The Drug Wars 50 Years Ago- High School Confidential

DVD REVIEW

High School Confidential, MGM Productions, starring Russ Tambyn with Jerry Lee Lewis doing his hit song High School Confidential, 1958

Mary Jane, weed, tea, ganja, herb, stick and so on. Every generation (which should tell us something) has its own code words for its recreational drugs. But wait a minute. Drugs, especially marijuana, are bad for you, right? Why? Marijuana is the first step on the slippery slope down the road to serious drug addiction- heroin, opium, crack and so on. And then on to a life of crime and jail. Is this a story from today’s headlines? Well, I suppose it could be but it is not. This is the premise behind the 1958 classic B teenage movie "High School Confidential".

Now frankly, this year I have been on a Jerry Lee Lewis kick trying to establish who was the “king of rock and roll” during the 1950’s so I picked up this little movie to see if it could aid my Jerry Lee bias. While the lead-in scene of Jerry Lee on a truck doing "High School Confidential" in front of some California high school students is amazing this film did not help in that effort. What is the case, however, is how even back then when drugs were a fringe phenomena mainly indulged in by the “beats” like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and their crowd and other “anti-social” types the monitors of American teenage mores in the film industry had to weigh in to condemn this practice out of hand. Nothing new there and the police authorities (the good guys, right?) then were just about as successful (in reality, not in the film) as they have been today. That is to say that they have sought to fill the jails as their solution to the problem. Mainly with blacks and Latinos. But enough of that, for now.

This turns out to be a very campy movie complete with new boy Russ Tambyn (a very old teenager, by the way) in town (as an undercover vice cop) trying to become “king of the hill” in the teenage drug market. We have a glance at teen life in the 1950’s as seen by Hollywood with their take on “beat” slang (including a very nicely done be-bop poetic recitation by a young woman at a teenage nightclub), high school dances, hot rods on Saturday night(complete with a Rebel Without A Cause racing scene), grabbing girls (right from under the noses of other guys no less), 'dissing' teachers and headmasters and doing a little weed. (You know to liven up the party). All in the service of one thing- don’t. The only thing not done here is an explicit tie-in with drugs and rock and roll although with Jerry Lee present that might have been a little hard to do. Since this is the 50th anniversary of the release of the film I will finish with one conclusion from viewing the film and the facts of life since then- decriminalize drug use-now.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Vote Yes on California Prop 19 -Decriminalize marijuana (herb, maryjane, joints, ganja or whatever your favorite name for it is) - Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
 
Additionally, everyone who has ever smoked a joint, thought about smoking a joint or thought about inhaling the smoke from a joint, in short everyone from the baby boomer generation (except good old boy Bill Clinton it seems) should vote YES with both hands on this one, despite its limitations. Hell, if we had won our fight for the new society back then in the 1960s this would already be the law of the land (actually a better version as noted in the article) and nobody would think twice about it today.    
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Workers Vanguard No. 967
22 October 2010

Vote Yes on California Prop 19

Down With the Racist “War on Drugs”!

OAKLAND—An initiative on the November 2 ballot in California would make the state the first in the country to legalize the sale of marijuana as well as eliminate criminal penalties for possession or use of an ounce or less by those over 21. It would make cannabis available for scientific, medical, industrial and research purposes and permit the cultivation of small amounts for personal consumption. Proposition 19, “The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010,” is written narrowly to leave much of pot use illegal and concerns itself with regulating and taxing its sale. Nevertheless, a vote for Prop. 19 is an elementary expression of support for a simple democratic right: that the government keep its claws off of people’s private lives.

Equally important, a vote for this initiative is a vote against the “war on drugs,” which is in the main a war against black people. While blacks and whites use marijuana at close to the same rate, the arrest rate for blacks is three times greater nationally and ranges up to four times greater in California counties.

The “war on drugs” has served to greatly intensify capitalist state repression, whose daily workings include street executions by marauding cops, such as the brutal killings of Oscar Grant in Oakland last year and Manuel Jamines in Los Angeles this September. In Latin America, U.S. imperialism—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—has used the “war on drugs” as a pretext for expanding its military presence and propping up pro-U.S. regimes (see “Mexico: Down With ‘Drug Wars’ Militarization!” WV No. 953, 26 February).

Contrary to government claims, the criminalization of marijuana has never had anything to do with protecting anyone’s welfare. Anti-drug laws are designed to maintain social control and regimentation of the population, providing a legal pretext to repress black people, immigrants, youth and others.

Laws against marijuana were first adopted beginning in 1914 as a racist measure against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. A federal ban in 1937 opened the era of campaigns against “reefer madness,” especially targeting both blacks and Latinos. The first federal “drug czar,” Harry Anslinger, captured that ban’s spirit with such racist diatribes as “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

Today’s plethora of drug laws are an outgrowth of the web of legal repression under the “war on crime,” kicked off with Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and Republican Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” These and subsequent measures were implemented to target black militants and the ghetto poor following the upheavals against segregation, poverty and racist cop terror in the mid-to-late 1960s. Under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the bipartisan “war on drugs” was officially launched, centered on a racist crack cocaine witchhunt. Incarceration rates skyrocketed, especially for young black men, for whom the capitalist rulers have had increasingly little use since the devastation of unionized industrial jobs beginning in the 1970s.

Starting in the early 1990s, marijuana arrests began to shoot up as crack cocaine arrests leveled off. By 2009, annual marijuana prosecutions had reached more than 858,000. More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and 46 percent of all drug arrests—nearly 760,000 a year—are for possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear the government’s opposition to Prop. 19, vowing that the Obama administration would “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.

The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, for any purpose, regardless of its particular risks or effects. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Likewise, we oppose “sin taxes” on activities and products the bourgeoisie deems “immoral” or unhealthy, like alcohol and tobacco.

In fact, marijuana is among the safest of non-food substances consumed by humans. Yet under the Controlled Substances Act, the Feds put it on the list of the supposedly most dangerous drugs, Schedule I, along with heroin, and ahead of Schedule II drugs like cocaine and morphine. Despite the passage of Prop. 215 in 1996, which made medical use of marijuana legal in California, the federal government did not stop persecuting a number of patients with harrowing illnesses for whom pot provided some relief.

NAACP president Alice Huffman explained why the California NAACP endorsed Prop. 19 by correctly denouncing “the so called ‘war on drugs’” as “a war that disproportionately affects young men and women and the latest tool for imposing Jim Crow justice on poor African-Americans” (San Francisco Chronicle, 16 September). For this, she has come under fire, with more than 20 black preachers and others demanding her resignation. Nate Holden, a longtime black Democratic Los Angeles politician, has come out against Prop. 19. The capitalist Democratic Party, and black elected officials in particular, have been instrumental in the anti-drug crusade. Huffman herself has endorsed Democratic state attorney general Jerry Brown for governor. Brown boasts of enforcing the racist drug laws and opposes Prop. 19. In their role of tying labor to the capitalist class enemy, the bureaucratic misleaders of almost all of California’s public workers unions have also backed Brown, who promises to cut public workers pensions.

The “war on drugs” has at times been supported by large sections of working people and the oppressed who wrongly believe that cops and prisons are a means for combatting the social pathology of drug addiction and the drug trade. In fact, decriminalization, by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade, would also reduce the crime associated with it. For those who wish, any associated psychological or medical problem that may arise from drug use should be treated as a medical issue, not a criminal one. At the same time, we understand that drug addiction in the ghetto is a reflection of the hellish conditions imposed on masses of black people in this racist capitalist society. As we wrote in “Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex: U.S./UN Crusade Against ‘Sex Trafficking’” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 58, Spring 2004):

“Recreational drug use is nobody else’s business, but widespread drug addiction and alcoholism sap the revolutionary energy of the working class and other sections of the oppressed. The social oppression that breeds alcoholism and drug addiction among the poor should be fought through the moral authority of the proletarian socialist movement, and not through state coercion.”

Whipping up hysteria about drugs in the workplace, the California Chamber of Commerce opposes Prop. 19 because the measure approves only the “existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance”—i.e., the current norm for subjecting workers to drug tests. We oppose all workplace drug testing, which the bosses use as a pretext to frame up or target militants and cow the entire workforce.

The racism and union-busting of the “war on drugs” come together in the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, under which port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute to fraud and being an “illegal immigrant.” Under TWIC, many port workers have lost their jobs, disproportionately blacks and Latinos, and including members of the largely immigrant port truckers. As the Northern California District Council of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union declared in a statement endorsing Prop. 19: “Peoples’ lives are ruined for a lifetime because of criminal records incurred from using a drug that is used recreationally by people from all walks of life. Those criminal records fall disproportionately on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.” Down with TWIC!

We support Prop. 19 as a step toward removing all laws against drug use, but we do not take a position on the particular schemes advanced by Prop. 19 to regulate the commercial production and taxation of marijuana. Moreover, we oppose the draconian measures it would mete out when it comes to youth—the other group specially targeted by drug laws—and those who provide them marijuana. These include up to seven years in prison for offering or providing pot to youth under 14, up to five years for ages 14-18 and six months for ages 18-21. Despite its weaknesses, however, if passed and actually implemented—no sure thing given federal and police hostility—Prop. 19 would eliminate a key legal pretext for state harassment and violence. Down with the racist and anti-labor “war on drugs”! For decriminalization of drugs! Vote yes on Prop. 19!

In Massachusetts Vote NO on Question 1- No Repeal Of The State Income Tax

Commentary

In Massachusetts Vote NO on Question 1- Repealing of the State Income Tax

For President- Republican John McCain-No. Democrat Barack Obama- No. Green Party Cynthia McKinney-No. Independent-Ralph Nader-No. And so on down through the offices to the local county commissioners and such. Come Election Day in Massachusetts on November 4, 2008 it would seem that there is no reason to go to the polls. Right? Not true. As usually is the case here there are some interesting ballot questions to select from. None, from a socialist perspective (hell, from a democratic perspective even) as important as the No vote on Proposition 8 (the gay marriage amendment) in California but important smaller issues nevertheless.

Vote No on Question 1- This the perennial repeal the state income tax proposition that the “no tax”- types try to get passed every few years. Usually this is spear-headed by know-nothings and those who just do not want to pay taxes under any circumstances. Who does? Normally, this question of how the bourgeois state finances itself is of minor interest to socialists but there is another issue at stake. Until working people take state power in their own interests some form of taxation is going to be needed to provide basic services. Hell, in the beginning stages of socialist transformation there may be taxes, depending on the economic superstructure that we inherit from the capitalists.

The argument lurking underneath this one is that if there is no state income tax then the inevitable taxes that will replace that lost revenue will be based on local real property valuations. That means that public services like local education, public works and health care such as they are will be dependent on the wildly varying property tax bases of the various towns. In short, the poor and minorities will get even less public services that at present. And the richer towns? Well, you can already guess about their heartrending problems. We have a side on this one today. Vote it down with both hands!!!

Vote Yes on Question 2- This is a proposition that would decriminalize marijuana possession and use for the recreational smoker, in effect, by making a first offense a civil rather than a criminal one for certain non- drug pusher amounts. There is a system of fines, etc. in place of criminal penalties. Nevertheless the proposition is basically supportable. As socialists we are committed to the decriminalization of all drug use and this proposition is in line with that goal, a basic social right to be left alone to one’s own devises when there are victimless situations involved.

Vote Yes on Question 3- This is a proposition that would ban dog races (essentially greyhound racing) where wagering was involved (subject to state regulation, in other words). The writer of this blog has spend some time betting on various sporting propositions, lately, mainly on college football games (See My revolving weekly Now For The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship? for current selections.) so I am personally somewhat agnostic on this one, except my “significant other” is very strongly in favor of this one. I will defer to her on this. I would rather watch horses race any day. From my limited knowledge on this subject, the trainers do not do right by these beautiful animals either during their racing careers or seeing that they are provided for after that time.