Last week I posted quickly on terrifying statistics in Baltimore City.  That day, I got an email from Scott Greenfield containing an excerpt of a speech to the Cato Institute by John McWhorter, who is currently a lecturer at Columbia University and an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Berkeley.  Mr. McWhorter has an undergraduate degree in French and a graduate degree in linguistics.  But, why limit yourself to what you know?  Professor McWhorter is also a political commentator who has written a fairly controversial book that says blacks have a culture of playing the victim and that the problems in black America (particularly as it relates to education) are the fault of blacks themselves.

I’m not black.  And I haven’t read McWhorter’s book.  But in the Washington Post article McWhorter says he wrote the book because he didn’t feel the racism that others were feeling so he wrote this based on his living in a middle-class suburb of Philly going to private schools perspective.  Oh, huh.  Interesting.  I also felt no racism growing up.  I suppose I could say it didn’t exist since I didn’t experience it. And, I imagine if I wrote an entire book saying Muslim women are to blame for their own discrimination it might be a best seller and I could get on the talk show circuit.  But, as usual, dear reader, I digress.  This isn’t an indictment of Mr. McWhorter, simply because at this point I don’t know enough about him.

In case you don’t want to click on the Cato link and read it yourself, the good Professor of Linguistics says now that the blame for the destruction of black America is the War on Drugs.  Professor McWhorter says that legalizing drugs (and making them free, given in maintenance doses) would insure that black Americans didn’t sell drugs or end up in jail or drop out of school.  He makes broad statements and generalizations that are not backed by any statistics or actual, plausible theories and scenarios, he just says it.  If we got rid of the war on drugs black men would go back to school.  If we got rid of the war on drugs then black men would be united with their families.

I don’t disagree that the war on drugs is a fucking waste of time and energy.  I used to have the Drug Clock on my blog, a countdown (up?) of the number of actual dollars and actual people that are wasted on this ‘war’, but it’s naive to think that legalizing drugs will make it all better.  And, are you really going to legalize meth – really?  Are you going to give it away for free, insuring that a segment of our population never functions, never contributes?  I’m not sure that the folks arguing to legalize drugs think it through all the way, or perhaps they don’t see first hand what ingesting things like PCP and heroin do to people.  (These drugs are not like marijuana.)  And the comparison to alcohol is weak, at best.  While you can have a drink and not be drunk, you are not going to smoke crack and not get high.

And, while the argument for or against legalizing drugs is one that we will continue to have for years to come, to say that ending the war on drugs would solve all of black America’s problems is just as disingenuous as saying that there is no racism in America.