The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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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. 41 of 55
Policymakers and researchers interested in productive and emancipatory research must challenge the simplistic notion that Portugal represents a “best practice” in drug decriminalization. There must be interrogation of the social construction of knowledge that does not only disrupt prevailing notions of decrim but is also void of research-related biases. For example, there needs to be more awareness to challenge police authority within drug policy implementation of social control. In Baltimore, analysis of drug decriminalization should include analysis of civilian oversight institutions, including the limitations of their oversight capacities because of legal obstacles such as the Maryland Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights. In conclusion: Interviewee recommendations made it clear that we must incorporate community perspectives into drug policy solutions. Interviewees also emphasized the need to invest in Black Civil Society institutions that have been deeply disrupted by drug criminalization. These are complex issues, and the solutions are complex. We learned that a few edits to the system are unlikely to produce the intended impacts of a sole public health approach. Decrim policy must be grounded in promoting the peace that was undone largely by the War on Drugs. The work toward reparations that repairs the harm should be rooted in community, led by the community, and for the community. Recommendations for Policy Advocates The co-author, Lawrence Grandpre, born and raised in Maryland, has worked extensively over the past 8 years in the state capital of Annapolis on a variety of legislative issues ranging from bail reform, police accountability to cannabis reform. This report set out to create resources to help advocates push for drug decriminalization. Based upon the findings of this report, and the co-author’s experience with legislative advocacy, a list of recommendations has been created to provide concrete takeaways for those seeking to advocate for policy change in the state of Maryland. These recommendations are presented with the intent of starting a conversation around bridging the space between the sorts of people participating in this study, representing Black civil society members who have worked to restore the civic capacity of the Black community to operationalize self-governance, and with institutions and communities working on drug policy who often do not engage these perspectives and understand the concerns these communities have. The goal is for rethinking and reconceptualizing the work. A full interrogation of the findings of this document is beyond the scope of this paper, but this paper felt incomplete without inclusion of these 4 central observations. 1. To Overcome “Criminal Justice Reform Fatigue,” Focus on Community Investment In our work pushing cannabis reform in Maryland, we at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle have been surprised that some of the lawmakers who in the past had expressed support for drug policy reform seemed unenthusiastic around cannabis legalization. Some discussed pass criminal justice reform efforts failing to provide them with the resources they need to fundamentally change conditions in their districts. Recalling that the “progressive” nature of these bills are used to justify not doing redistributive policy by those in Democratic Party leadership, essentially allowing them to say, “we already did our social justice thing.” If social justice policy is treated as a box to check off, then some lawmakers have stated they would rather save their political capital for policy which they felt has more transformative impact on their communities, like community economic development policy. This dynamic, which I have dubbed “criminal justice reform fatigue,” is echoed by interviewees in this report. Folks expressed frustration in superficial and failed reforms that claimed community investments which don’t materialize or benefit them. An example of this is the Maryland Justice Reinvestment Act (JRI), which despite claims to use the savings from limiting incarceration of “non-violent drug offenders” to invest in communities, failed to produce investment in community-based alternatives to incarceration, with an analysis of JRI’s reinvestment efforts noting technical assistant providers feedback: 42 of 55
Page 1 and 2: THE COMMUNAL IMPACTS OF DRUG CRIMIN
Page 3 and 4: Acknowledgements We would like to t
Page 5 and 6: “groupthink”. Also, I realize t
Page 7 and 8: Decriminalize Blackness First “It
Page 9 and 10: Indeed, this quote comes from a for
Page 11 and 12: criminal elements involved in the i
Page 13 and 14: Reparations Means Community Repair,
Page 15 and 16: The Communal Impacts of Drug Crimin
Page 17 and 18: The community-based scholar is info
Page 19 and 20: Definitions Black Civil Society Thi
Page 21 and 22: works. Specifically, we looked at h
Page 23 and 24: working with other Black Power orga
Page 25 and 26: Pseudonym Occupation/Community Role
Page 27 and 28: limiting a pipeline. There’s not
Page 29 and 30: “Black and brown people are being
Page 31 and 32: health and for community education?
Page 33 and 34: friendship community, 'cause heroin
Page 35 and 36: “And then actually right out of F
Page 37 and 38: 3. Decriminalization does not recog
Page 39 and 40: “It’s the values that people ha
Page 41: A local pastor family interviewed r
Page 45 and 46: advocates trust the experience of o
Page 47 and 48: powerful independent Black institut
Page 49 and 50: trust working-class people in turn
Page 51 and 52: systemic corruption and incompetenc
Page 53 and 54: & The Baltimore “Black Hole” [I
Page 55 and 56: Dan Baum investigates whether gun-c
Page 57: © 2023

The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

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