WITH MALICE TOWARDS MANY
The brutal police bludgeoning of black Detroit father Malice Green has illustrated that the battle lines of the so-called War on Drugs could more accurately be drawn around a "War on Blacks." Published reports surfacing since the fashlight beating of the westside father of five, which left him dead of head trauma, speculated on the issue of whether Green was a user of crack cocaine, as police charged.
So what if he was?
The purported justification behind the so-called drug war is to undo or lessen the damage drugs do. To be sure, drugs do serious harm to people by destroying their health, and taking their lives as well. But was Malice Green beaten to death in his car to save him from the scourge of drugs? Were the police so concerned with saving Green from drug's ill effects that they beat his skull in with flashlights?
One is reminded of the saying that came out of the Vietnam War when U.S. troops ravaged and napalmed villagers- "We had to destroy the village, in order to save it," they said. Did the police destroy Green to save him from the sickness of drugs?
So soon after the high-tech brutality against Rodney King of L.A., and the scene is repeated- this time, fatally. The "Drug War" is a cruel farce designed to obliterate those it claims to protect.
In th United States alone, over 300,000 people perish annually from that well known legal drug- cigarettes. In the United States alone, well over twenty thousand people die every year from the ever popular legal drug- alcohol. As a result of cocaine, an estimated eighteen thousand people died in 1989 and 1990. Cigarettes produce an addictive substance, nicotine, which poisons lungs, causing emphysema and death. Alcohol is literally an organic poison that destroys living tissue, such as brain tissue and livers, and is a stimulant to crime, countless traffic accidents, suicide, and death.
Will those who wield deadly (to themselves and others, through passive secondhand smoke inhalation) tobacco be beaten down in the streets? Will drinkers find Uzis pointed at there bodies when they imbibe their next alcoholic fix?
I don't think so.
So, when is a drug a "drug"?
When it destroys human life, or when it fails to return a tidy profit to U.S. industries?
Every single day, lives are shattered by police and judicial actions that crumble careers and families in the name of a "War on Drugs," while popular, financially respected drugs continue untold social, psychic, and human damage. The Malice Green case shows how the state, instead of solving a problem, creates an absurdity of "destroying life- only to save it."
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal
