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.
-------------
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.
