NAACP paradigm shift

Why does it matter that the NAACP wants an end to the War on Drugs?

Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote for the Miami Herald 30 July 2011, NAACP’s paradigm shift on ending the Drug War

Here's why this matters. Or, more to the point, why it matters more than if such a statement came from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. The NAACP is not just the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It is also its most conservative.

Conservative as in:

...denoting a propensity toward caution and a distrust of the bold, the risky, the new. And that's the NAACP all over.

...there has always been something determinedly middle class and cautious about the NAACP. This is the group whose then-leader, Roy Wilkins, famously detested Martin Luther King for his street theatrics.

For that group, then, to demand an end to the Drug War represents a monumental sea change.

How monumental?

It is time to concede what has long been apparent: you cannot jail people out of wanting what they want. But, you just might be able to treat and educate them to that purpose. Granted, that will require a paradigm shift some of us will find difficult to get our heads around.

But if the NAACP can do it, you and I have no excuse.

And we have no excuse to build a CCA private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia, to benefit profiteers from the War on Drugs. Spend that tax money on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq