Under the banner of the New England Annual Conference of United Methodist Churches, 600 Methodist churches in six states have issued a resolution passed Saturday calling for an end of the War on Drugs in the name of Christ.
The group urged “a new system of the care and restoration of victims” and the community as a whole, according to the resolution published on the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition website, whose mission the Conference resolved to support.
The group cited the failure of the “‘so-called’ War on Drugs” to make progress in eliminating “or even reducing” substance abuse, as well as the negative consequences that have resulted from “War on Drugs” policy, including a violent underground market and its associated loss of life, the high incidence of death due to overdose in the unregulated and sometimes adulterated market, and the harms associated with processing and punishing people as criminals for drug use.
“The ‘War on Drugs’ has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery” for people of color, the resolution noted, while costing millions of dollars per year to finance.
The group concluded that the issue was one of the poor and marginalized, and the consequence of the drug war was “mass incarceration, racial injustice, and the breakdown of families,” according to Major Neill Franklin (Ret.), executive director of LEAP.
The group made their call under the authority of “the love of Christ, who came to save those who are lost and vulnerable.”
By James Haleavy