Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Almost euphoric. Happy with my work, life, family. A really good day.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Fell asleep easily. Slept seven hours.
Work: Cooking along.
Pain: Mild.
It’s been over a week now, and either this experiment is working or the placebo effect is a mighty force. I feel so good I don’t care which of those is true. No, that’s not true. I do care, because if it’s purely a placebo, then I could get the same effect without committing a crime. Though the quantity of LSD in my little cobalt blue bottle is minuscule, under both California and federal law I could be arrested and charged with possession. I could face a one-to-three-year sentence in state court and up to a six-month sentence in federal court. Obviously, this would not be good; redheads look terrible in orange. Oh, and I’d miss my kids and my husband. Still, all things considered, I have been remarkably blasé about the criminality of this experiment, even though I know that mere drug possession is prosecuted in this country with the same vigor as drug trafficking. Our jails and prisons are full of people whose only crime was to possess drugs; a shocking number of them were caught not with heroin or methamphetamine or another drug of addiction, or even with LSD, but with marijuana. More than 40 percent of arrests for drug possession in this country are for a drug that 19.8 million of us have used in the past month.
The war on drugs has resulted in a massive increase in the size of our prison population. According to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sentencing reform, fully half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses, and “the number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased thirteen-fold since 1980.” The vast majority of these are neither violent offenders nor kingpins but low-level offenders guilty of doing little more than what I did yesterday.
And yet I am so little at risk of prosecution that I am not only taking LSD but writing about it. Why? Because the sad fact is that my race and class make prosecution less likely.
As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, told me, “The war on drugs and the war on crime are the most recent manifestation of an impulse to punish, control, and exploit poor people of color which will surface repeatedly in our country until we are willing to face our racial history.” Our interminable drug war has from its inception set its sights firmly on the poor and the brown. The first drug laws, the anti-opium laws of the 1870s, were directed at Chinese immigrants, never mind that the country was full of white middle-class laudanum addicts, tippling from their dropper bottles all day long. Early in the next century, support for the laws criminalizing cocaine was ginned up by claims that “drug-crazed Negroes” were destroying white society and murdering white women. Southern senators, unperturbed by their wives’ opioid addictions, believed that cocaine made black men superhuman, even that it made them immune to bullets. When the first drug czar, a man named Harry Anslinger, wanted to criminalize marijuana, he appealed to people’s biases against immigrants from Mexico, claiming that the drug made Mexicans sexually violent. William Randolph Hearst jumped on this bandwagon, warning again and again in the pages of his newspapers about the dangers of the Mexican “Marihuana-Crazed Madman.” This demonization continues today.*1 White people are five times as likely to use drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites.*2 The racism of the drug war has been the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of color in the United States.
When I was an attorney, I experienced this arbitrary and unjust system firsthand. Though I practiced in the federal courts and should have been dealing only with large-scale drug conspiracies and offenses, I represented many defendants, most of them people of color, who faced draconian sentences for relatively minor offenses. One in particular stood out from the rest. My client, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was charged with the distribution of methamphetamine. A man of compromised intellect, he had been hired by a local drug dealer to schlep a box of methamphetamine from one place to another. The dealer, however, turned out to be a DEA confidential informant. My client was looking at a sentence of more than fifteen years, with a ten-year mandatory minimum.
In the federal system, sentences are not left to the discretion of judges. They are calculated in accordance with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, promulgated by the United States Sentencing Commission. Before the Sentencing Guidelines, a defendant’s sentence depended in large part on the judge to whom his case was assigned. End up in the court of a judge with a capacity for empathy and you might walk away with probation. Be assigned a hard-ass and you might spend the rest of your life in jail. And guess whom the hard-asses were most likely to punish? Race and class bias were rampant under that system. By removing judicial discretion, the Sentencing Guidelines and the mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes passed by Congress were intended to rid the system of sentencing disparities. Instead of a judge’s individual assessment of a case, a crime, or a defendant, the Sentencing Guidelines and mandatory minimums require that charges and sentences be determined primarily by a single factor: the quantity of drugs bought or sold.