The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

drug court. They have to graduate from drug court, which means usually you have to graduate
from the program, but primarily the incentive is not the person's improvement, it's how do we
keep our jobs at the court-the prosecutor, the judge. I’ve seen it first-hand, internally the
criminality of the system itself. People are buying and selling clients to each other, literally seen
trading clients among court officials working together to make sure that only certain programs
receive clients because they are affiliated with one program and then funnel clients from that
program to get clients only from them. In some way shape or form there's some way that the
court system, the drug court system, inadvertently ends up harming people that results in
higher rates of drug use instead of lower rates of drug use.” (Calvin)
The lessons learned from this research presents a unique opportunity to re-interrogate the assumptive
logic of the barging that is being made in drug policy circles and harm reduction spaces. In order to rescue
critical ventures like Overdose Prevention Sites from decades of underfunding, the core of how the
community experiences harm reduction is tied to the political and economic institutions that facilitate
and exacerbate mistreatment, gentrification, and other forms of social control.
Grandpre himself raises concerns about the dangers of non-community institutions having control of
resources in a piece about the Nehemiah project in Baltimore (76). Non-community institutions measure
investment with tangible outcomes while what the community values is less tangible, leading to a
disconnect in what is seen as good investment:
“I talked to the lead fixer for the Nehemiah project… He was candid, he said: 'Look, I work for
foundation and these are people with a lot of money they are used to investing it in a certain
way. And what they are looking for is what we call deliverables.’ In other words, they want
something physical so they can say ‘we brought this building.’ They can’t say ‘we brought a
better relationship between John and his wife.’ They can’t say “we brought a better experience in
school” unless they can trace him in every grade and his grades were higher. That was too soft
of them. They were looking for clear, physical evidence, i.e., ‘put up a building (76).'
3. Decriminalization reforms must be made with acknowledgement that interventions do
not exist in a vacuum, therefore, a critical race lens must be applied
Last, mechanisms of drug treatment investments through criminal justice diversion of decrim must
counter anti-Black treatment systems already in place. Removal of criminal sanctions, such as diversion
from arrest, does not necessarily remove police presence and other forms of social control in communities
grappling with high levels of drugs. Decriminalization, such as shifting levels of drug thresholds, may
sustain disparate racialized enforcement and may also shift the criminalization of low-thresholds of drug
use into other forms given the inherent anti-Black systems already in place. For example, in one
predominantly Black county in Maryland, Kozlowski and colleagues found that after a policy shifting
misdemeanor marijuana possession from a criminal arrest to a citation went into effect, enforcement
activity for marijuana arrests did not decline; in fact, other misdemeanor arrests replaced marijuana
arrests (5). Shifting focus to solely drug decriminalization policy efforts of low-level drug possession
diverts attention from the contextual conditions of the policing apparatus in Maryland.
Given the conversations of policy harassment and brutality, there is a concern that even if small quantities
of drugs are decriminalized, police may have flexibility in reporting to round amounts up to possession
with intent to distribute, overcharging with factors like resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, or even
planting weapons to create additional violent charges. Decrim needs to directly engage police reform to
deal with this dynamic.
We heard the stories of police harassment, such as stealing drugs in order to resell them. Whether
Baltimore policing is a result of the financial gain of direct sale of drugs by police, or by police benefitting
from the increased budgetary support that the War on Drugs provides, police have an incentive to create
panic around drug use to justify their position (32). There was very little analysis in the decrim literature
that engaged with notions of police actively promoting drug use in the Black community for their own
benefit, as supported by the work of Gary Webb, that crack cocaine was intentionally sold to black
communities to create a pipeline of cash to fund off the books CIA work in Latin America or to destabilize
the Black community (7). The role of seeing drug use promoted by officials implicates communities' ability
to trust that interventions offered, like decriminalization and other harm reduction efforts, such as
overdose prevention sites.
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