DRUGS DESTROY THE FAMILY UNIT

McCOMB - In the movie The Godfather a group of Mafia chieftains are
discussing the pros and cons of getting into the illegal-drug business.

One of the fictional crime bosses asserts that in his regime drugs will
only be sold "to the coloreds" and will be kept away from schools and nicer
neighborhoods. That movie was set in the late 1940s, and much has changed
for the worse on the drug scene since. Illegal drugs are so pervasive now
that a growing number of school districts in rural Mississippi are planning
this fall to drug test students, black and white, who participate in
extracurricular activities. This is more of a preventive measure than an
attempt to catch drug users. The theory is that if kids know they are going
to be tested and have to pay a price for using drugs - such as not being
able to play sports or in the band - it will give them another reason to
say no to experimentation. Illegal drugs, contrary to the expressed will of
the old Mafia chief, have not been restricted to the "coloreds." Drug abuse
and trafficking is an equal-opportunity plague, observing no racial or
social barriers. But it is evident that its biggest toll is on
African-Americans, at least in Mississippi. Law-enforcement personnel say
that much of the crime in this state is related directly or indirectly to
drugs.

Addicts steal to get money to buy drugs.

Dealers kill each other over turf wars. It is not unusual for innocent
people, including children, to get killed in the crossfire. Watch any
Mississippi television station and you can see reports of it, almost daily.
Not all but a majority of the perpetrators and the victims of the
drug-related violence are African-American. Former McComb Mayor J.C. Woods
called my attention to an opinion piece in the Aug. 4 Business Week
magazine that calls for the decriminalization of drugs to help blacks.
Woods was appalled by the suggestion, and I don't agree with it either.
Gary S. Becker, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is a fellow of
the Hoover Institution, wrote the column, which makes some valid points,
such as: "Black families were quite stable until the '60s, if not quite as
stable as those of whites.

Although divorce and unmarried motherhood have increased throughout
American society, they have exploded among blacks. Well under half of black
children are in two-parent families, sharply down from about 75 percent in
1950, although there has been a little improvement since the mid-1990s."
Becker points to the huge increase in the number of black men in prison,
asserting they make up more than 40 percent of male prisoners although they
are only 12 percent of the overall population. "For those incarcerated on
drug-related charges, the black share is 60 percent. "There's reason to
believe this shortage of desirable male companions discourages black women
from marrying or staying married for long," Becker wrote. So, one of his
solutions is to decriminalize drugs, taking the profit motive out of the
trade. "Trafficking in drugs attracts young blacks mainly because it offers
much better pay (provided they don't get caught) than do the legal
alternatives which tend to be low-wage jobs," he wrote. I don't buy the
theory, although an argument can be made that it is the lure of the money
that is more tempting to some than the drugs themselves. But the drugs are
so devastating that they must be outlawed.

You don't get rid of murder by legalizing it. I do think Becker makes a
good argument in another part of his article on the stability of the black
family. From the 1960s until the mid-1990s, when some reforms began to be
made, the welfare system encouraged deterioration of the family by making
it more profitable in many cases for a mother not to be married to someone
with a low-paying job. We've had it backward for too long. More thought
should be given to providing incentives and benefits, either directly or
through tax breaks, to those who work and raise their families in
traditional homes.

Charles Dunagin is a retired editor and publisher of the McComb
Enterprise-Journal.