(Freedom Socialist, October-December 1990, Seattle)

Know what happens when you propose legalization as the

solution to the drug crisis? Everybody cracks up.

"We can't legalize crack!" scream the anti-drug warriors.

"Three hundred and seventy-five thousand crack babies

were born last year! Our future's going up in smoke!"

Yeah, and what about our imperiled present? The above

statistic, even if doctored by scare-mongers as is

likely, doesn't say much for drug prohibition, does it?

The gall of the prohibitionists, weeping crocodile tears

for young women, especially for women of color, ang their

babies - and all the while shiling for George Bush who,

with Reagan in the '80s, sent these same women to crack

hell by slashing to ribbons all means they might have had

for escaping the conditions that breed drug abuse. Bush

helped gut jobs and job training, acces to housing,

education, health care, welfare, prenatal and child care,

you name it. He also helped try to usurp control over

women's bodies by cutting abortion access and pushing

forced sterilization on women of color.

The drug war now serves as the jump-start for the stalled

assault on reproductive rights nationally. Legal

authorities charged a woman in Illinois with involuntary

man-slaughter in May 1989 after her newborn daughter died

from complications attributed to the woman's drug abuse

while pregnant. Florida officials likewise convicted a

woman in 1989 for taking drugs while pregnant and gave

her 15 to 24 years probation, during which she must

report any pregnancy to law enforcement officials.

Washington, D.C. cops arrested a woman for forgery in

1989 and jailed her for the last months of her pregnancy

after she tested positive for cocaine.

How long before our police-state-in-the-making uses these

and similar cases as precedents for claiming total

control over women's bodies and lives?

Absolute control is what the dope police are after. Bush

and Co. have as much concern for crack babies as they do

for AIDS babies. In the later case they have withheld

information and funding needed to stop the spread of AIDS

in the lesbian/gay and people of color communities. And

listen to them shriek against free sterilized needle

exchange! More genocide, in keeping with the thrust of

the drug war.

Drug prohibitionists would force "responsibility" on

beleaguered women - after stripping from them the

material means to lead responsible lives - by

caterwauling about crack-demaged babies, then throwing

their mothers into the clinic to rot.

For women, the drug war is nothing but more hell. And

because babies' health is wholly tied to women's welfare,

you can take bets that the drug war will serve up more

damaged children.