformed poor Black neighborhoods into
communities of suspects and fugitives.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
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Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (4/7)
3. The war on drugs systemically destroys lives and communities
Brown Watch, 2012
(Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75 Years of Racial Control: Happy
Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brown-watch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-brown-men-75-years-ofracial.html)
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people stopped. This
is not limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12
times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana charge, and 3 times more likely to go to
prison with a marijuana possession charge. The strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and imprison
poor and minority populations must stop NOW. In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of the
benign nature of the marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the
rampant misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering
that a marijuana CONVICTION can bring.
In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A
drug conviction in America is the gift
that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can prevent employment,
home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be a parent. The issue of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is
featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State,
presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness.
Miller suggests that drug
laws, such as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at poor
and minority populations. Miller poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize, confiscate,
concentrate, and annihilate these populations by assigning the label of drug user, criminal, or addict,
seizing property, taking away freedom and institutionalizing entire communities in our ever growing
prison system. We can stop this from happening. Marijuana was deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later,
50% of the population supports marijuana legalization, and families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal
sanctions associated with its use. The most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison
industrial complex out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S.
every 38 seconds, we have no time to waste, tax and regulate now. Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering a
more sensible and humane approach to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots this November.
13/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (5/7)
Thus, we offer the following plan: the United States federal government will end the war on
drugs by dismantling its domestic surveillance operations.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
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Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (6/7)
Contention 4 demonstrates our ability to solve through action
1. Our advocacy is the only way to bring an end to the system of institutional racism—the
reason reforms have failed is because they haven’t challenged the underlying racial ideology
Alexander, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, 2010
[Michelle, is an associate professor of law, a civil rights advocate and a writer.
“New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” pp. 221-224]
King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to
identify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize
thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it
was a flawed public consensus— not merely flawed
policy— that was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed public consensus lies
at the core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they do not
think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using
ecstasy.
Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown, and it is because drug crime is racially
defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug
criminals— at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is
this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste
system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Those who believe that advocacy
challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it
are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won— even a string of victories— but in the
absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the
extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste
system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just
as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in their book Racial
Formation in the United States. They attribute the cyclical nature of racial progress to the “unstable equilibrium”
that characterizes the United States’ racial order. 22
Under “normal” conditions, they argue, state institutions are able to normalize the organization and
enforcement of the prevailing racial order, and the system functions relatively automatically.
Challenges to the racial order during these periods are easily marginalized or suppressed, and the
prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, and ideology seems “natural.” These conditions clearly prevailed
during slavery and Jim Crow.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
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Drug War 1AC (Short Vsn) (7/7)
2. We are a strategy of decarceration. A launching pad for politics that can abolish prisons and
promote freedom.
Berger, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, 2013
[Dan, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A
Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing
the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system
through a combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique. It is reform in
pursuit of abolition. Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition,
providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action. 32
Rather than juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of
decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension. It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black
freedom struggle. It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of political conditions without sacrificing
its political vision. Today we are in a moment where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed
Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity.
33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship
status, HIV status and beyond. The movements against them, therefore, will need to bring together diverse
communities of resistance. They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition underlying groups
such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA. The fight against prisons is
both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social justice. These movements must include the leadership by
those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican
Bay in 2012. The
challenge is to maintain the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time
translating it into a political program.
16/75
War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/NAUDL 2015-16
Drug War 1AC (Long Version) (1/8)
Contention One: The War on Drugs is nothing more than a federal surveillance program. It
reaches every aspect of life in communities of color in an attempt to maintain the racial
hierarchy.
Adams-Fuller, Associate Professor of Sociology at Howard University, 2009
[Terri, “Racial Profiling” in Institute for Public Safety & Justice: Fact
Sheet, http://www.ipsj.org/publications/RacialProfiling.pdf
In recent years racial profiling on American roadways - commonly referred to as DWB (driving while
black) - has come to the forefront of popular discourse. The phenomenon of pulling over persons of
color on spurious traffic violations based on preconceived conceptions is a common travel experience
for many people of color. For years African American and Latino/Hispanic Americans have known
that their communities have been the recipients of an inordinate amount of police surveillance.
The general American public has just recently become aware of the magnitude of this problem during the latter end of the 1990s, as the media began to increase its
coverage of this phenomenon. Although communities of color have always suffered more police surveillance than other communities, this scrutiny has elevated
during certain periods in history, often dictated by politics. The
African American and Hispanic/Latino communities
increasingly became the subjects of police surveillance fol1owing President Reagan's declaration of the
nations "war on drugs" in 1982. The increased frenzy that surrounded the "war on drugs" prompted many law
enforcement agencies around the country to intensify their inspection of supposedly "suspicious"
persons. These increased efforts have disproportionately been targeted towards communities of color
(Walker, et al. 1996). Across the country profiles are utilized by many law enforcement agents, which are often
largely based on racial or ethnic characteristics.
According to a 1999 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, in
1986 the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) launched "Operation
Pipeline" a drug prohibition program that trained over 27,000 police officers from 48 participating
states to "use pretext stops in order to find drugs in vehicles." It has been reported that some of the materials
used by the DEA in Operation Pipeline "implicitly if not explicitly" encourage police to target
minority motorists (Harris, 1999). Thus the nations highest drug enforcement agency has lent the appearance of legitimacy to the use of racial profiles.
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In Contention Two we highlight the injustice of the War on Drugs
1. The drug war causes mass incarceration and creates the predominant mode of racist social
control.
Alexander, Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School 2006
[Michelle, Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice, Chapter pp. 219-228]
Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they wereextraordinary and immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown people. However, few
believe that a similar form of social control exists today. What I have come to recognize is that, contrary to popular
belief, a new form of social control does exist, as disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow-the
mass incarceration of people of color. There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of
the criminal justice system in resurrecting, in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political
disenfranchisement, and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of
color, particularly African Americans.
The story begins with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white supremacy . A recent twist has
been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court
decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has
more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10 Although
African
American men comprise less than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the prison and
jail population.11 Today, one out of three African American men is either in prison, on probation, or on
parole.l2 Latinos are not far behind. They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal
inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the War
on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights. Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as attacking
affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging manifestation
of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color.
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2. The War on Drugs is simply the latest structure of Black surveillance motivated by fear of
the black body. This surveillance comes in multiple forms of violence to Black communities
Kundnani and Kumar, lecturer at New York University and Associate Professor of Medical Studies at Rutgers, 2015
(Arun and Deepa ,“Race,
surveillance, and empire”, International Socialist Review http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire)
The War on Drugs—launched by President Reagan in 1982—dramatically accelerated the process of racial
securitization. Michelle Alexander notes that At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most
important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with
public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and
dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.52
Operation Hammer, carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988, illustrates how racialized surveillance was
central to the War on Drugs. It involved hundreds of officers in combat gear sweeping through the
South Central area of the city over a period of several weeks, making 1,453 arrests, mostly for teenage curfew
violations, disorderly conduct, and minor traffic offenses. Ninety percent were released without charge but the thousands
of young Black people who were stopped and processed in mobile booking centers had their names
entered onto the “gang register” database, which soon contained the details of half of the Black youths
of Los Angeles. Entry to the database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five
handshakes and wearing red shoelaces. Officials compared the Black gangs they were supposedly targeting to the National Liberation Front
in Vietnam and the “murderous militias of Beirut,” signaling the blurring of boundaries between civilian policing and military force, and between domestic racism
and overseas imperialism.53
In the twelve years leading up to 1993, the rate of incarceration of Black Americans tripled,54
establishing the system of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander refers to as the new Jim Crow.55 And yet those in
prison were only a quarter of those subject to supervision by the criminal justice system, with its
attendant mechanisms of routine surveillance and “intermediate sanctions,” such as house arrests,
boot camps, intensive supervision, day reporting, community service, and electronic tagging. Criminal
records databases, which are easily accessible to potential employers, now hold files on around onethird of the adult male population.56 Alice Goffman has written of the ways that mass incarceration is not just a matter
of imprisonment itself but also the systems of policing and surveillance that track young Black men
and label them as would-be criminals before and after their time in prison. From stops on the street to
probation meetings, these systems, she says, have transformed poor Black neighborhoods into
communities of suspects and fugitives.
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3. The war on drugs systemically destroys lives and communities
Brown Watch, 2012
(Brown Watch, News for People of Color, "War on Drugs is a War on Black & Brown Men - 75 Years of Racial Control: Happy
Birthday Marijuana Prohibition", October 2, www.brown-watch.com/genocide-watch/2012/10/2/war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-black-brown-men-75-years-ofracial.html)
From 2002 to 2011, African American and Hispanic residents made up close to 90% of people stopped. This
is not limited to New York. In California, African-Americans are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, 12
times more likely to go to prison with a felony marijuana charge, and 3 times more likely to go to
prison with a marijuana possession charge. The strategy of using marijuana laws to stop, detain and imprison
poor and minority populations must stop NOW. In the past 75 years we have seen mounting evidence of the
benign nature of the marijuana plant, and its tremendous potential for medical development. But the
rampant misinformation about the effects of marijuana USE is dwarfed by the lifetime of suffering
that a marijuana CONVICTION can bring.
In 2010, there were 853,839 marijuana arrests in the U.S., 750,591 of those were for possession. A
drug conviction in America is the gift
that keeps on giving. Affected individuals must face a lifetime of stigma that can prevent employment,
home ownership, education, voting and the ability to be a parent. The issue of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs is
featured in the new documentary, The House I Live In. In the film, Richard L. Miller, author of Drug Warriors and Their Prey, From Police Power to Police State,
presents a very sinister take on the method behind the Drug War madness.
Miller suggests that drug
laws, such as those for marijuana are part of a process of annihilation aimed at poor
and minority populations. Miller poses that drug laws are designed to identify, ostracize, confiscate,
concentrate, and annihilate these populations by assigning the label of drug user, criminal, or addict,
seizing property, taking away freedom and institutionalizing entire communities in our ever growing
prison system. We can stop this from happening. Marijuana was deemed illegal without acknowledging science or the will of the people. 75 years later,
50% of the population supports marijuana legalization, and families are still being torn apart and lives destroyed over the criminal
sanctions associated with its use. The most vulnerable members of our society are also the targets of a prison
industrial complex out of control and getting bigger every day. Someone is arrested for marijuana in the U.S.
every 38 seconds, we have no time to waste, tax and regulate now. Oregon, Colorado and Washington are all considering a
more sensible and humane approach to marijuana as all three have tax and regulate initiatives on their ballots this November.
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1AC (5/8)
Contention 3 brings this debate into the real world with our alternative
1. The resolution provides the opportunity to test the validity of ideas through the examination
of problems and solutions. Thus, we offer the following plan: the United States federal
government will end the war on drugs by dismantling its domestic surveillance operations.
2. Perhaps, more importantly, our actions in this round are critical in two fundamental ways.
A. Discourse in the debate community promotes education.
Through the unique format of switch-sides policy debate, students are encouraged to research contemporary
policy issues ranging from the encroachment on civil liberties to, yes… even the likelihood of nuclear war as
a result of governmental action or inaction. Furthermore, our discussion of these topics leads us to develop
meaningful arguments through the process of making claims, supporting those claims with facts and
evidence, and then contributing our own thoughtful analysis. Finally, we gain the opportunity to examine the
interplay of actual policy ideas and alternatives as we apply our research and arguments in an "academic
laboratory" at debate competitions.
B. Our discourse promotes real world activism.
First and foremost, we take what we have learned and share those ideas in the classroom when we return to
school the following week. In addition, we are much more likely to take an active role in the community as
both young adults and later years when we enter the workforce. In essence, through our education, we learn
how important it is for ordinary citizens to take an active role in the society in which we live. Finally, we
gain a greater understanding of cultures and governmental systems; thereby, increasing our ability to play a
meaningful role within those contexts.
3. By signing an affirmative ballot, you acknowledge it is essential for people in the debate
community and society at large to carefully consider the ills institutionalized in our system of
governance, analyze current events, question government policies, voice our opinions with
others, and encourage us to promote meaningful change in our everyday lives.
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4. Just as television helped bring an end to McCarthyism, we need a movement to bridge the
gap between people, reduce polarization, and present alternatives to the status quo: We
believe competitive debate fits that bill
Saul '05
(John B., "Sound Ideas Obscured by Political Ideology," The Seattle Times, Oct 30, p. M9)
Eventually, the country has righted itself as each threat passed. Offending laws were removed or, in
the case of McCarthy, the leading proponent of such extreme actions was discredited. Johnson gives an
illuminating account of the role early television played in exposing millions of Americans to the
"snarling, blustering, abusing, bullying, giggling, threatening, lying and filibustering" of McCarthy, an
era vividly portrayed in "Good Night, and Good Luck," the recent film about newsman Edward R. Murrow. Then, at the end of 1954, the Senate condemned him
for "conduct contrary to Senate tradition."
Johnson's book may have the prescription for righting ourselves this time. Americans need some
way to get to know each other across the chasms that divide us (Johnson suggests compulsory national service). We need
higher standards in politics and a braver media willing to take on tough issues and challenge public
figures. Instead of "rigid ideological polarization" and hysteria that create abuses of civil liberties,
Johnson writes that the country needs to unite "to fashion sensible policies to deal with genuine problems."
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Vsn2 1AC (5/8)
Contention 3 brings this debate into the real world with our alternative
1. The resolution provides the opportunity to test the validity of ideas through the examination
of problems and solutions. Thus, we offer the following plan: the United States federal
government will end the war on drugs by dismantling its domestic surveillance operations.
2. Perhaps, more importantly, our actions in this round are critical in two fundamental ways.
A. Debate fosters education through dialectical discourse that extends beyond the
tournament
BRISCOE, Director of Forensics at South Anchorage HS, '09
(Shawn F., "Forensics: Enhancing Civic Literacy & Democracy," Principal Leadership,
May, p. 48)
Their involvement in this
activity truly incorporates a dialectal approach to civic education.
Most noticeably, debaters take what they learned and share those ideas in the classroom when they return
to school following a tournament. Many of my students have expressed that their interest in a
government, philosophy, or science class was sparked at a debate tournament. They have shared their
ideas, and those of their competitors, with their classmates in units on constitutional law, the civil
rights movement, and the greenhouse effect. As a result, other faculty members and administrators frequently told me how lucky I was to
have such bright and talented students on my time. Although my students are bright and talented, I believe these statements oversimplified the reality. The truth is,
all students are bright. Their teachers just may not have reached them yet.
B. Debate brings societal change by giving students the ability to act effectively within the
system
BRISCOE, Director of Forensics at South Anchorage HS, '09
(Shawn F., "Forensics: Enhancing Civic Literacy & Democracy," Principal Leadership,
May, p. 48)
Anecdotal evidence suggests that debaters are much more likely to take a meaningful role in the community as well.
Through debate, they learn the importance of ordinary citizens taking an active role in the society in which they
live and gain a greater understanding of cultures and governmental systems, thereby increasing their
ability to play a meaningful role within those contexts. The discourse that occurs on a debate team
between tournaments and at forensics competitions gives debaters a greater understanding of those who
are different from themselves, a sense of interconnectedness, and knowledge of how to work more effectively
with others. Translating these ideas to the business world, "a number of CEOs and company
presidents who have formal debating experience" credited much of their success to the logical thinking and
interpersonal skills they developed at debate competitions (Jones, 2004, p. 3B).
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Vsn2 1AC (6/8)
3. By signing an affirmative ballot, you acknowledge it is essential for people in the debate
community and society at large to carefully consider the ills institutionalized in our system of
governance, analyze current events, question government policies, voice our opinions with
others, and encourage us to promote meaningful change in our everyday lives. This extends
beyond the case impacts that will never be realized through fiat-based impacts.
4. Just as television helped bring an end to McCarthyism, we need a movement to bridge the
gap between people, reduce polarization, and present alternatives to the status quo: We
believe competitive debate fits that bill
Saul '05
(John B., "Sound Ideas Obscured by Political Ideology," The Seattle Times, Oct 30, p. M9)
Eventually, the country has righted itself as each threat passed. Offending laws were removed or, in
the case of McCarthy, the leading proponent of such extreme actions was discredited. Johnson gives an
illuminating account of the role early television played in exposing millions of Americans to the
"snarling, blustering, abusing, bullying, giggling, threatening, lying and filibustering" of McCarthy, an
era vividly portrayed in "Good Night, and Good Luck," the recent film about newsman Edward R. Murrow. Then, at the end of 1954, the Senate condemned him
for "conduct contrary to Senate tradition."
Johnson's book may have the prescription for righting ourselves this time. Americans need some
way to get to know each other across the chasms that divide us (Johnson suggests compulsory national service). We need
higher standards in politics and a braver media willing to take on tough issues and challenge public
figures. Instead of "rigid ideological polarization" and hysteria that create abuses of civil liberties,
Johnson writes that the country needs to unite "to fashion sensible policies to deal with genuine problems."
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Drug War 1AC (Long Vsn) (7/8)
Contention 4 demonstrates our ability to solve through action
1. Our advocacy is the only way to bring an end to the system of institutional racism—the
reason reforms have failed is because they haven’t challenged the underlying racial ideology
Alexander, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, 2010
[Michelle, is an associate professor of law, a civil rights advocate and a writer.
“New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” pp. 221-224]
King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to
identify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize
thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it
was a flawed public consensus— not merely flawed
policy— that was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed public consensus lies
at the core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they do not
think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using
ecstasy.
Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown, and it is because drug crime is racially
defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug
criminals— at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is
this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste
system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Those who believe that advocacy
challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it
are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won— even a string of victories— but in the
absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the
extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste
system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just
as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in their book Racial
Formation in the United States. They attribute the cyclical nature of racial progress to the “unstable equilibrium”
that characterizes the United States’ racial order. 22
Under “normal” conditions, they argue, state institutions are able to normalize the organization and
enforcement of the prevailing racial order, and the system functions relatively automatically.
Challenges to the racial order during these periods are easily marginalized or suppressed, and the
prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, and ideology seems “natural.” These conditions clearly prevailed
during slavery and Jim Crow.
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2. We are a strategy of decarceration. A launching pad for politics that can abolish prisons and
promote freedom.
Berger, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, 2013
[Dan, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A
Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing
the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system
through a combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique. It is reform in
pursuit of abolition. Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition,
providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action. 32
Rather than juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of
decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension. It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black
freedom struggle. It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of political conditions without sacrificing
its political vision. Today we are in a moment where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed
Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity.
33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship
status, HIV status and beyond. The movements against them, therefore, will need to bring together diverse
communities of resistance. They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition underlying groups
such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA. The fight against prisons is
both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social justice. These movements must include the leadership by
those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican
Bay in 2012. The
challenge is to maintain the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time
translating it into a political program.
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Harms Extensions: War on Drugs is Racist
The war on drugs and mass incarceration provide the white elite with a method of destroying
black communities
Alexander, Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School 2006
[Michelle, Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice, Chapter pp. 219-228]
This war, which continues today, has nothing to do with solving drug abuse, and everything to do with
creating a political environment in which communities of color can be lawfully targeted for mass
incarceration.l4 Not unlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration provides the white elite with social
benefits. By segregating, incarcerating, and rendering unemployable huge segments of the black and
brown population, the racial hierarchy remains intact. By denying blacks an equal and adequate
education, barring them from certain forms of employment, and relegating them to the worst
neighborhoods, the white elite has ensured that whites will never occupy the bottom rung of that
hierarchy.
Today, slavery and Jim Crow laws no longer exist, and affirmative action has opened doors to some,
upsetting the racial caste system. Mass incarceration, however, has emerged as a new, and arguably
more durable, form of social controL's In addition to protecting their social position, mass incarceration
provides white elites with clear economic and political benefits. The prison industry is hugely profitable.
Marc Mauer's excellent book Race to Incarcerate documents the unprecedented expansion of our criminal
justice system and the ways that the race to incarcerate has devastated communities of color.16 He cites
promotional literature from the prison industry, one piece of which stated: "While arrests and convictions are
steadily on the rise, profits are to be made-profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming
industry now." I?
The racism of the drug war is codified in law
Adams-Fuller, Associate Professor of Sociology at Howard University, 2009
[Terri, “Racial Profiling” in Institute for Public Safety & Justice: Fact Sheet,
http://www.ipsj.org/publications/RacialProfiling.pdf
The constitutionality of racial profiling was challenged in a series of Supreme Court cases. The
resulting rulings increased the power of police and reduced the rights of citizens. In 1996 the Supreme
Court ruled (in the of case Whren v. U.S.) that law enforcement could stop drivers for any traffic
violation regardless of the true intent behind the officer's decision to stop the driver. Later that same
year the Supreme Court ruled (in the case of Ohio v. Robinette) that police officers are not in violation of the
4th amendment if they fail to inform suspects that they do not have to consent to having their vehicle
searched. Additional powers were granted to the police in 1997, when the Supreme Court ruled (in the
case Maryland v. Wilson) that police have the right to order passengers out of a vehicle whether or not
there is reason to suspect that they may be dangerous. These ruling have increased and sanctioned the
powers of the police, granting judicial permission to continue current practices, that are often based on
discrimination.
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Solvency Extensions: Decarceration creates
opportunities for freedom
(___)
(___) Decarceration is a political strategy that rips prisons from our social fabric and allows
oppressed communities the opportunity for freedom.
Berger, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, 2013
[Dan, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black
Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
Decarceration, therefore, works not only to shrink the prison system but to expand community
cohesion and maximize what can only be called freedom. Political repression and mass incarceration
are joined at the hip. The struggles against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the struggles
for restorative and transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice must be
equally interconnected. For it is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in the social
fabric of popular resistance as the expansion of prisons has been stitched into the wider framework of
society that we might hope to supplant the carceral state.
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(Solvency Ext) Answers to: Policing Continues
(___)
(___) Empirics prove, police officers will stop policing
Dumke 14 Mick, Chicago Reader, 4-7, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-bust-blacks-potpossession-after-decriminalization/Content?oid=13004240
"This is a giant vicious circle," says the veteran. "Do I want to be stopping everybody in these
neighborhoods? Absolutely not. But the craziness almost dictates it." The officers say no tweaks to the
ticketing ordinance will solve the problems. The neighborhoods need economic alternatives to the drug
trade. And both officers count themselves among the growing number of people who believe the
government should oversee the cannabis business. "Take it out of the hands of the criminals," says the
veteran. He won't get an argument from Alderman Proco Joe Moreno (1st). "We all know the usage is pretty
much even among different ethnicities," he says. "It doesn't seem that the intent of the ordinance is being
acted out on the street." Like the officers, Moreno believes it's time to consider legalizing marijuana,
which he maintains is less harmful than alcohol (a position recently advocated by President Obama as well).
"I think there's broad public support for it," Moreno says. "The City Council gets a lot of criticism, but on a
number of issues we can move faster than the state or the federal government. It would be tough to pass, but
I'd be more than happy to lead that effort."
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Case Debate
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Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance remains
(___)
(___)Federal surveillance is overwhelmingly targeted at drug policing – It’s the cornerstone of
the war on drugs. 88% of wiretaps are from the war on drugs
Greenberg 2015—Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED, April 10, 2015, “Want to See Domestic
Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War” http://www.wired.com/2015/04/want-see-domestic-spyings-futurefollow-drug-war/
The DEA’s newly revealed bulk collection of billions of American phone records on calls to 116 countries
preceded the NSA’s similar program by years and may have even helped to inspire it, as reported in USA
Today’s story Wednesday. And the program serves as a reminder that most of the legal battles between
government surveillance efforts and the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections over the last
decades have played out first on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs. Every surveillance test
case in recent history, from beepers to cell phones to GPS tracking to drones—and now the feds’
attempts to puncture the bubble of cryptographic anonymity around Dark Web sites like the Silk
Road—began with a narcotics investigation. “If you asked me last week who was doing this [kind of mass
surveillance] other than the NSA, the DEA would be my first guess,” says Chris Soghoian, the lead
technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The War on Drugs and the surveillance state are
joined at the hip.” It’s no secret that drug cases overwhelmingly dominate American law
enforcement’s use of surveillance techniques. The Department of Justice annually reports to the judiciary
how many wiretaps it seeks warrants for, broken down by the type of crime being investigated. In 2013, the
last such report, a staggering 88 percent of the 3,576 reported wiretaps were for narcotics. That’s
compared to just 132 wiretaps for homicide and assault combined, for instance, and a mere eight for
corruption cases.
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Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance remains
(___) The affirmative presents a strategy to challenge the racist foundations of criminal justice
systems – we must focus on specific efforts to aid larger movements
Murakawa 2014, Associate Professor[2014, Naomi Murakawa is an Associate Professor Center for
African American Studies, “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” ProQuest ebrary]
Administrative tinkering does not confront the damning features of the American carceral state, its
scale and its racial concentration, which, when taken together reinforce and raise African American
vulnerability to premature death. By focusing on the intra-system problems of “discretion,”
lawmakers displaced questions of justice onto the more manageable, measurable issues of system
function. When framed as a problem of discretion— that is, individual decision making permissible by
formal rules— then solutions to racial inequality double back to individual administrators and their
institutional rules. In this sense, problematizing discretion forces questions of remediation onto
sanitary administrative grounds. Should judges be elected or appointed? Should judges administer
justice through sentencing guidelines? No guidelines and some mandatory minimums? No mandatory
minimums and only mandatory maximums? Will judges or parole boards select the final release date?
These questions matter, but they cannot replace clear commitments to racial justice. When they are
posed independently of normative goals, process becomes the proxy, not the path, to justice. Without a
normatively grounded understanding of racial violence, liberal reforms will do the administrative
shuffle. This book traced a stark half-century turn from confronting white racial violence administered and
enabled by carceral apparatuses, to controlling black criminality through a procedurally fortified, race-neutral
system. Race liberals institutionalized the “right to safety” while skirting its animating call against statesanctioned white violence. Fixation on administrative minutiae distracted from the normative core of
punishment in a system of persistent racial hierarchy. Unlike administrative tinkering, reforms for
decriminalization and decarceration would push debates to their normative core: what warrants
punishment, in what form, and why? 18 In place of liberal searches for the ideal procedural path to life
incarceration, metrics of racial justice should focus on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “the statesanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death.”
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Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains
(___)
(___) Federal surveillance is targeted at communities of color as a means of social control
Davis 1971—Angela Davis is a former Black Panther and civil rights activist, “Masked Racism: Reflections
on the Prison Industrial Complex” http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/davisprison.html
Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution to the vast array of social
problems that are hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons and jails. However, the great
majority of people have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the
historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work. Racism has undermined our ability to
create a popular critical discourse to contest the ideological trickery that posits imprisonment as key to
public safety. The focus of state policy is rapidly shifting from social welfare to social control. Black,
Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are portrayed as the purveyors of violence,
traffickers of drugs, and as envious of commodities that they have no right to possess. Young black and
Latina women are represented as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies
and poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance is thus focused on communities of
color, immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, the homeless, and in general on those who
have a diminishing claim to social resources. Their claim to social resources continues to diminish in large
part because law enforcement and penal measures increasingly devour these resources. The prison
industrial complex has thus created a vicious cycle of punishment which only further impoverishes
those whose impoverishment is supposedly "solved" by imprisonment. Therefore, as the emphasis of
government policy shifts from social welfare to crime control, racism sinks more deeply into the
economic and ideological structures of U.S. society. Meanwhile, conservative crusaders against affirmative
action and bilingual education proclaim the end of racism, while their opponents suggest that racism's
remnants can be dispelled through dialogue and conversation. But conversations about "race relations"
will hardly dismantle a prison industrial complex that thrives on and nourishes the racism hidden
within the deep structures of our society.
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Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains
(___)
(___) Challenging the drug war can create momentum for larger change
Burns 2014 Rebecca, In These Times staff writer and assistant editor based in Chicago, THE
UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF LEGALIZATION, beyondchron.org/the-unbearable-whiteness-oflegalization/
***note ¶ Art Way--senior drug policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance in Colorado, which lobbied for
legalization.¶ David Leonard--associate professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race
studies at Washington State University¶ Mariame Kaba--Chicago-based activist; founding director of the
non-profit Project NIA, which works to decrease youth incarceration ¶ Art: It’s true that marijuana reform is
just one aspect. The whole question is: Why are we criminalizing people for what they decide to put in their
bodies? It’s also important to note that the drug war is a federal policy; states receive money from D.C. to
engage. When Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana, they basically removed themselves from
federal policy regarding marijuana prohibition. I think that will provide momentum to change federal
policy regarding other substances. I don’t see the unintended consequence [that the War on Drugs
would] somehow become more and more entrenched when it comes to cocaine and other drugs.¶
Legalization is expected to be a boon for state coffers, as well as wealthy investors and so-called
“ganjapreneurs” now flocking to Colorado. But do you think it will create jobs or other economic benefits in
communities of color?¶ David: In some ways this looks like a gentrification of the drug—those who always
benefit will still benefit.¶ Art: I’m not aware of any industries that began with the intention to create jobs for
African Americans or poor people of color. No one said that this was some type of panacea for the
various root problems that African Americans face. It’s difficult for people to find work if they have a
drug conviction on their record, especially a felony, and that’s still the case within the marijuana
industry in Colorado—although there was a successful push to make sure that only people with felonies
relating to distribution of drugs are kept out. Many of the concerns about who benefits are valid, but I
don’t think they should overshadow that we’re moving in the right direction.¶ What comes next for
reformers?¶ Art: You are likely to see medical marijuana [initiatives] in Florida within a year’s time that
will break open the discussion down South and begin reform efforts there. It doesn’t change the day-today reality in Louisiana and the South Side of Chicago right now, but persuasive reform efforts will
start to plant seeds across the country, as well as in our federal government.
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Answers to: Reforming War on Drugs will solve
(___)
(___) Police forces will continue to find ways to criminalize communities of color unleas the
entire structure of the War on Drugs is challenged. Small changes will not make a difference.
Burns ’14 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana
Legalization”, [SG])
One worry has been that the high price of legalized marijuana will encourage a black market and that arrests
for illegal distribution could actually increase. Mariame Kaba: I’m very concerned about how this is going
to play out on the ground. Young people who are selling drugs because they have no other job
opportunities are definitively not going to be able to participate in the formal economy through the
dispensaries. Is law enforcement going to go after those young people 20 times harder now? AW: Yes, I am
concerned that distribution charges will increase. Whenever you make change, especially against law
enforcement’s status quo, it often finds a way to circumvent that change and maintain its budget. But
we haven’t seen anything that will lead us to believe that is taking place right now. And you have to realize
that these new marijuana laws are part of a much broader reform movement: Colorado has also been revising
its criminal justice laws. The first thing we did once Amendment 64 passed [in Colorado] was to lower
criminal penalties for those [between the ages of] 18 and 20 possessing marijuana. So we are already
working on preempting any type of net-widening. ITT:
What impact will marijuana legalization have on the War on Drugs as a whole? David J. Leonard: Any
changes in the War on Drugs will require continued organizing and agitation, because history has
shown that one step forward has also resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color. New York
decriminalized marijuana in 1977. That clearly did not lead to the end of the War on Drugs in New York, or
lessen its effects on communities of color. Instead, the way the law was written provided the foundation
for stop-and-frisk, because the law made it a misdemeanor for marijuana to be in public view, which
basically fostered incentives to stop blacks and Latinos and tell them to empty their pockets. So I have
a number of concerns about the impact of these reforms on the War on Drugs. To give just one other
example: Does decriminalization apply to those who are on probation and being drug-tested? MK: Another
concern is whether, as the prices of marijuana start climbing [because of legalization] and [poor] people
turn to using other kinds of drugs, those drugs then get painted as the worst possible drugs on the
planet. The people who are doing the “worst” drugs somehow always happen to be the most
marginalized people within our culture. That’s why it’s so important that we focus on uprooting the
whole architecture of the War on Drugs. If we’re not talking about the root issues of racism and
classism, there are bound to be unintended consequences.
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Answers to: Weed Legalization Fixes the System
(___)
(___) Marijuana legalization deepens isolations against communities of color by making
broader movements impossible
Simon , 2013 David, Creator of HBO’s The Wire, The Audacity of Despair, “Lost in a symptom: The Nation on marijuana reform,” 11-1, http://davidsimon.com/lost-in-asymptom-the-nation-on-marijuana-reform/The surest way to ensure the continued abuse of people of color under the
auspices of the drug war is to reduce or eliminate any corresponding threat to white Americans. This
seems to me to be such a fundamental of realpolitik in the United States that I’m still a little bit astonished
that The Nation, in a recent assessment of marijuana reform efforts and racial bias, can’t see any forest from
the trees. Not a single fact about marijuana use and the racial bias that law enforcement exhibits with regard
to the drug is askew, of course. I agree with the article’s author, Dr. Carl Hart of Columbia University, on his
entire statistical premise: While I am entirely aware that marijuana arrests account for over 50 percent of all
drug arrests, and while African-American and Latino suspects are certainly arrested at disproportionate rates
despite comparable white marijuana use is certain, I believe that the extraordinary rates of incarceration
of African-Americans — or all Americans, for that matter — is the result of overall drug enforcement of
heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other hard drugs. This is not to say that there are not thousands of
incarcerated for marijuana arrests, especially at the state level. In some states, draconian enforcement of
marijuana statutes, especially coupled with repeat-offender statutes, has certainly resulted in the
imprisonment of Americans, and likely those unfortunates are dispropotionately people of color. But as
many urban and high-population states have for the last several decades been liberalizing marijuana laws
and reducing or eliminating prison penalties on the drug, the greater share of those incarcerated – and not
merely arrested — under U.S. drug statutes has been comprised of hard-drug defendants. And those
number in the hundreds of thousands. Certainly, marijuana enforcement is an opportunity for law
enforcement to profile, harass and penalize minorities. And certainly, a marijuana arrest can be used to
establish a criminal history, achieve probationary verdicts and put people of color under the control of the
criminal justice system. To the extent that defendants opt for suspended sentences and then are rearrested, or
find themselves arrested in that minority of states with retrograde marijuana codes, incarcerative outcomes
do occur. But Dr. Hart’s linkage of the ACLU report of racial bias in marijuana enforcement to the appalling
percentage of African-American males who will serve prison time needs to be carefully uncoupled. One in
three African-American boys born today will be imprisoned at some point not because of marijuana
enforcement, but because of the entirety of the drug war — and only by dealing with all of drug
enforcement and its subtext of racial and class control will that trend ever abate, much less be
reversed. Only by addressing political reform to the use or trafficking of those drugs that drive the majority
of prison sentences for drug crimes will the country begin to address itself to the mechanism that has put 2.3
million Americans behind bars and made us the jailingest society in human history. Which brings me back to
my initial political worry when it comes to marijuana
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Answers to: Weed Legalization Fixes the System
<<<Simon Continues>>>
reform, which, regrettably, has been over-simplified and mischaracterized in some quarters as it volleys
about on the internets. Here, again: Yes, marijuana is among the least dangerous prohibited substances in the
drug world. Yes, any continuing criminal arrests for its use are dysfunctional and draconian. Yes, as with any
drug law, such arrests target people of color disproportionately. But accept as well that marijuana is also the
most basic and fundamental place where white, middle-class and affluent America intersects with the
drug war. It is the place where many, many white families of economic means and political relevance
encounter even the most moderate risk to their status and future. For the majority of that cohort, it is the only
place where the drug war’s rubber actually hits any stretch of suburban blacktop. Of course, it is impossible
to argue against the immediate practicalities of liberalizing marijuana use and reducing the criminal penalties
such. In a country with our levels of alcohol use, no one should be incarcerated or even criminally arrested
for smoking weed. But in so liberalizing this single sphere of our national drug war, the actual political
isolation of the poor, and of poor people of color especially, will deepen. Having removed much of the
white, middle-class interaction with drug enforcement from the equation, those who are championing
marijuana reform and ignoring the overall disaster of the drug war will be perpetuating the
fundamental and continuing injustice.
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Answers to: Weed Legalization Fixes the System
(___) Legalization of marijuana doesn’t strike to the core of the issue
Levy-Pounds 13 Nekima, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Community Justice Project at
the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis). ALBANY GOVERNMENT LAW REVIEW,
IMPACTS OF THE DRUG WAR ON YOUNG BLACK MEN, Vol. 6
In the face of discriminatory patterns and practices of harassment and humiliating searches, it is understandable why the simplest approach may appear to be the
the initial
steps that were taken by Colorado voters to legalize marijuana may not be enough to effectively address the
root-level issues that lead to the possession and sales of marijuana amongst young men of color. To be clear, studies show that whites are in the majority as
legalization of marijuana, in hopes of reducing the unnecessary arrests or harassment of young black men. However, it is important to recognize that
far as marijuana usage and arrests go.64 However, African American and Latino males are more likely than whites to be arrested for possessing small amounts of
marijuana.65 What may not be apparent is the fact that even
with the dramatic change to the law in Colorado, men of color may
still be at risk of experiencing racial profiling and harassment, especially in circumstances where law
enforcement suspects that they are in possession of more than an ounce of marijuana. Beyond that, persons
caught selling marijuana in any amount without a license could be subject to a felony and a fine, if convicted.66
There are at least two factors, and likely many more, that make African American men more vulnerable to experiencing criminal justice impacts relating to
marijuana possession. The first factor that contributes to disparate arrest and conviction rates of African American men for low-level drug offenses, such as
black men between the ages of sixteen
to twenty-four have one of the highest rates of unemployment amongst any other group on a national
level.67 Young black men have tremendous difficulty obtaining jobs that pay a living wage, which in turn make
it difficult to support their families through legitimate means.68 The effects of generational poverty, racial discrimination, and
marginalization of African American men have led to perpetuating cycles of poverty, intolerable rates of
incarceration, high rates of unemployment, lower levels of educational attainment, and ongoing disengagement with mainstream
marijuana, is the poor socioeconomic conditions that entice these men to enter the drug trade. Indeed,
(____) Legalizing weed doesn’t fix the problem, in fact it just makes it worse by making elites
rich while people of color are still policed and incarcerated
Clutch Magazine 2014
(“Legal Weed: White People Get Rich, Black People Get To Stay In Prison”
http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2014/07/legal-weed-white-people-get-rich-black-people-get-stay-prison/)
During the March 6 conversation, Alexander went on to further point out the fact that black men
and boys have been public enemy number one, when it comes to the war on drugs. “Black
men and boys” have been the target of the war on drugs’ racist policies—stopped, frisked
and disturbed—“often before they’re old enough to vote,” she said. “We arrest these kids at
young ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them
into a parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in
the Civil Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their lives,” Alexander said.
“They can be discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing, access to education,
public benefits. They’re locked into a permanent second-class status for life. And we’ve done this in
precisely the communities that were most in need of our support.”
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Answers to: War on Drugs Stop Criminals
(___)
(___) Even if that is true in theory, the war on drugs fails and creates more violence and
tension
Dumke 14 Mick, Chicago Reader, 4-7, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-bust-blacks-potpossession-after-decriminalization/Content?oid=13004240
Police say there are good reasons to get some pot possessors off the street. Marijuana dealing remains a
highly profitable business, and tension among competing sales operations can lead to violence. In custody,
some lower-level dealers provide police with information that leads to violent traffickers or gang leaders.
Still, that's not always the case—especially when officers sent to saturate high-crime areas are rookies
or only assigned there temporarily. "Guess who we end up stopping?" says the veteran officer. "The guy
who's walking to the store for some soda pop, or a lady who turns out to be a nurse." Or they're
simply pot users or sellers who aren't tied to large-scale operations. Sending them into the criminal
justice system can push them down a dangerous path while exacerbating tensions within the
community.
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Answers to: Utilitarianism
(___)
(___) Challenging institutional racism is a prior ethical question— it makes violence
structurally inevitable and foundationally negates morality making their utilitarianism
arguments incoherent
Albert Memmi 2k, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve
Martinot, p. 163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably
never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and
without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the
house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us
and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest
degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in
which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which
man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable
negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human
condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of
the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise
to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice:
one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its
consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition
for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a
redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism
signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an
ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not
an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans,
widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments.
Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things
considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of
course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and
oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps,
the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is
probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect.
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Answers to: Utilitarianism
(___) The judge should prioritize the impacts on minority populations – typical risk assessment
tends to exclude the voices of the oppressed and normalizes violence against these people
Mills 97 – Associate Prof of Philosophy @ U Illinois, Chicago (Charles-; The Racial Contract)
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real determinant of (most) white
moral/political practice and thus as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged . If the epistemology
of the signatories, the agents, of the Racial Contract requires evasion and denial of the realities of race,
the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial Contract is, unsurprisingly, focused on these
realities themselves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Contract tracking white moral/political
consciousness, the reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/political consciousness and
stimulating a puzzled investigation of that white moral/political consciousness .) The term "standpoint
theory" is now routinely used to signify the notion that in understanding the workings of a system of
oppression, a perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate than one from the top down.
What is involved here, then, is a "racial" version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive advantage that
is grounded in the phenomenological experience of the disjuncture between official (white) reality and
actual (nonwhite) experience, the "double-consciousness" of which W. E . B . Du Bois spoke .48 This
differential racial experience generates an alternative moral and political perception of social reality
which is encapsulated in the insight from the black American folk tradition I have used as the epigraph of
this book : the central realization, summing up the Racial Contract, that "when white people say Justice,' they
mean 'Just Us."' Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounters) been bemused or astonished by the
invisibility of the Racial Contract to whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in universalist terms
even when it has been quite clear that the scope has really been limited to themselves . Correspondingly,
nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the Racial Contract-objects rather than
subjects of it, viewing it from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than persons-are (at least
before ideological conditioning) able to see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial polity is
most transparent to its victims . The corollary is that nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory
has necessarily been focused less on the details of the particular competing moral and political
candidates (utilitarianism versus deontology versus natural rights theory; liberalism versus conservatism
versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged Racial Contract that has usually framed their
functioning. The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of nonwhites is not the fine- or even
coarse-grained conceptual divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their Herrenvolk
variants), but whether or not the subclause invoking the Racial Contract, thus putting the theory into
Herrenvolk mode, has been activated . The details of the moral theories thus become less important than
the metatheory, the Racial Contract, in which they are embedded.
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Answers to: Utilitarianism
(___) You should reject impacts that only focus on extinction and death, the world is already
violent towards people of color and a focus on “nuclear war” or other big impacts masks the
oppression of white supremacy by painting it as not as important
OMOLADE 84 City College Center for Worker Education in New York City
Barbara-a historian of black women for the past twenty years and an organizer in both the women’s and civil rights/black power movements; Women of Color and
the Nuclear Holocaust; WOMEN’S STUDIES QUARTERLY, Vol. 12., No. 2, Teaching about Peace, War, and Women in the Military, Summer, p. 12;
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4004305
In April, 1979, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released a report on the effects of
nuclear war that concludes that, in a general nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet
Union, 25 to 100 million people would be killed. This is approximately the same number of African
people who died between 1492 and 1890 as a result of the African slave trade to the New World. The
same federal report also comments on the destruction of urban housing that would cause massive
shortages after a nuclear war, as well as on the crops that would be lost, causing massive food
shortages. Of course, for people of color the world over, starvation is already a common problem,
when, for example, a nation’s crops are grown for export rather than to feed its own people. And the
housing of people of color throughout the world’s urban areas is already blighted and inhumane:
families live in shacks, shanty towns, or on the streets; even in the urban areas of North America, the
poor may live without heat or running water. For people of color, the world as we knew it ended
centuries ago. Our world, with its own languages, customs and ways, ended. And we are only now
beginning to see with increasing clarity that our task is to reclaim that world, struggle for it, and
rebuild it in our own image. The “death culture” we live in has convinced many to be more concerned
with death than with life, more willing to demonstrate for “survival at any cost” than to struggle for
liberty and peace with dignity. Nuclear disarmament becomes a safe issue when it is not linked to the
daily and historic issues of racism, to the ways in which people of color continue to be murdered. Acts
of war, nuclear holocausts, and genocide have already been declared on our jobs, our housing, our
schools, our families, and our lands. As women of color, we are warriors, not pacifists. We must fight as
a people on all fronts, or we will continue to die as a people. We have fought in people’s wars in China,
in Cuba, in Guinea-Bissau, and in such struggles as the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and
in countless daily encounters with landlords, welfare departments, and schools. These struggles are
not abstractions, but the only means by which we have gained the ability to eat and to provide for the
future of our people. We wonder who will lead the battle for nuclear disarmament with the vigor and
clarity that women of color have learned from participating in other struggles. Who will make the political
links among racism, sexism, imperialism, cultural integrity, and nuclear arsenals and housing? Who
will stand up?
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Discourse Impact Extensions
(
)
( ) Discourse is critical to our society: Political tolerance and acceptance of multiple
viewpoints is the cornerstone of our democracy
SARKESIAN '95
(Sam C., Prof Emeritus of Poli Sci @ Loyola Univ. with emphasis in national security and military professionalism, US National
Security, '95,p. 54)
The fundamental proposition is that democracy does not adhere to a dogmatic ideological philosophy. Indeed, one of
the most pervasive features of democracy is its pluralistic and pragmatic basis. This is rooted in the idea of
political tolerance for a variety of views--even extreme views--as long as they accept the notions of
political equality, self-determination, and individual worth. Although many disagree on specific applications, these
concepts are legitimate and historical bases for assessing the nature and credibility of a political
system. Finally, the legitimacy of a system and its leaders rests on the will of the people--the power of the
people is basic to the Constitution and the functioning of the U.S. political system. In brief, the way the system
functions, expectations regarding elected officials, and the purposes of the system must reflect the notion of government responsibility and accountability to the
people.
( ) The opportunity to think and speak freely gives the US government & our society the
legitimacy to persevere against all external threats
SARKESIAN '95
(Sam C., Prof Emeritus of Poli Sci @ Loyola Univ. with emphasis in national security and military professionalism, US National
Security, '95, p. 64)
With all of the disadvantages that open systems like the United States face in dealing with developed
totalitarian and authoritarian systems, in the long run it is democracy that has the advantage. The
involvement of the people in the governing process in open systems, their ability to voice their views
freely [emphasis added], and the final responsibility of those in office to the people establish long-term
stability, legitimacy, and capability as no other type of system can. Therein lies the true strength of open
systems. Little can prevail against the strength of a people who, having examined and debated the
issues, are convinced of the right policy and strategy.
(
) Market Place of Ideas leads to a pragmatic public
SARKESIAN '95
(Sam C., Prof Emeritus of Poli Sci @ Loyola Univ. with emphasis in national security and military professionalism, US National
Security, '95,p. 57)
Pragmatism is another ingredient of the democratic faith. This is the belief that the search for
practical consequences based on common sense is a natural result of an enlightened citizenry. Once
problems are encountered, the American people, applying common sense, can find reasonable--even
right--solutions. This "can do" attitude pervades most segments of U.S. society.
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Answers to: State Solutions Bad
(___)
(___) Mass incarceration is the cardinal scourge of black masses debilitates resistance
movements—we must use every tactic to challenge it including legal reform
Williams 68 [March 1968, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving
as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. Black
Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited Williams’s Negroes with Guns as a major inspiration. “Reaction
Without Positive Change”, The Crusader, Volume 9, Number 4,
http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.RobertFWilliams.Cru
sader.March.1968.pdf]
It is because it is an instrument of social reaction in the employ of reactionaries hell-bent on preserving
an ante-bellum and vulturous power structure frenetically trying to maintain its encircled and
battered position. Tyrants do not change of themselves. The pressure of the people stimulated by the
enlightenment derived from their social being is the driving wheel that propels the vehicle of change.
The Black and the powerless, who face the wrath of so-called Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, must come to
realize the futility of leaving their fate to the rule of law as implemented by puppet judges who pander
to the savage emotions of a cold blooded aristocracy. The true power of the state derives from the people.
The weakness of the people in a confrontation with state tyranny evolves from the apathy, confusion,
demoralization, disunity and ignorance of their own power. All over degenerate and fascist America today
the most complimentary citizens of a civilized society are being railroaded to prison, are being removed from
a decadent and sheepish society that is in dire need of highly moral and resistant fiber. These courageous and
upright citizens constitute the last thin line between regression and progression. They are the sparse in
numbers but firm pillars that so precariously prevent the society from plunging into the tragic and chaotic
depth of despotic fascism. America's jails are teaming with principled Black Nationalists, freedom
fighters, war resisters, peace advocates, resisters of false arrest, those forced into crime as a means of
survival, the penniless and powerless guilty of minor infractions, but unable to pay the court's tribute
money and the state's bribery. America's racist courts have assumed the despotic posture of
institutionalized lynch mobs enjoying the sanctimonious solicitude of the state's ritualistic buffoonery. This
inhumane and oppressive situation can only be rectified by an aroused, united and determined
citizenry. The power of the enraged masses must be arrayed against this Anglo=Saxon kangarooism.
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Answers to: State Solutions Bad
(___)
(___) Reformism is effective and brings revolutionary change closer rather than pushing it
away
Richard Delgado 9, self-appointed Minority scholar, Chair of Law at the University of Alabama Law
School, J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, his books have won eight national book prizes,
including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American
Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s
teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change, 2009, “Does Critical Legal
Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590
2. The CLS critique of piecemeal reform Critical scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform.
Incremental change, they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create
a decent society. Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise
and legitimize oppression. Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the
occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the
system is fair and just. In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case method in law
school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power
structure.“ To avoid this, CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to
find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an unabashedly political fashion. The CLS critique of
piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter experience that
occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is imperialistic in that it
tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them. A court
order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone
the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This
may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a warm office. It smacks of
paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the certainty of heat now, unless
there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some incremental
changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small reforms
induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may hold a
tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of piecemeal reform often
misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be
what we want.
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Case Debate
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Answers to: State Solutions Bad
(___) Legal change has resulted in racial advancement and more is still possible
Randall Kennedy 12, Harvard Law Professor, Race, Crime, and the Law, Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group, pp. 388-389
True, it is sometimes genuinely difficult to determine an appropriate remedial response. The proper
way to address that difficulty, however, is to acknowledge and grapple with it, not bury it beneath
unbelievable assertions that, in fact, no real problem exists. Whitewashing racial wrongs (especially
while simultaneously proclaiming that courts are doing everything reasonably possible to combat racially
invidious government action) corrupts officials and jades onlookers, nourishing simplistic, despairing, and
defeatist critiques of the law that are profoundly destructive. The second impression that I want to leave
with readers should serve as an antidote to these overwrought, defeatist critiques by acknowledging that the
administration of criminal law has changed substantially for the better over the past half century and
that there is reason to believe that, properly guided, it can be improved even more. Today there are
more formal and informal protections against racial bias than ever before, both in terms of the
protections accorded to blacks against criminality and the treatment accorded to black suspects,
defendants, and convicts. That deficiencies, large deficiencies, remain is clear. But comparing racial
policies today to those that prevailed in 1940 or 1960 or even 1980 should expose the fallacy of
asserting that nothing substantial has been changed for the better. This point is worth stressing
because of the prevalence and prominence of pessimistic thinking about the race question in American
life. Some commentators maintain, in all seriousness, that there has been no significant improvement in
the overall fortunes of black Americans during the past half century, that advances that appear to have
been made are merely cosmetic, and that the United States is doomed to remain a pigmentocracy. This
pessimistic strain often turns paranoid and apocalyptic in commentary about the administration of
criminal law. It is profoundly misleading, however, to focus exclusively on the ugliest aspects of the
American legal order. Doing so conceals real achievements: the Reconstruction Constitutional
Amendments, the Reconstruction civil rights laws, Strauder v. Alabama, Dempsey v. Moore, Brown v.
Mississippi, Powell v. Alabama, Norris v. Alabama, Batson v. Kentucky, the resuscitation of
Reconstruction by the civil rights movement, the changing demographics of the bench, bar, and police
departments—in sum, the stigmatization (albeit incomplete) of invidious racial bias. Neglecting these
achievements robs them of support. Recent sharp attacks upon basic guarantees bequeathed by the
New Deal ought to put everyone on notice of the perils of permitting social accomplishments to lose
their rightful stature in the public's estimation.
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Case Debate
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Answers to: State Level Surveillance
(___)
(___) State activities in the drug war come from the DEA
DEA 2015—United States Drug Enforcement Agency, “DEA Programs: State and Local Task Forces”
http://www.dea.gov/ops/taskforces.shtml
This cooperative effort between the DEA and local law enforcement agencies actually began in 1970,
before the establishment of the DEA, with a pilot task force created in New York City by the former
BNDD. The first task force was comprised of investigators from major state and local regional agencies,
primarily the New York City Police Department and the New York State, along with BNDD personnel. Due
to the complexity of drug problems in the region and the varied levels of drug trafficking, the New
York City metropolitan area was ideal for federal, state, and local initiatives. The success of the New
York Task Force provided the impetus for a combined creation of DEA’s State and Local Task Force
Program. As an inducement to participate, DEA began to pay investigative overtime for the state and
local task force officers, as well as investigative expenses such as payments to informants, “buy money”
to purchase contraband, undercover vehicles, and surveillance equipment. When State and Local Task
Force funding was not available for new task forces. DEA Headquarters gave approval to establish an
“informal” task force using existing divisional funds. Since these ad hoc task forces operated
informally, no system existed to track their progress or to include them in DEA’s budget planning.
Therefore, the Provisional Task Force Program was created as a way to plan ahead, using limited
funding prudently.
46/75
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Case Debate
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Answers to: Status Quo Solves
(___)
(___)
Drug reform has been a myth since Nixon—They protect it for profits
Whitaker 2013—Morgan Whitaker is from MSNBC, September 24, “How profits help drive the war on
drugs” http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/how-profits-help-drive-the-war-drugs
So why pour money into a failed system? One factor might just be profit. During the Reagan
administration, the government started incentivizing drug arrests by handing out grants to police
departments fighting drug crimes. An arrest in a state like Wisconsin could bank a city or county an extra
$153. In 34 years in the Seattle Police Department, Norm Stamper learned about those incentives first
hand, and he believes they are “corrupting the system.” “What we have seen with this drug war are
insane numbers of Americans being arrested for nonviolent, very low level drug offenses, in the tens of
millions of numbers, and what do we have to show for it?” he asked on Tuesday’s PoliticsNation. He said
drugs are more readily available than when Nixon “first declared war against them.” “Make no
mistake, he was really declaring war against his fellow Americans. He was declaring war particularly
against young people, poor people, and people of color.” Stamper takes issue with the prison industry, which
has seen major growth due to low level drug offenders, compared to relatively little growth from more
violent offenders. “The prison industrial complex, the law enforcement, drug enforcement industry, the
cartels themselves, heavy street traffickers, are deeply invested in the status quo,” Stamper said. “They
are very much invested in making sure, by protecting and expanding their drug markets, often times
through violent means, that they will continue to reap the enormous, untaxed, obscene profits
associated with illicit commerce.”
47/75
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Case Debate
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Answers to: Status Quo Solves: DEA Policy
(___)
(___)
No major reforms—The DEA sees profiling as effective
Hicks 2015—Josh Hicks reports for the Washington Post, January 30, “Report criticizes DEA’s poor
monitoring for racial bias in ‘cold consent’ stops”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/01/30/dea-version-of-stop-and-frisk-is-barelymonitored-for-racial-bias/
The review also found the DEA provides little instruction or oversight for the stops. For instance, only
29 percent of its task force members and 47 percent of supervisors had attended training, and most
agents were unaware of reporting requirements that could help determine whether officers use the
method improperly. Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial-justice
program, said the cold-consent program could easily lead to problems. “This type of highly discretionary
law-enforcement technique provides an opening for implicit biases to influence the officers’ decisions
and actions,” she said. “All people are vulnerable to biases.” The IG launched its probe after the Pentagon
attorney filed a complaint, saying she faced humiliating and aggressive questioning. She was not identified in
Thursday’s report. A DEA spokesman said the agency concurs with the IG reforms, but the agency also
said in a letter that cold-consent encounters are one of many tools it uses to disrupt drug-trafficking
networks. It added that it can’t legally force an individual to provide demographic information
without an arrest. “It would not be in DEA’s best interest to use its best guesstimate in determining the
race during an encounter, which may not result in an accurate statistic,” the letter said.
48/75
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Ans to: Topicality – Dom. Surv. = Terrorism (JV/V)
(___)
(___) We meet – war on drugs is at the heart of the domestic surveillance – every surveillance
test case in recent history is related to the war on drugs
Greenberg, senior reporter on privacy and security issues, 15 Andy, April 15, 2015, "Want to See
Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War," www.wired.com/2015/04/want-see-domestic-spyingsfuture-follow-drug-war/
THE NSA ISN’T the only three-letter agency that’s been quietly collecting Americans’ data on a mindboggling scale. The country learned this week that the Drug Enforcement Agency spied on all of us
first, and with even fewer privacy protections by some measures. But if anyone is surprised that the
DEA’s mass surveillance programs have been just as aggressive as the NSA’s, they shouldn’t be. The
early targets that signal shifts in America’s domestic surveillance techniques aren’t activists and
political dissidents, as some privacy advocates argue—or terrorists, as national security hawks would
claim. They’re drug dealers. The DEA’s newly revealed bulk collection of billions of American phone
records on calls to 116 countries preceded the NSA’s similar program by years and may have even
helped to inspire it, as reported in USA Today’s story Wednesday. And the program serves as a reminder
that most of the legal battles between government surveillance efforts and the Fourth Amendment’s
privacy protections over the last decades have played out first on the front lines of America’s War on
Drugs. Every surveillance test case in recent history, from beepers to cell phones to GPS tracking to
drones—and now the feds’ attempts to puncture the bubble of cryptographic anonymity around Dark
Web sites like the Silk Road—began with a narcotics investigation. “If you asked me last week who was
doing this [kind of mass surveillance] other than the NSA, the DEA would be my first guess,” says Chris
Soghoian, the lead technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The War on Drugs and the
surveillance state are joined at the hip.” It’s no secret that drug cases overwhelmingly dominate American
law enforcement’s use of surveillance techniques. The Department of Justice annually reports to the
judiciary how many wiretaps it seeks warrants for, broken down by the type of crime being
investigated. In 2013, the last such report, a staggering 88 percent of the 3,576 reported wiretaps were
for narcotics. That’s compared to just 132 wiretaps for homicide and assault combined, for instance,
and a mere eight for corruption cases.
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Answers to: Topicality – Domestic Surveillance = Terrorism (JV/V)
(___) Counter-interpretation – domestic surveillance is categorized by means of
communication not content, it is not realistic or predictable to limit surveillance to only
terrorism
Stray, 2013 (Jonathan Stray, “FAQ: What You Need to Know About the NSA’s Surveillance Programs”,
http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq, August 5th, 2013)
There have been a lot of news stories about NSA surveillance programs following the leaks of secret
documents by Edward Snowden. But it seems the more we read, the less clear things are. We've put
together a detailed snapshot of what's known and what's been reported where. What information does
the NSA collect and how? We don’t know all of the different types of information the NSA collects, but
several secret collection programs have been revealed: A record of most calls made in the U.S., including
the telephone number of the phones making and receiving the call, and how long the call lasted. This
information is known as “metadata” and doesn’t include a recording of the actual call (but see below).
This program was revealed through a leaked secret court order instructing Verizon to turn over all such
information on a daily basis. Other phone companies, including AT&T and Sprint, also reportedly give their
records to the NSA on a continual basis. All together, this is several billion calls per day. Email, Facebook
posts and instant messages for an unknown number of people, via PRISM, which involves the
cooperation of at least nine different technology companies. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others have
denied that the NSA has “direct access” to their servers, saying they only release user information in
response to a court order. Facebook has revealed that, in the last six months of 2012, they handed over the
private data of between 18,000 and 19,000 users to law enforcement of all types -- including local police and
federal agencies, such as the FBI, Federal Marshals and the NSA. Massive amounts of raw Internet traffic
The NSA intercepts huge amounts of raw data, and stores billions of communication records per day in its
databases. Using the NSA’s XKEYSCORE software, analysts can see “nearly everything a user does on
the Internet” including emails, social media posts, web sites you visit, addresses typed into Google
Maps, files sent, and more. Currently the NSA is only authorized to intercept Internet communications with
at least one end outside the U.S., though the domestic collection program used to be broader. But because
there is no fully reliable automatic way to separate domestic from international communications, this
program also captures some amount of U.S. citizens’ purely domestic Internet activity, such as emails, social
media posts, instant messages, the sites you visit and online purchases you make.
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Answers to: Topicality/Domestic Surv. – We Meet Extensions (JV/V)
(___)
(___) The heart of domestic surveillance is the war on drugs
Greenberg, senior reporter on privacy and security issues, 15 Andy, April 15, 2015, "Want to See
Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War," www.wired.com/2015/04/want-see-domestic-spyingsfuture-follow-drug-war/
With all those cases in mind, the DEA’s now-defunct bulk collection of Americans’ phone metadata fits
squarely into a long and storied history of drug investigators using and abusing their surveillance
powers. That doesn’t make privacy advocates like it any better. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
and Human Rights Watch filed a lawsuit earlier this week to make sure that the program is completely
terminated rather than merely hidden or suspended, considering the 20-year secrecy around the
DEA’s phone metadata collection.
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Answers to: Topicality/Dom Surv – Counter-Interp Extensions (JV/V)
(___)
(___) Domestic surveillance includes electronic surveillance independent of the content – the
affs form of restricting War on Drugs surveillance ought to be included in the topic
Small, Lieutenant in the United States Air Force Academy, 2008 (Matthew Small, United States Air
Force Academy, “His Eyes are Watching You: Domestic Surveillance, Civil Liberties and Executive Power
during Times of National Crisis”, cspc.nonprofitsoapbox.com/storage/documents/Fellows2008/Small, 2008)
This paper’s analysis, in terms of President Bush’s policies, focuses on electronic surveillance;
specifically, wiretapping phone lines and obtaining caller information from phone companies. Section f
of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 defines electronic surveillance as: [T]he acquisition by an electronic,
mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or
intended to be received by a particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the
contents are acquired by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a
person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement
purposes; Adhering to the above definition allows for a focused analysis of one part of President Bush’s
domestic surveillance policy as its implementation relates to the executive’s ability to abridge certain civil
liberties. However, since electronic surveillance did not become an issue of public concern until the 1920s,
there would seem to be a problem with the proposed analysis
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Answers to: Organized Crime DisadvantageMarijuana Legalization now (N, JV, & V)
(___)
(___) Their impacts are empirically denied or will never happen – marijuana is being legalized
in Colorado and shows the easing up of the War on Drugs has a negligible impact.
David Downs 12, writes the syndicated weekly column “Legalization Nation” for the SF Gate,
11/2/12,Think Tank: ‘U.S. Weed Will Kick Mexican Weed’s Butt If Any States Legalize Pot’,
blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2012/11/02/u-s-weed-will-kick-mexican-weeds-butt-if-any-states-legalize-pot/
A new study released by a respected Mexican think tank finds that cannabis legalization in Colorado,
Washington or Oregon this year will lead to such huge price drops and quality increases that U.S.
cannabis will completely muscle Mexican pot out the U.S. market. The Mexico Institute for
Competitiveness’ ‘Possible Impact of legalizing marihuana in the U.S.‘ finds that cheap, legal, high-quality
sensimilla would seap out of whatever state legalized it, and undercut Mexican “commercial” weed
across the country. Cheaper, better, U.S. cannabis would lead to “significant decline in revenues from
drug trafficking in Mexican criminal organizations,” IMCO states. “United States is currently a net
importer of marijuana. But [if] one or more states [legalized, the U.S.] could meet most of its domestic
demand with domestic production. If this scenario materializes, Mexico would be facing the largest
structural shock suffered by drug traffickers since the massive arrival of cocaine in the late eighties,” they
conclude.
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Answers to: Organized Crime DA - Kingpin Focus (N, JV, V)
(___) Ending the War on Drugs allows the government to focus on getting the kingpins of the
cartels
Carlsen, Director of CIP, 2010 Laura, director of the CIP Americas Program, “How Legalizing
Marijuana Would Weaken Mexican Drug Cartels,” Nov 3, http://www.cipamericas.org/wpcontent/uploads/wp-post-to-pdf-cache/1/how-legalizing-marijuana-would-weaken-mexican-drug-cartels.pdf
In the months leading up to the vote, opponents of legalization issued a barrage of confused and¶
contradictory arguments aimed at convincing voters to ignore a basic common-sense fact: legal sourcing
erodes the black-market profits of organized crime. But organized crime is a business. Reducing
demand through providing legal sources would hurt that business and cut deeply into resources used
to recruit youth, buy off politicians and purchase weapons.¶ The most recent argument thrown out in the
anti-Prop. 19 campaign, claims that the California marijuana¶ market is insignificant to Mexican drug
traffickers.¶ That argument was blown out of the water on October 18 when the Mexican Army and police
seized 134¶ tons of marijuana, wrapped and ready to be smuggled from Tijuana across the border. The huge
cache¶ was estimated to be worth at least $338 million dollars on the street. Mexican authorities guessed that
it¶ was owned by the nation's most powerful drug-trafficking organization, the Sinaloa Cartel.¶ Even if much
of that is distributed to other states, the sheer size of the potential shipment shows that the¶ U.S. marijuana
market for Mexican traffickers, calculated at $20 billion a year, is well worth fighting for.¶ Since before
Prop. 19 came along, reports showed that Mexico's drug cartels were concerned about how U.S.
production and legalization of medical marijuana cut into their profits.¶ Prohibition creates the
underground market that generates their economic, political and military strength. With the drop in
income from marijuana sales, cartels have less money for buying arms and politicians, or recruiting
young people into the trade.¶ The drug cartels also consider the marijuana black market worth killing for.
Just days after the historic bust, thirteen young men were massacred at a drug rehabilitation center. An
anonymous voice came over¶ police radio saying the act was "a taste of Juarez" and that up to 135 people
could be murdered in¶ retaliation for the bust--one per ton.¶ Although calculating Mexican cartel earnings
from marijuana sales will always be a guessing game, it's¶ indisputable that as long as it's illegal every penny
of those earnings goes into the pockets of organized¶ crime. From the peasant who converts his land from
corn to pot to feed his family, to the truckdriver who¶ takes on a bonus cargo, to the Mexican and U.S.
border officials who open "windows" in international¶ customs controls, to the youth gangs who sell in U.S.
cities--all are sucked into a highly organized and¶ brutal system of contraband.¶ Legalization in part of the
world's leading market would take a huge chunk out of this transnational business.¶
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Answers to: Organized Crime DA- War on Drugs not key (N, JV, V)
(___)
(___) The war on drugs aren’t necessary nor do they solve – there are a whole host of alternate
causes
Riggs, 12 Mike, Staff writer, “The 3 Worst Arguments for Legalizing Marijuana,”
http://reason.com/archives/2012/03/23/the-three-worst-arguments-for-legalizing,
The election of Mexican President Felipe Calderon in 2006 ushered in a new era of prohibition-fueled
drug violence. Six years and 50,000 drug-war deaths later, the argument that repealing marijuana
prohibition could stem the violence in Mexico and along the U.S. border is ubiquitous. The claim was a
major selling point for Proposition 19 in California, which would have legalized marijuana and subjected its
sale to taxation and regulation, and has been made repeatedly by drug reform advocates in the two years
since. “We have created an illegal marketplace with such mind-boggling profits that no enforcement
measures will ever overcome the motivation, resources and determination of the cartels,” Libertarian Party
presidential candidate Gary Johnson wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Washington Times. Legalizing pot, he
added, would deny the cartels “their largest profit center and dramatically reduce not only the role of
the United States in their business plans, but also the motivation for waging war along our southern
border.” But there are objections to that claim. In October 2010, the RAND Corporation released a study
saying that Mexican cartels derived only 16 percent of their revenue from marijuana. (As pointed out by
NORML, that number conflicted with the ONDCP's estimate that 61 percent of cartel revenue comes from
marijuana.) In June 2011, Mexico analyst Sylvia Longmire argued that cartels have diversified to the point
that legalizing marijuana might dent their war chests, but it won’t stop them; they’d still make money
stealing oil from pipelines, pirating and selling contraband intellectual property, extorting small
businesses, bribing politicians, ransoming kidnap victims, manufacturing and moving harder drugs
such as cocaine, heroin, and meth, and trafficking undocumented immigrants and sex workers. In
2011, David Borden, executive director of StoptheDrugWar.org, emailed me with objections to Longmire’s
argument: “Some of the other criminal enterprises that cartels are involved in (enterprises they've been able
to enter because of having drug cash and organizations built by drug cash) are less straightforwardly tied to
demand, such as kidnapping for ransom, but they have their limits—for all we know they are already doing
as much of those things as they think could be sustained, and the more profit they continue to make from
drugs, the more money they are going to invest in all kinds of enterprises, both illicit and licit.” “Will the
cartels vanish from the face of the earth because of marijuana legalization?" Borden continued.
"Probably not. Would even full legalization of all drugs accomplish that? Unclear.” That lack of clarity is
exactly why marijuana reformers should be careful when promising what legalizing pot can and can’t do for
Mexico. The war on drugs has weakened the country’s political institutions, corrupted its military and police
forces, and devastated its economy. While pot legalization in the U.S. would allow users to divest from the
cartels' brutality, pitching marijuana legalization as anything other than a baby step toward peace and
stability in Mexico puts drug reformers on tenuous grounds.
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Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage– Ending War on Drugs Stops
Cartels (N, JV, V)
(___)
(___) Ending the war on drugs moves the United States from a prohibition model to a public
health one which hurts cartels even more and stops instability
Robelo, Research Coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance, 13 Drug Policy Alliance research
coordinator Daniel, "Demand Reduction or Redirection? Channeling Illicit Drug Demand towards a
Regulated Supply to Diminish Violence in Latin America," Oregon Law Review, 91 Or. L. Rev. 1227, 2013,
l/n
It is also impossible to foresee how regulation would affect levels of violence. Some analysts believe a shortterm increase in violence is possible (as competition over a smaller market could intensify), but that violence
in the longer term will decline. n106 Some analysts point out that organized crime may further diversify into
other activities, such as extortion and kidnapping, though these have been shown to be considerably
less profitable than drug trafficking. As one scholar [*1249] notes, given the profitability of the drug trade,
"it would take roughly 50,000 kidnappings to equal 10% of cocaine revenues from the U.S. n107 While the
American mafia certainly diversified into other criminal endeavors after the Repeal of alcohol
Prohibition, homicide rates nevertheless declined dramatically. n108 Combining marijuana regulation
with medical regulatory models for heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine could strike a major blow to the
corrosive economic power of violent trafficking organizations, diminishing their ability to perpetrate murder,
hire recruits, purchase weapons, corrupt officials, operate with impunity, and terrorize societies. Moreover,
these approaches promise concrete results - potentially significant reductions in DTO revenues - unlike all
other strategies that Mexico or the United States have tried to date. n109 Criminal organizations would still
rely on other activities for their income, but they would be left weaker and less of a threat to security.
Furthermore, the United States and Latin American governments would save resources currently
wasted on prohibition enforcement and generate new revenues in taxes - resources which could be
applied more effectively towards confronting violence and other crimes that directly threaten public
safety. n110
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Answers to: Organized Crime – War on Drugs Isn’t Key Ext (N,JV,V)
(___)
(___) Other crimes make them stronger
Beittel, 13 June, Analyst in Latin American affairs, “CRS Report for Congress¶ Prepared for Members and
Committees of Congress¶ Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations:¶ Source and Scope of the Violence,”
http://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41576.pdf, Vitz
Another emerging factor has been the criminal diversification of the DTOs. In addition to selling¶
illegal drugs, they have branched into other profitable crimes such as kidnapping, assassination¶ for
hire, auto theft, controlling prostitution, extortion, money-laundering, software piracy,¶ resource theft,
and human smuggling. The surge in violence due to inter- and intra-cartel conflict¶ over lucrative
drug smuggling routes has been accompanied by an increase in kidnapping for¶ ransom and other
crimes. According to recent es¶ timates, kidnappings in Mexico have increased¶ by 188% since 2007, armed
robbery by 47%, and extortion by 101%.¶ 98¶ Some believe¶ diversification may be evidence of
organizational vitality and growth. Others contend that¶ diversification signals that U.S. and Mexican drug
enforcement measures are cutting into profits¶ from drug trafficking, or constitutes a response to shifting
U.S. drug consumption patterns.¶ 99¶ The¶ growing public condemnation of the DTOs may also be
stimulated by their diversification into¶ street crime, which causes more harm to average Mexican civilians
than intra- and inter-DTO¶ violence related to conflicts over drug trafficking.
Because the DTOs have diversified, many analysts now refer to them as transnational criminal¶
organizations (TCOs), as organized crime groups, or as mafias.¶ 100¶ Others maintain that much of¶
their non-drug criminal activity is in service of the central drug trafficking business.¶ 101¶ Whatever¶ the
label, no one has an accurate way to assess how much of the DTOs’ income is earned from¶ their non-drug
activities. Los Zetas are one of the most diversified DTOs. Their satellite¶ businesses include the theft
of petroleum from the state-owned oil company PEMEX, product¶ piracy, and human smuggling, as
well as extortion, money laundering, and robbery.¶ 102¶ In July¶ 2011, the Obama Administration
released a¶ Strategy to Combat¶ Transnational Organized Crime¶ ,¶ citing the Mexican DTOs as some of its
target subjects.¶ 103¶ On July 25, the White House issued an¶ executive order that named four groups
around the world that presented transnational organized¶ crime threats to U.S. national security. Not
surprisingly, Los Zetas were identified for their¶ diverse criminal activities and their propensity to commit
mass murder. Some analysts have¶ questioned why Los Zetas were singled out, when Sinaloa and other
Mexican DTOs are also¶ known to be significantly involved in other forms of crime
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State Decriminalization CP Ans - Solvency (JV & V)
(___)
(___) Solvency deficit – decriminalization fails to lessen the impacts of policing on communities
of color – New York decriminalization proves
Burns, associate editor, 2014 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Marijuana Legalization”, [SG])
What impact will marijuana legalization have on the War on Drugs as a whole? David J. Leonard: Any
changes in the War on Drugs will require continued organizing and agitation, because history has
shown that one step forward has also resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color. New York
decriminalized marijuana in 1977. That clearly did not lead to the end of the War on Drugs in New
York, or lessen its effects on communities of color. Instead, the way the law was written provided the
foundation for stop-and-frisk, because the law made it a misdemeanor for marijuana to be in public
view, which basically fostered incentives to stop blacks and Latinos and tell them to empty their
pockets. So I have a number of concerns about the impact of these reforms on the War on Drugs. To
give just one other example: Does decriminalization apply to those who are on probation and being
drug-tested?
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Answers to: State Decrim CP – Solvency Deficit Extensions (JV & V)
(___)
(___) Police forces will continue to find ways to criminalize communities of color unless the
entire structure of the War on Drugs is challenged. Small changes will not make a difference.
Burns, associate editor, 2014 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Marijuana Legalization”, [SG])
: I’m very concerned about how this is going to play out on the ground. Young people who are selling
drugs because they have no other job opportunities are definitively not going to be able to participate
in the formal economy through the dispensaries. Is law enforcement going to go after those young people
20 times harder now? AW: Yes, I am concerned that distribution charges will increase. Whenever you
make change, especially against law enforcement’s status quo, it often finds a way to circumvent that
change and maintain its budget. But we haven’t seen anything that will lead us to believe that is taking
place right now. And you have to realize that these new marijuana laws are part of a much broader reform
movement: Colorado has also been revising its criminal justice laws. The first thing we did once Amendment
64 passed [in Colorado] was to lower criminal penalties for those [between the ages of] 18 and 20 possessing
marijuana. So we are already working on preempting any type of net-widening. ITT:
What impact will marijuana legalization have on the War on Drugs as a whole? David J. Leonard: Any
changes in the War on Drugs will require continued organizing and agitation, because history has
shown that one step forward has also resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color. New York
decriminalized marijuana in 1977. That clearly did not lead to the end of the War on Drugs in New York, or
lessen its effects on communities of color. Instead, the way the law was written provided the foundation
for stop-and-frisk, because the law made it a misdemeanor for marijuana to be in public view, which
basically fostered incentives to stop blacks and Latinos and tell them to empty their pockets. So I have
a number of concerns about the impact of these reforms on the War on Drugs. To give just one other
example: Does decriminalization apply to those who are on probation and being drug-tested? MK: Another
concern is whether, as the prices of marijuana start climbing [because of legalization] and [poor] people
turn to using other kinds of drugs, those drugs then get painted as the worst possible drugs on the
planet. The people who are doing the “worst” drugs somehow always happen to be the most
marginalized people within our culture. That’s why it’s so important that we focus on uprooting the
whole architecture of the War on Drugs. If we’re not talking about the root issues of racism and
classism, there are bound to be unintended consequences.
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Answers to: State Decrim CP – Solvency Deficit Extensions (JV & V)
(___) Empirically in Colorado, just removing criminal penalties doesn’t change the policing
Fleischer 13 – (Matthew, Jan 2 2013, “Weed Is Legal, but Prior Offenders Won’t Be Let Off the Hook,”
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/01/02/no-relief-convicted
Modified for ableist language.
In the past 25 years, 210,000 marijuana-related arrests have been made in the state of Colorado alone. Of
that number, more than 50,000 took place between 2006 and 2010. So now that Colorado has officially
legalized the commercial sale and consumption of marijuana, how many of those people arrested for
previous weed crimes will be let out of prison? Or, if they’ve already served their time, how many will
have their marijuana crimes expunged from their records, making it easier to get a job? The answer:
Zero on all counts. In American criminal justice, so goes the thinking, marijuana possession or
distribution was against the law when the crime was committed. The law is the law. Whether or not the old
law was unpopular or unjust is immaterial. Though there’s a certain cruel logic to this viewpoint, from a
global perspective it is an extreme outlier. The United States is one of the only countries in the world that
doesn’t guarantee what’s called “retroactive ameliorative relief” in sentencing. Meaning, when a law is
passed to ease or eliminate punishments for a specific crime, those already convicted of that crime don’t
necessarily receive the same relaxation or cessation of their sentence. “The United States is one of only 22
countries that doesn’t guarantee retroactive ameliorative relief in sentencing,” says Amanda Solter,
Project Director of Human Rights and Criminal Sentencing Reform Project for the University of San
Francisco School of Law. “The only other countries that do this are places like Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan,
South Sudan, and a handful of countries in the Caribbean. Even Russia provides this right.” Though postconviction relief varies from state-to-state in the U.S., amelioration typically needs to be explicitly
specified by lawmakers for it to take effect. In a political system paralyzed [affected] by the need of
candidates to appear tough on crime, this rarely happens. The Fair Sentencing Act, for instance, which
passed the U.S. Congress in 2010, eases penalties for the personal possession of crack cocaine. However,
even though this law was explicitly crafted to right the wrong of absurdly high sentences for crack
possession in comparison with other drugs, lawmakers made no effort to ease the sentences of those
already convicted. It gets worse. “Connecticut repealed the death penalty and didn’t make it retroactive,”
says Solter. “New Mexico has done the same. Two people there are currently on Death Row. It seems
obvious on some level, and yet that right doesn’t exist here in the United States. It’s the world’s worst
punishment, then you decide it doesn’t apply retroactively? “South Africa, on the other hand, abolished the
death penalty and made it retroactive for 300 to 400 people on Death Row. Russia did the same in the ’90s
and commuted the sentences of roughly 700 people. These are tangible examples of where other countries
are putting [retroactive ameliorative relief] into practice.
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State Decriminalization CP Answers - Racism (JV & V)
(___)
(___) the counterplan doesn’t challenge the underlying racist ideology that is used to police
communities of colors – it still maintains the war on drug efforts more broadly which mean
people still get policed – decriminalization efforts now prove minorities still get targeted
Dumke 14 Mick, Chicago Reader, 4-7, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-bust-blacks-potpossession-after-decriminalization/Content?oid=13004240
The racial grass gap hasn't narrowed a bit. Two years after Chicago moved to reform its marijuana
laws, a two-tiered system of justice remains firmly in place: while low-level pot possession has essentially
been decriminalized for residents of affluent neighborhoods, others are routinely stopped and cuffed in an
ongoing crackdown in poor, minority areas. The number of arrests for marijuana possession citywide has
dropped to its lowest level in 12 years. But police continue to make an average of 44 arrests a day for
misdemeanor possession, more than for any other offense. And who's getting busted hasn't changed at all.
Though studies have found similar marijuana usage rates across racial groups, 78 percent of those arrested
since August 2012 for carrying small amounts of pot were black, according to police department data.
Another 17 percent were Hispanic, and just 4 percent were white—virtually the same breakdown as
before the new possession ordinance went into effect. The reformed pot law allows police to ticket people
caught with less than 15 grams of marijuana instead of locking them up. But police have seldom issued the
tickets, formally known as administrative notices of violation, or ANOVs. Just 1,725 marijuana-possession
tickets were handed out between August 2012 and this February—while 20,844 arrests were made during the
same period for possession of less than 15 grams. And as with the arrests, most of the tickets—a whopping
70 percent—were issued to African-Americans. Another 18 percent went to Hispanics, while whites
received 11 percent. The figures were provided to the Reader through a request under the state's freedom of
information act. "This trend reflects the racial and ethnic disparities we see throughout the system—
from the point of ticketing or arrest, through admissions to the Cook County Jail or the state's prison system,"
Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle said in a written statement. "These are concerns I raised
directly with the Mayor, and it's his obligation to work to make this process more fair."
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Answers to: States Decrim CP – Racial Biases Continue Extensions (JV&V)
(___)
(___) Racial biases will continue to exist and communities of color will get policed
Levine 13 Harry, Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of
New York. TNI, Vol. 15: Weed. 4/3, http://thenewinquiry.com/features/national-disgrace/
More and more we are finding that decriminalization as it is usually understood and practiced is not a real
solution — it does not fix this scandal. Under most forms of decriminalization, police continue to stop
and search people looking for marijuana, and they do so in the same neighborhoods, targeting the
same people. So decriminalization does nothing to address the huge racial biases and disparities in the
policing of pot possession.
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Answers to: States Decrim CP – Administrative Tinkering Ext (JV&V)
(___)
(___) Absent challenging the entire racist foundation of the war on drugs, policing will
continue and law enforcement will figure out a way
Burns, associate editor, 2014 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Marijuana Legalization”, [SG])
. African Americans are about three and a half times more likely to be arrested [in the United States for
marijuana-related offenses] than their white counterparts; Latinos are about two times more likely. We’re
setting a paradigm that hopefully many other states will follow. One worry has been that the high price of
legalized marijuana will encourage a black market and that arrests for illegal distribution could
actually increase. Mariame: I’m very concerned about how this is going to play out on the ground. Young
people who are selling drugs because they have no other job opportunities are definitively not going to
be able to participate in the formal economy through the dispensaries. Is law enforcement going to go
after those young people 20 times harder now? Art : Yes, I am concerned that distribution charges will
increase. Whenever you make change, especially against law enforcement’s status quo, it often finds a
way to circumvent that change and maintain its budget. But we haven’t seen anything that will lead us
to believe that is taking place right now. And you have to realize that these new marijuana laws are
part of a much broader reform movement: Colorado has also been revising its criminal justice laws.
The first thing we did once Amendment 64 passed [in Colorado] was to lower criminal penalties for
those [between the ages of] 18 and 20 possessing marijuana. So we are already working on preempting
any type of net-widening. What impact will marijuana legalization have on the War on Drugs as a whole?
David: Any changes in the War on Drugs will require continued organizing and agitation, because
history has shown that one step forward has also resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color.
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State Decriminalization CP Answers – Perm (JV & V)
(___)
(___) Permutation do both – decriminalization is such a successful strategy that it diminishes
the cartels’ revenue sufficiently and eliminates the necessity of the war on drugs
Duke, Yale professor of Law, 2009 professor of law at Yale (Steven, “Drugs: To Legalize or Not” Wall
Street Journal, 4/25, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB124061360462654683)
Even with popular support, legalizing and regulating the distribution of marijuana in the U.S. would be
neither easy nor quick. While imposing its prohibitionist will on the rest of the world for nearly a century,
the U.S. has created a network of treaties and international agreements requiring drug prohibition.
Those agreements would have to be revised. A sensible intermediate step would be to decriminalize the
possession and use of marijuana and to exercise benign neglect of American marijuana growers. Doing
both would puncture the market for imports from Mexico and elsewhere and would eliminate much of
the profit that fuels the internecine warfare in Mexico.
(___) Solvency deficit – decriminalizing certain drugs without uprooting the war on drugs
more broadly means poor people turn to selling and using other drugs and still criminalized
for it
Burns, associate editor, 2014 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness
of Marijuana Legalization”, [SG])
MK: Another concern is whether, as the prices of marijuana start climbing [because of legalization] and
[poor] people turn to using other kinds of drugs, those drugs then get painted as the worst possible
drugs on the planet. The people who are doing the “worst” drugs somehow always happen to be the
most marginalized people within our culture. That’s why it’s so important that we focus on uprooting
the whole architecture of the War on Drugs. If we’re not talking about the root issues of racism and
classism, there are bound to be unintended consequences.
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Answers to: States Decrim CP – Permutation do both Extensions (JV&V)
(___)
(___) Permutation do both solves the net benefit – decriminalization is SO effective at
damaging the cartels that it eliminates any down falls to dismantling the war on drugs
Duke, Yale professor of Law, 2009 (Stephen – Professor of Law, Yale Law School, “Drugs: To Legalize
or Not”, 4/25, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB124061360462654683)
Marijuana presents the strongest case for this approach. According to some estimates, marijuana
comprises about 70% of the illegal product distributed by the Mexican cartels. Marijuana will grow
anywhere. If the threat of criminal prosecution and forfeitures did not deter American marijuana
farmers, America's entire supply of that drug would be home-grown. If we taxed the marijuana
agribusiness at rates similar to that for tobacco and alcohol, we would raise about $10 billion in taxes per
year and would save another $10 billion we now spend on law enforcement and imprisoning marijuana users
and distributors. Even with popular support, legalizing and regulating the distribution of marijuana in
the U.S. would be neither easy nor quick. While imposing its prohibitionist will on the rest of the world
for nearly a century, the U.S. has created a network of treaties and international agreements requiring
drug prohibition. Those agreements would have to be revised. A sensible intermediate step would be to
decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana and to exercise benign neglect of American
marijuana growers. Doing both would puncture the market for imports from Mexico and elsewhere
and would eliminate much of the profit that fuels the internecine warfare in Mexico.
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Answers to: States Decrim CP – USFG Key (JV & V)
(___)
(___) The federal government taking action is key – policing and imprisonment will still
continue
Lynch 12, Mona, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California,
Theoretical Criminology, “Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment,” 16(2) 175–199
The federal case thus represents the quintessential ‘war on drugs’. It has been exceptionally punitive,
meting out prison sentences in the overwhelming majority of drug cases, and it has over-targeted
minorities through its policies regarding crack cocaine, its definitions of relevant sentencing factors under
the Guidelines, and by over-selecting people of color for federal prosecution. Yet, the federal system is
unrepresentative of the more general US case in two important regards: first, it deals with only a small
percentage of known drug offenses.9 Second, the federal drug offense caseloads are highly discretionary
and represent, even more than those in state and local courts, matters of prosecutorial policy decision
making.
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Drug Surveillance Reform K Ans – Perms (V only)
(___)
(___) Permutation do the plan and the alternative: The aff is the best middle ground between
reform and abolition – we are a non-reformist reform which means we don’t try to make the
prison systems more just, we just take incremental steps to chip away at the prison-industrial
complex
Sudbury, Professor of Ethnic Studies, 2008 (2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at
Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of
Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the
Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society,
Volume 10, Issue 4)
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth
in sentenced populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two,
and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for programming and turned them into
cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for
activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to
provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations
continue to swell, anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist strategies. Gains
temporarily won are swiftly undermined, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus
on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs.
Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19 Of even greater concern is the well-documented
tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes in conditions by
further expanding prison budgets. The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption has led
Angela Y. Davis to call for “non-reformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and “better”
prisons. 20 Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights advocacy and reforms, building
bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important step toward challenging the
racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration. In this way, human rights
advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a radical antiprison agenda. Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim not to create more humane, culturally
sensitive, women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people
to access services and resources outside the penal system.
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Answers to: Reformism K – Permutation Extensions (V only)
(___)
(___) Incremental steps to chip away that prison-industrial complex are the best strategy –
even the most active and prominent abolitionist agree
Davis, an abolitionist, 2004, Angela Davis in an Interview with Dylan Rodriguez, Davis: The Challenges
of Prison Abolition, illinoisprisonwatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/davis-challenges-of-prison-abolition.html
Angela: The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development -- referred to by
Foucault in his analysis of prison history -- has created a situation in which progress in prison reform has
tended to render the prison more impermeable to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered
"better," prisons.¶ The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a
balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those
strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. In
other words, I do not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and abolition.¶ For
example, it would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the demand for
better health care inside Valley State, California's largest women's prison, under the pretext that such
reforms would make the prison a more viable institution. Demands for improved health care,
including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate
prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific
decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from
punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.
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Answers to: Reformism K – Permutation Extensions (V only)
(___) Drug reform is an important stepping stone to creating larger reform
Sudbury, Professor of Ethnic Studies, 2008 (2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at
Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of
Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization. “Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the
Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society,
Volume 10, Issue 4)
Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work. Organizations and campaigns that promote drug
law reform include Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists,
civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines
racial justice, economic, and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a
pipeline of prisoners of color from New York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas
represented Republican senators, resulting in a transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities
of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in
decarcerative efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman
who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her relationship with an abusive partner who was
involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was
incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs,
securing interviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent
the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow
drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her
release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young
people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public
expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines
have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of
thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The
project invites people in federal and state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit
their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The “Faces of
FAMM” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to
galvanize public support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantles popular
representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection against dangerous drug dealers and
traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving long sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to someone involved in these activities.
Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform. Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for
the release of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work.
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Answers to: Reformism K – Permutation Extensions (V only)
(___) Frame the plan as a small victory for the decriminalization movement. This solves better
because small legal victories can be used to energize and transform social movements.
Gilroy 83 Paul, sociologist at the London School of Economics, SOCIALIST REGISTER, THE MYTH OF
BLACK CRIMINALITY, socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5474/2373
In answer to this tendency, it is our contention that recognition of contemporary importance of racial politics
allows a number of important analytical and strategic issues to take shape. It is not only that a left
movement which makes rhetorical commitment to viewing the law as an arena of struggle can profit
from careful attention to the methods and organisational forms in which various black communities
have won a series of legal victories whilst simultaneously organising outside the courtroom, though the
history of such cases, which span the 12 years between the Mangrove 9 and the Bradford 12, does merit
careful inspection. It is rather that taking the experience of black communities seriously, can transform
'left wing' orthodoxy on the subject of the police and thereby determine a change in the orientation
and composition of the struggle for democratic local control of police services.
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Drug Surveillance Reform K Answers – Link Turns (V)
(___)
(___) Link turn: challenging the racist foundation of the war on drugs is a starting point for a
broader reform of the criminal justice system
Moskowitz, 14 April 2, Peter, “Report suggests US ready to end war on drugs,”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/2/drugs-pew-marijuana.html,
Views on drugs and drug policy in the United States have shifted significantly in the last few years, as
Americans become more amicable to the idea of lenient punishment for drug users than ever before,
according to a new survey. The poll, Pew Research Center’s first comprehensive look at drug policy since
2001, suggests that Americans are not only supportive of less harsh laws for marijuana, but also for
hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. Drug reform advocates say the survey shows the public has had a
harsh reaction to the expensive and largely ineffective policies of the war on drugs. But they also say the
survey only tells half the story: while public perception may have shifted, many policies that people seem to
disagree with remain in place, with few signs from politicians that they are willing to reverse course anytime
soon. “The public is definitely pretty far ahead of politicians,” said Jag Davies of the Drug Policy
Alliance, an organization that promotes alternatives to current drug policy. “Elected officials have
been so scared for so long, but they’re starting to realize it’s to their benefit to reevaluate [their
policies].” The survey, conducted in February and released on Wednesday, finds that 67 percent of
Americans think the government should focus less on punishment and more on treatment for drug
users, including users of heroin and cocaine. It also notes that people are supportive of abolishing
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences. In 2001, about half of those polled favored mandatory
minimum sentences for drug crimes, but Pew’s most recent survey found that 63 percent of people thought
states moving away from the minimums was a “good thing.” Pew also finds that by overwhelming
majorities, people think alcohol is more harmful to individual and societal health than marijuana. And
perhaps most tellingly for the immediate future of drug policy in America, 75 percent of respondents say that
regardless of their views on marijuana, they believe that full legalization is inevitable. Drug policy watchers
say the trends highlighted by the survey aren’t particularly surprising – perceptions of drug use have
been shifting in a more lenient direction for years. But they say the sheer size of the shift shows how
ready Americans are to move beyond the era of the war on drugs. “
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Drug Surveillance Reform K Ans – Link Turns (V only)
(___) Link turn: shifts in public consciousness aren’t mutually exclusive with legal changes – in
fact reformist strategies help reinforce broader changes in public opinions
Lobel, 2007 Assistant Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Orly, Harvard Law Review, 120 Harv. L.
Rev. 937,
The concerns about the nature of civil society and non-governmental actors illuminate the need to
reject the notion of opting out to a non-regulated sphere and avoiding the legal system in alternative
social activism. Rather, when we understand these different realities and processes as similarly formed
and sustained by law, we can continue to explore new ways in which legality relates to social reform.
Some of these new ways include efforts to design mechanisms of accountability that address the concerns
of the new political economy, such as treating private entities as state actors by revising the tests of joint
participation and public function as applied to the state action doctrine; extending public prohibitions such as
non-discrimination, due process, and transparency requirements to private actors; and developing
procedural rules for such activities as standard-setting and certification by private groups.169 They
may also include using the non-delegation doctrine to prevent certain processes of privatization and
rethinking tax exemption criteria of non-profits.170 All of these possible avenues continue to understand
the law as serving significant roles in the quest for reform and accountability, while recognizing that
new realities require creative rethinking of existing courses of action. Rather than opting out of the legal
arena, it is possible to accept the need to diversify modes of activism and legal categories, while
continuing to use legal reform in multiple ways that are responsive to new realities. Focusing on
function and architecture, rather than on labels or These studies, in such fields ranging from occupational
risk prevention, through environmental policy to financial legality, draw on the understanding that groups
and individuals will better comply with state norms once they internalize them.172 For example, in the
context of occupational safety, there is a growing body of evidence that focusing on the implementation
of a culture of safety, rather than on the promulgation of rules, can enhance compliance and induce
effective self-monitoring by private firms. Importantly, in all of these new governance fields of inquiry,
the government agency and the courts must preserve their authority to discipline those who lack the
willingness or the capacity to actively and dynamically participate in collaborative governance. Thus,
unlike the contemporary message of extra-legal activism which robustly privileges private actors and
non-legal techniques to promote social goals, the new governance scholarship is engaged in developing
a broad menu of law reform strategies that involves private industry and non-governmental actors in a
variety of ways while assuming the necessary role of the state to aid weaker groups to promote greater
welfare and equity. A responsive legal architecture has the potential to generate new forms of accountability
and social responsibility and to link between hard law and “softer” practices and normativities. Legal reform
in the contemporary era retains the potential to increase power and access of vulnerable individuals and
groups and to develop tools to increase fair practices and knowledge building within the new market
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Drug Surveillance Reform K Answers – Alt Fails (V)
(___) The alternative fails: while massive overall of the criminal justice system would ideal, the
alternative alone cannot do that – radical critiques of the system must be tied to specific policy
proposals to rally around and make them effective
Shelby, Professor of African American Studies at Harvard, 2007 – Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who Are Dark: The
Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity
African American philosophy does not typically make public policy recommendations . Although engaged with social
realities and historical events, its mode of inquiry still tends to be relatively abstract and somewhat tentative in its conclusions, often asking
more questions than it answers. It operates at the level of general principles rather than offering
concrete proposals for social change. The intellectual culture of the U S has a strong bias against
speculative inquiry, and thus philosophical work of the kind I engage in here may frustrate some readers, especially those interested in ideas largely for their immediate practical application to
concrete problems. Political philosophy in particular can appear as worthless pontification or superfluous splitting of hairs. Moreover, given that
African American philosophy scrutinizes and defends basic normative ideals, it might seem to be
hopelessly Utopian, as engaged in painting a picture of an ideal world in which none of us will ever
live. Because of this, some who are eager to get on with the important work of changing the world and
not merely interpreting it become impatient with philosophical reflection—often concluding that, at best,
it is irrelevant to practical matters or, at worst, it is a meaningless form of recreation engaged in by a self-important cadre of the
intellectual elite. This study hopes to vindicate African American philosophy of the charge of practical
irrelevance by using philosophical techniques to analyze current social problems that African
Americans face. The Structure of the Book Chapter 1 foreshadows my core themes and conclusions by offering a new interpretation of the political philosophy of Martin R. Delany, a mid-nineteenthcentury radical abolitionist and one of the founders of black nationalism. Competing strands in Delany's social thought—"classical" nationalism and "pragmatic"
nationalism—offer two different foundations for black political solidarity. I argue that the pragmatic variant
is the more cogent of the two, and the one that can still serve usefully as a theoretical schema through
which African Americans can understand and carry out important political projects.
But
nited
tates
<<<Shelby Continues>>>
today. I criticize the Black Power conception of black solidarity, focusing specifically on its
commitment to black institutional autonomy, its social analysis of the black condition in terms of white
supremacy, its treatment of the black population as a cohesive kinship unit that is capable of speaking with one voice, and its tendency to exclude, marginalize,
and sometimes alienate needed nonblack allies. In light of the problems with Black Power but
retaining its key insights, in Chapter 4 I offer an alternative conception of black political solidarity. I argue
that black unity must operate across multiracial political organizations; it must recognize that the
sources of black disadvantage cannot all be reduced to racism; and it should acknowledge the need for
a decentralized network of black advocacy. This conception identifies the basic aims, political principles, and proper scope of black politics. It also suggests a way to conceive of the
relationship between the demands of racial justice and the ideal of racial equality. In Chapter 5 I critically discuss black cultural nationalism (or cultural pluralism). I argue against including the goal of cultural autonomy among the basic aims of black political
solidarity, and I suggest that the so-called politics of difference is not an appropriate model for contemporary black politics. I first provide a general characterization of the ideal of black cultural self-determination in the form of eight tenets, ranging from the claim
that there is a distinct black culture to the thesis that blacks are, and should be regarded as, the foremost interpreters of the meaning and worth of their cultural ways. I then highlight the conceptual and normative errors that are frequently committed by those who
defend this conception of cultural politics. Once again using Du Bois as a point of departure, in Chapter 6 I offer an extended discussion of the relationship between social identity and political solidarity. Relying on the analytical groundwork developed in
previous chapters, I distinguish thin conceptions of blackness, which view black identity as a vague social marker imposed from outside, from thick conceptions, which view the marker as signifying something "deeper," perhaps even something that blacks can
autonomously and positively embrace as a component of their self-conception. I show that a shared thick black identity, whether "racial," ethnic, cultural, or national, is not needed for political solidarity and that, in fact, the attempts to develop such an identity are
counterproductive to blacks' emancipatory aims. In the conclusion
I elaborate the pragmatic nationalist conception of political solidarity. I draw
out the implications of the foregoing argument by integrating its various strands. In particular, I offer an interpretation of the ideal of black self-determination that demonstrates the coherence of the pragmatic nationalist
outlook and its relationship to the broader nationalist tradition in African American political thought. This interpretation highlights a significant but often unnoticed connection between the value of individual autonomy
and the emancipatory aims of black unity,
revealing important common ground between political liberalism and black
nationalism, which many scholars have overlooked.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/ NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Reformism K – Reformism Works Ext (V)
(___)
(___) Piecemeal reforms are effective tools to create momentum for large-scale change – while
the aff doesn’t solve all problems, it creates the momentum to address institutional racism
Delgado, Professor of Law at University of Alabama,self-appointed Minority scholar, 2009
(Richard, “Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want, Arguing about Law”, p. 588-590)
The CLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities know from bitter
experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand. The critique is
imperialistic in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events
affecting them. A court order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized
housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the meantime, the order keeps a number of
poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a
warm office. It smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the
certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence.
Indeed, some incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further
away. Not all small reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The
welfare family may hold a tenants‘ union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars‘ critique of
piecemeal reform often misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change,
when it comes, will be what we want.
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War on Drugs Affirmative
SLUDL/ NAUDL 2015-16
Answers to Reformism K – Alt Fails Ext (V only)
(___)
(___) Their alternative fails – anti-racist movements cannot success unless they tied to strategic
and specific demands
Reed 9 Adolph L..is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the
interim national council of the Labor Party. Left Business Observer #121, September
Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be
against racism, but what does the word mean exactly? The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is
focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some
strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over
specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And,
no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does
waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism
seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s
only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and
pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial
segregation. This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the
South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically
and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of
racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The
1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment
discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly
focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of
voting rights and specific programs of redistribution. Clarity lost Whether or not one considers those
goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not. Sure,
those earlier struggles relied on a discourse of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is
only in a period of political demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have
become smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless abstractions
like “the black liberation movement”—an entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears and returns
impelled by its own logic.
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