War on Drugs Affirmative NAUDL 2015-16
War on Drugs Affirmative
War on Drugs Affirmative
Summary
Glossary of Terms (1/2)
1AC (1/8)
Case Debate
Case Extensions: War on Drugs is Racist
Case Extensions: Decarceration creates opportunities for freedom
Answers to: Movements Turn
Answers to: Policing Continues
Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance remains (1/2)
Answers to: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains – Extensions (1/2)
Answers to: Reforming War on Drugs will solve
Answers to: Weed Legalization Fixes the System (1/3)
Answers to: War on Drugs Stop Criminals
Answers to: Utilitarianism (1/3)
Answers to: State Solutions Bad (1/3)
Answers to: State Level Surveillance
Answers to: Status Quo Solves
Topicality
Answers to: Topicality – Domestic Surveillance = Terrorism (1/2)
Answers to: Topicality – We Meet Extensions
Answers to: Topicality – Counter-Interpretation Extensions
Organized Crime Answers
Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage- Marijuana Legalization now
Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage- Kingpin Focus
Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage- War on Drugs not key
Answers to: Organized Crime Disadvantage– Ending War on Drugs Stops Cartels
Decriminalization Counterplan
State Decriminalization Counterplan Answers (1/3)
Answers to: State Decrim Counterplan – Solvency Deficit Extensions (1/2)
Answers to: States Decrim Counterplan – Racial Biases Continue Extensions
Answers to: States Decrim Counterplan – Administrative Tinkering Extensions
Answers to: States Decrim Counterplan – Permutation do both Extensions
Answers to: States Decrim Counterplan – Fed Key Extensions
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
1
War on Drugs Affirmative NAUDL 2015-16
First Affirmative
1AC(1/8)
The drug war causes mass incarceration and creates the predominant mode of racist social control—prison expansion maintains racial hierarchies and prevent black self determination. Prison expansion maintains racial hierarchies and destroys communities of color.
Alexander, Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School2006
[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 were-extraordinary 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.
1AC (2/8)
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
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, forthe 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 one-third 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.
1AC (3/8)
The War on Drugs is nothing more than a federal surveillance program. It reaches every aspect of life in communities of colorin 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,
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.
1AC (4/8)
This is a continuous extermination of minority populations that must be stopped---as Americans, we must speak out in public spaces about the injustice of laws
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,
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. Buttherampant 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.
1AC (5/8)
Institutional structures of domination create everyday holocausts—you should ignore event based impacts that ask you to ignore the ongoing suffering and death in communities of color.
Omolade,historian and organizer, 1989
[Barbara, “We Speak for the Planet”, Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politices, ed Harris & King pp. 172-176]
The Achilles heel of the organized peace movement in this country has always been its whiteness. In this multi-racial and racist society, no allwhite movement can have the strength to bring about basic changes. It is axiomatic that basic changes do not occur in any society unless the people who are oppressed move to make them occur. In our society it is people of color who are the most oppressed. Indeed our entire history teaches us that when people of color have organized and struggled-most especially, because of their particular history, Black people-have moved in a more humane direction as a society, toward a better life for all people.1 Western man's whiteness, imagination, enlightened science, and movements toward peace have developed from a culture and history mobilized against women of color. The political advancements of white men have grown directly from the devastation and holocaust of people of color and our lands. This technological and material progress has been in direct proportion to the undevelopment of women of color. Yet the dayto- day survival, political struggles, and rising up of women of color, especially black women in the United States, reveal both complex resistance to holocaust and undevelopment and often conflicted responses to the military and war. The Holocausts Women of color are survivors of and remain casualties of holocausts, and we are direct victims of war-that is, of open armed conflict between countries or between factions within the same country. But women of color were not soldiers, nor did we trade animal pelts or slaves to the white man for guns, nor did we sell or lease our lands to the white man for wealth. Most men and women of color resisted and fought back, were slaughtered, enslaved, and force marched into plantation labor camps to serve the white masters of war and to build their empires and war machines. People of color were and are victims of holocausts-that is, of great and widespread destruction, usually by fire. The world as we knew and created it was destroyed in a continual scorched earth policy of the white man. The experience of Jews and other Europeans under the Nazis can teach us the value of understanding the totality of destructive intent, the extensiveness of torture, and the demonical apparatus of war aimed at the human spirit. A Jewish father pushed his daughter from the lines of certain death at Auschwitz and said, "You will be a remembrance-You tell the story. You survive." She lived. He died. Many have criticized the Jews for forcing non-Jews to remember the 6 million Jews who died under the Nazis and for etching the names Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Terezin and Warsaw in our minds. Yet as women of color, we, too, are "remembrances" of all the holocausts against the people of the world. We must remember the names of concentration camps such as Jesus, Justice, Brotherhood, and Integrity, ships that carried millions of African men, women, and children chained and brutalized across the ocean to the "New World."