New Haven Independent

Cliff Thornton is the founder and president of Efficacy, a drug reform organization based in Hartford. In his lunchtime talk Wednesday at the Yale Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Thornton called for a three-pronged approach to deal with the various drugs that are now illegal: legalization of marijuana, medicalization of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines, and decriminalization of the rest. He said the so-called drug war is a war on people, especially people of color, that has cost billions of dollars and destroyed families and communities, but has done nothing to curb the flow of drugs into the country.
The failure of that war will be a unifying theme in his campaign, he said.
“This issue affects education, it affects taxes, it affects health,” he said. “There’s nothing you can bring up that I can’t connect it to.”
Thornton’s talk was co-sponsored by Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bio-ethics and its Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. It had to be moved to a larger venue because so many academics and community activists came to engage him in a passionate conversation about how to engage the broader community on this critical issue.
Some favored emphasizing the economics of the failed policy — billions of tax dollars spent on prisons, billions of dollars in ex-prisoners’ earning power never realized because first they’re locked up and then when they’re released many can’t get jobs, and many other costs.
“Economics can be an entering wedge to the discussion,” Thornton said, but he focuses on the race and class nature of the “war on drugs,” which has put a majority of the more than two million prisoners in the U.S. behind bars, and targeted blacks and Latinos, who are disproportionately affected even though research shows they are not disproportionate users or sellers of drugs. According to Thornton, 76 percent of illegal drug users in the U.S. are white. Yet 90 percent of the people locked up on drug charges are black or Latino. “Race privilege,” he said, “keeps [white drug abusers] from getting arrested… Money lets you hide your problems. And race and moeny are Siamese twins.”
Barbara Fair, a member of People Against Injustice, a New Haven-area group that pushes for criminal justice reform, challenged Thornton to stop using the term “drug war” altogether.
“I have always said, as long as we talk about a drug war, that’s how we keep the churches out, because the churches think we’re trying to say, ‘Oh, let everybody use drugs.’ It’s not a drug war. It’s a race war. Once slavery was over, this was the new policy that went in to keep slavery in place.”