Who Takes Responsibility for the Carnage?

an interview with
Clifford Wallace Thornton, Jr.

by Preston Peet
Drugwar.com

Clifford W. Thornton

[editor's note- Clifford Wallace Thornton, Jr. is the co-founder of Efficacy, an organization in Connecticut dedicated to seeking peaceful constructive solutions to many social ills, lately focusing its sights on the War on Some Drugs and Users. Thornton spoke candidly with us about his long time efforts to focus attention on the repurcussions of the War itself, the need for more public discourse, and for rational solutions to best hasten an end to the War. Be sure to visit the various links following the interview.]

June 30, 2002

P- Hi and good morning Cliff. Let’s get right to it. Where are you from?

CT- I was born in Hartsford, Connecticut, and live in Windsor at the present time.

P- How old are you?

CT- 57.

P- Do you have any degrees and if so, where from?

CT- I have a degree from Teikyo University in Waterbury, Connecticut, in marketing.

P- What got you interested initially in the War on Some Drugs?

CT- Well, the War on Drugs for me is a very long story. It started probably two weeks before I graduated high school when there was a knock on the door. Upon answering the door and exchanging pleasantries, the man at the door asked to talk to my grandmother. After speaking with him, my grandmother instructed me to accompany him to a field of abandoned cars. Under one of the cars was the body of a naked woman. That woman was my mother. She had died from an apparent overdose of heroin. At that particular time I thought that all drugs should be eradicated from the face of the earth. But as I watched decade after decade of this Drug War, I began to question what the authorities were doing. I say down with a few medical doctors in the mid to late 70s, who explained to me that this whole Drug War was a huge farce. They told me in the history of man no one has ever died from the direct ingestion of marijuana. I knew that by then anyway, but they were also telling me about heroin. They were saying that heroin, pure heroin, is the perfect pain reliever in that it doesn’t destroy body tissue. They went on to say that the government was putting all these scare tactics out to the public because they’re looking more for control of people than of the actual drugs. That started to change my whole thought process on this. I had been developing my own little nitch as far as information pertaining to drugs, but this took me over the top and made me believe that this War on Drugs is the biggest farce in the world.

P- When did you graduate high school?

CT- I got out of high school in 1963.

P- I know you co-founded Efficacy with your wife Margaret, but what is Efficacy?

Margaret Thornton

CT- Efficacy is an organization that looks at peaceful ways of solving social problems. At this particular juncture we’re concentrating our efforts on Drug Policy reform because we find that the Drug War is two degrees from everything in this society. Not just social problems, but everything else.

P- Such as?

CT- Such as the economics in this country, the health system, our education system. If you really look at the Drug War, you see things that are definitely aligned. If you start to connect the dots, you see that everything we do in this society- for instance, when we start to look at our economic system, and we start to talk about investment especially in the black community, we see that legitimate economic investment can never be more profitable as prohibition induced drug trafficking or cultivation. Because essentially what we’ve done with these drugs, these weeds, is we’ve actually made these weeds worth more than our present gold standard. So how in the world is anyone going to compete with a system of that magnitude? You can’t, it’s impossible. You see that IV drug use is directly related to the spread of AIDS, especially in our black communities, and you begin to wonder why the authorities are so against things like needle exchange, when it’s a proven fact that needle exchange will cut the rates of HIV and AIDS in half.

P- Well, the prohibitionist answer is going to be of course that we’re condoning drug use, enabling drug users to go and do their immoral drugs if we supply them needles.

CT- Right. Then there is this interesting aspect as applies to the education system. Not only does law enforcement take away money from the education system, even though the budgets are pretty much the same, if you go back ten or twelve years you can see slowly but surely that the law enforcement system in this country, and the budgets for those agencies, keep growing. Dollar for dollar you can see the change in education versus the law enforcement. Here’s a big thing about education. A couple of years ago there was an editorial in the local paper here in Hartford. The editorial said that there were three hundred students going on to the local high schools, graduating from middle school. It said that out of those three hundred students, a third of them were reading at an eighth or ninth grade level. Fifty percent of the rest were approaching that level. The remaining were reading at a third to fifth grade level. The first question that comes to my mind is, if we couldn’t get those students reading at eighth or ninth grade level in eight years, how are we going to get them reading at a twelfth grade level in the next four years? Chances are that is not going to happen. Projections show that within four years of those students leaving high school, whether they graduate or quit, seventy percent of them will be somewhere in the criminal justice system. Fifty percent of those will be there for direct drug charges. As usual, when you begin to check drug related charges too, that percentage jumps into the high sixty percentile. The education system in this country, especially in the inner cities, has become an unending feeder pool for expansion of the prison industrial complex.

P- Before I forget, what do you do for a living?

CT- This is what I do. I left my other job.

P- You’re an activist?

CT- I am a full fledged activist. I’ve been doing full time activism for three or four years.

P- What were you doing before this?

CT- I was a middle level manager with Southern New England Telephone, the leading New England telecommunications corporation in the state of Connecticut. That’s what I did prior coming to the movement. I mean, I’d dealt with the Drug War issue before. We first got our start five years or so before I left the corporation, when my wife and I started doing a public affairs radio program at the University of Hartford. We did quite a few shows, covering issues like abortion, race relations, domestic violence, and interviewed politicians who were running for office in the state. Everything we picked up, I mean everything, lead somehow back to the drug problem. So my wife and I decided we were going to do a generic program about drugs, and we did. We garnered so much interest, we put together three one hour shows. The first dealt with the history of drugs in America, the second with the crime and violence associated with the Drug War, and the third dealt purely with the economics, the money we are spending to fight this Drug War. After that, the telephone system went down at Hartford because there were so many requests for us to do more shows. We were asked to do lectures. We decided we had something here, which lead to the formation of Efficacy, a 501C3, and sending out a newsletter to about 2500 people now, mostly in New England but also throughout the world.

P- So, you see a lot of interest for reform among the people, whereas the politicians make it seem that everyone is actually supportive of the War?

CT- I’ll be perfectly up front with you. A lot of politicians who will oppose me in public will then say in private that I’m on the right track.

P- I’ve heard this from other activists before. Why do you suppose they will only say things like this in private?

CT- Because they are protecting their jobs. If they come out against this Drug War they are going to be ostracized, not only from within their own party but also within their own communities. It takes a lot of courage to come out against this War. I admire people like Judge James Gray, and Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, even though I don’t really think he’s good for the movement because he just doesn’t have his shit together. I mean, his heart is in the right place, but he just doesn’t come across, well, let me say he’s effective, but not as effective as I think he can be. That’s just my thoughts.

P- So what do you think about this decision by the Supreme Court to allow random drug testing of any public school student who wants to take an extra curriculars? Why do these kids not warrant their constitutional rights?

CT- I think this Supreme Court decision is grossly inadequate. Let’s be realistic here. Smoking marijuana has become a very common fact of life for children who are in school, and I’m talking kids who are in eighth and ninth grades on up through high school. So what I think this is going to do is have a great reduction in participation in many areas regarding extra curricular activities. Especially people into sports.

P- Do you see this maybe leading to more youth drug treatment type situations, like maybe even agreements between schools and drug treatment facilities?

CT- I think that is quite possible. It goes hand in hand. We all know that one hand washes the other. So yes, it’s just like drug courts and rehabilitation centers. They will send people to these drug rehabilitation centers who have no drug problem at all. I know a couple of people who went to prison and had to go through drug court prior to going to prison who didn’t do drugs at all. But by the time they got out of prison, they were doing drugs. I mean, these days these are not just isolated stories, there is case after case after case. All this Drug War does is allow the authorities to have massive amounts of control over large segments of people. What it also does is actually promote drug use amongst our young people.

P- How so?

CT- When you constantly bring attention to an issue of this magnitude, constantly telling the students not to take illegal drugs while all the time we’re telling them not to illegal drugs are right there in front of their faces, what you are actually doing is telling the students not to do drugs but we the authorities have no control over stopping them coming into your neighborhoods, your schools, your churches. Illegal drugs are everywhere.

P- You're probably right. Congress actually heard testimony saying exactly that. Dr. Shyam Sundar, director of Media Research Laboratory at the College of Communications, Pennsylvania State University, testified before the US House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources in October 1999, saying he suspected the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s National Anti-Drug Media Campaign was going to result in a “forbidden fruit” phenomenon, that when kids are pounded with messages not to do drugs, but still see drugs everywhere, they will feel they are missing out, leading directly to hands on experimentation. It seems logical to me that that could be the end result of an endless media barrage of Drug War propaganda.
What are your thoughts on trying outright legalization?

CT- There are three concepts that I look at. I look at the outright legalization of marijuana. I would like to see cocaine and heroin medicalized. I would like to see the rest of the drugs decriminalized, and down the road more study conducted, first of all to see what sort of medicinal use they might have, and secondly just to make sure that people who are using these drugs are getting the correct information on the possible impact that using these drugs might have on them as well as their relatives. That’s the way in which I view things.

P- What reform groups do you work with?

CT- I sit on the board of NORML. I work with ReconsiDer out of New York state, and a number of other groups depending on what they are doing at the time. I’m pretty much open to working with most reform groups, not just drug policy groups, but groups that work on issues like race…

P- Like the November Coalition?

CT- Yeah, definitely the Coalition, but they are a direct Drug Policy reform organization. Efficacy is not strictly a Drug Policy reform organization.

P- What do you call it?

CT- It is more of a social reform group that looks not only at drug policy, but also at other social issues like the environment, fair wages, the prison system, and a lot of other social endeavors.

P- You raised the point in the recent editorial you wrote for Drug War that the War on Drugs is primarily a War on poor people. Might this be a reason that it’s so difficult to get mainstream Americans to support Drug War reforms?

CT- That is a good possibility, but you have to understand that the people in the middle class, just like the people in the lower class, are just trying to make a living. Most of them don’t have the time to put into Drug Policy reform. However, there are quite a few other things that they could do that would be a tremendous help to us, simple things like writing letters to the editor about this. If we could get a couple hundred thousand people writing, let’s say, in the state of Connecticut, continuously writing letters to their papers about the Drug War, this would help enormously. Another thing I tell people when I do talks and lectures about this is that another thing that would help us would be for individuals to find other people who are interested that we aren’t reaching and get them to do the same things. If this were done and duplicated a lot more we would have this Drug War to full public discourse immediately.

P- You seem a bit upset in your editorial about the seeming lack of interest in Drug Policy reform among black leaders, secular, political and religious. Why do you suppose that is, that there isn’t more of an outcry against the War by these leaders, and how do you propose reaching them and getting them to speak out?

CT- Let me just give you a verbatim report here. Last year in the city of Hartford, they had a joint task force of State police and local Hartford police, to arrest all of the individuals within the city of Hartford who had outstanding warrants and were known drug dealers. What happened was I saw this coming about, and called a press conference. We sat down and outlined what we knew was going to happen. We told them they probably would arrest a ton of people, and they did. They did a very good job of arresting people with warrants and who were dealing drugs. But we also told them that they were going to create a tremendous vacuum in this community because once you get rid of the drug dealers and all those people with outstanding warrants, all you are doing is giving a free reign to potential drug dealers to take over large areas for the purpose of selling drugs. What happened? Since the operation there have been something like fifteen murders, I’m not quite sure of the exact numbers, but I do know that out of the say fifteen murders, thirteen were directly related to the drug trade.

P- Like from turf war?

CT- Exactly, turf war. The only thing you do by arresting a drug dealer is create a job vacancy. When I told them that they looked at me like I was crazy. But I was on a radio show a couple of months ago and I explained the same situation, and from that one of the black preachers said he did agree with me and said he’d give me a platform to espouse my message.

P- Where was that?

CT- In Hartford. He let me come in a talk to three of the classes he teaches at the local colleges and universities. His name is Reverend Larry Woods.

P- Do you see more young blacks than black leaders active in Drug Policy reform?

CT- Wow. No. I don’t see what I would call a lot of black activists. I’m not saying they aren’t out there. I know we have recruited two in my organization, one of whom has been spectacular as far as getting me interviews on the radio, and calling the mayor of Hartford to tell him what’s been going on, that the mayor must speak with Efficacy because they are the only one who seem to know what’s going on and how it’s going on.

P- What’s the kid’s name?

CT- Jonathan Small.

P- How do you see getting more black leaders, well, not even just blacks, but those poor people too. How does one get people in general, who are definitely effected by the War, to get involved?

CT- The only way you are going to do that is to constantly put on forums, do radio shows, make the message so redundant and make them see that what you are saying is correct. Once they see that they will come in droves. An interesting parallel here, and I worked with a lot of people within the Drug Policy Reform movement, which is predominantly white, the thing I tell them is that I remember when I was eighteen, nineteen years old, looking outside the window. On either side of me were these two women watching these predominantly white college kids marching through the area for civil rights. One of the woman asked the other, “why are all these white kids in our neighborhood marching?” The other woman said, “these kids are marching for civil rights, so we can have a better way of life.” The first one said, “so why the hell aren’t we out there, if that’s what they’re doing?” Before long, you saw a lot of blacks join in the civil rights movement. I saw this unfold before my eyes. I say all of that to say that eventually they will come, but it will take time. There’s always that one event, that one thing that sparks people on to greater heights.

P- Did you hear about Asa Hutchinson’s speech in London almost two weeks ago now, where he outlined what he called Drug reform myths, one of which is that the Drug War is an abject failure? He insisted that the War is not failing, that it is in all actuality a success, that we just need to continue as we are going. What would you say to him if you could speak to him face to face?

CT- First of all, I’d have to say he is one of the premier assholes in the Bush Administration. If he can say that the Drug War has been a success, show me how it’s been a success? Two million people in prison, half of those are black males, I don’t know what his criteria is for success. If he tells me that he’s keeping drugs away from young people, I’d say again it’s an abject failure. Statistics show over and over again that eighty-something percent of US students say marijuana is easier to get than alcohol and cigarettes. How in the hell can that be a success?

P- What he says is that “some say our fight against drugs has been a failure and that there hasn’t been any progress. But when we look at measurements there we see a different story. On the demand side we’ve reduced casual use, chronic use, and prevented others from even starting.” He goes on to say all kinds of stuff about how there’s been lots of success with things like law enforcement drug interdiction and decreased drug availability.

CT- The two main tenets of the Drug War are first of all interdict these drugs, interdicting so many that the prices of these drugs become so high that people can’t afford them, and secondly is to interdict drugs so our children can’t get them. If he is basing any of his facts on that, I tell you this man isn’t of this planet, he just doesn’t live here. I don’t expect anything else from people like him because that’s what they’re paid to do. But we have got to remember this: Anyone who supports the War on Drugs is directly responsible for its results.

P- Can you explain to me a bit to me about the Unitarian Universalists For Drug Policy Reform and the Alternatives to the Drug War statement? I understand you were at their conference in Canada where they passed the statement calling for an end to the War on Drugs.

CT- The Unitarians are really a select group of church goers. Over the years, not just in Drug Policy, they above any other religious organization with the possible exception of the Quakers have come forth with social programs and policies to rid this country of the wrong that has been done within social polices. I got interested in UUs last year when Chuck Thomas, who heads up the UUDPR, invited me to come to Cleveland to speak at a convention. After I gave the speech, Chuck enlisted me to help by going into the UU churches to get this statement passed. I tell you, those people are ahead of the times. I can’t say enough about how they approach social issues and social reform, especially the Drug War.

P- Ok Cliff, that should about cover it, unless there’s something you’d like to add?

CT- The thing is, Jessie Jackson said something years ago, that anyone who takes up trying to get rid of the Drug War would be looked at as a traitor by the US government. I think that summarizes what not only black leaders and politicians and clergy think, but also the majority of the population. I must emphasize once again, that all the people who are supporting the War on Drugs are actually supporting all of the carnage that ensues.

P- I really appreciate you speaking with me Cliff, thanks.

CT- One last thing, and please quote me on this. This is for the black leaders and politicians: Everything that has occurred in our cities, everything pertaining to the Drug War, you have to hold yourself personally responsible if you support this type of action, this War on Drugs.

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The peace lily is Efficacy's symbol. It is in loving memory of Lillie Thornton.

Clifford W. Thornton can be reached at:
Efficacy
P O Box 1234
Hartford, CT 06143
860 285 8831
860 688 4677(fax)
efficacy@msn.com
www.efficacy-online.org

Links

Racism of the US Drug War
This site has a vast collection of charts, notes, quotes, and more outlining clearly the real results and consequences of the War.

Drug War Facts
Compiled by Common Sense for Drug Policy, this is another comprehensive collection of facts about the War.

Race and the Drug War
This is a constantly updated list of links to news articles.

Sister Somayah
The webiste of this Los Angeles activist and High Times Freedom Fighter.

Ed Forchion, the New Jersey Weedman
A former marijuana smuggler, political candidate running on a legalize marijuana platform, and currently fighting a conviction that could land him in prison for up to twenty years, Ed Forchion is an activist of an extremely rare breed, who isn't afraid to stand up for his beliefs. His has been a long and lonely fight.

Drug War Reality Tour
Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign

Communities of Color and the drug war- DRCNet.org
While white politicians continue to appeal to their (mostly) white constituents with "get tough" rhetoric and punitive legislation in service to the "War on Drugs," the reality is that what they are engaged in is little more that a war on people of color; particularly African Americans.

The Impact of the Drug War and Drug Policies
on Youth, The Poor, and The Family
More from Common Sense for Drug Policy.

Prohibition- The So Called War On Drugs
A great overview of the entire scam.

The drug war is a class act
An article by Gary and Nora Callahan for the November Coalition's Ravorwire prison newsletter.

What Has the Supreme Court Been Smoking?
Arianna Huffington ridicules the US Supreme Court for its decision to allow the evictions of poor people from public housing if any family member is arrested for drugs, regardless of whether or not the arrest was on public housing property. Of course Florida Governor Jeb Bush did not loose his public housing when his daughter was arrested passing forged prescriptions for Xanax, but then the Bush family is rich, and white.