The brutal police bludgeoning of Black Detroit father Malice Green has illustrated 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 flashlight beating of the West Side 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 that drugs do to people. To be sure, drugs do serious harm to people by destroying their health and taking lives as well. But was Malice Green beaten to death in his car to save him from the scourge of drugs? Were the police are so concerned with saving Green from drugs’ ill effects that they beat his skull in with flashlights?
One is reminded of the saying that came out of the Vietnam War when US troops ravaged and napalmed villagers, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” they said. Did police destroy him to save him from the sickness of drugs? So soon after the high tech brutality against Rodney King of LA, and the scene is repeated, this time fatally.
The drug war is a cruel farce designed to obliterate those they claim to protect. In the US alone, over 300,000 people perish annually from that well-known legal drug, cigarettes. In the US alone, well over 20,000 people die every year from the equally popular legal drug alcohol. As a result of cocaine, an estimated 18,000 people died between 1989 and 1990. Cigarettes produce an addictive substance, nicotine, which poisons lungs, causing emphysema and death. Alcohol is literally an organic poison, which destroys living tissue such as brain tissue and livers, 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 the street? Will drinkers find Uzis pointed at their 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 US industries?
Every single day, lives are shattered by police and judicial actions which 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 a life only to save it.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty, and what you can do, contact Equal Justice USA at 301-699-0042.
