On a sunny day in Milwaukee, I drove downtown to interview a presidential candidate. The city has buzzed with political energy since hosting the Republican National Convention in July, and is plastered with political billboards, law signs and bumper stickers.
The name of Claudia De la Cruz is rare among them. She’s the candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Born and raised in New York, De la Cruz earned master’s degrees in social work and divinity at Columbia University, co-founded the People’s Forum community center and has served as a pastor. She’s been involved in many protests, including recently against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The PSL formed in 2004, after splintering from the Workers World Party in San Francisco, and now claims a presence in over 100 cities. The party’s website states that “the only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society.”
De la Cruz’s candidacy is controversial even on the political left, given fears that the likes of her, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and independent Cornell West could siphon away enough blue votes in swing states to put Donald Trump back in the White House.
De La Cruz has either direct or write-in access to the ballot in 30 states, including key battlegrounds in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Her name is unlikely to directly appear on the ballot in Pennsylvania, where Democrats succeeded in getting it removed on a technicality in August. But later that month, Georgia officials ruled that De La Cruz, West and Stein could appear on the ballot there. State Democrats announced they would appeal.
I spoke with De la Cruz before she addressed a passionate audience at a Milwaukee church. I wanted to ask about her perspectives on the drug war, harm reduction and related areas. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alexander Lekhtman: The unprecedented overdose crisis has continued under the Biden and Trump administrations, and long before. How would you address it?
Claudia De la Cruz: It’s a deeper question: What moves people towards use of drugs? What is it that causes people to find some escape from reality, and what reality are they escaping from? To solve the problem, we have to look at the cause. A lot of it is rooted in economics, people’s inability to live and thrive in a system that thrives on death and destruction.
Addiction is criminalized as much as the selling, and it’s not looked at as a health problem. As a country we have the highest use of substances, so it’s way beyond policy, it’s about the reorganization of society in a way that allows people to make meaning of their lives, and can provide people what they need to live and thrive.
“The so-called War on Drugs was not a war on drugs, it was a war on the anti-war movement, and on Black people, that continues today.”
Another aspect is we often think about “street drugs.” But what about Big Pharma, and people who get hooked on drugs for the profit of a whole institution and system that benefits off of peoples’ addictions? So it goes beyond drug policy and into the profit motive. How is that connected to economics in our communities? A lot of people who are using high levels of drugs are living in a context that is highly violent and poor, without access to many basic things they need.
The so-called War on Drugs was not a war on drugs, it was a war on the anti-war movement, and on Black people, that continues today. It has given space for other laws, like the 1994 crime bill. Beyond policies, we need to think about uprooting the systems and structures that create the conditions for people to become addicted, and also how do we decriminalize and regulate the use of substances in this country?
Kamala Harris might present herself as a figure who represents change and an opportunity to “turn the page” from the Trump-Biden matchup that so many people were disgusted by, but her policies do not differ in any fundamental way from Joe Biden’s. On some issues, like taxes on the rich, she has even moved to the right of Biden.
Neither candidate is willing to call for the type of dramatic change necessary to meet the scale of the crises people are facing, and that includes mass incarceration. People who want to see an end to racist drug and criminal justice policies still need to look for an alternative outside of the two party system.
AL: Besides how you frame it in economic and societal terms, there are acute practical needs for vulnerable people who use drugs. What do you think about harm reduction measures including syringe service programs and overdose prevention centers? We see widespread attacks on such programs, in red and blue jurisdictions. These and many adjacent services—a drop-in center for unhoused people in New York City, for instance—are being underfunded and defunded. Why is this happening?
CDLC: The same problem is happening in Philadelphia. There has been a displacement of an entire population in the city, for interests that have to do with gentrification. The way they sell it is, “We want to clean up our streets and make sure our kids are safe.” Without considering there is a reason why this is a problem and what creates that problem. They’re uninterested in that.
Mayor Adams is the worst thing that’s happened to New York, almost like if Bloomberg and Guiliani had a baby. He is not only attacking the homeless community and population with drug addiction problems, he’s also attacking regular working class New Yorkers. It’s a hyper-surveilled and policed city. “Cop City” is being built in Queens.
We can’t see all this in isolation. We have to understand why we’re seeing cutting of programs for people on the margins that have been historically attacked.
“Harm reduction is important, but not enough—we have to reorganize society.”
In the 1990s, I was part of St. Ann’s church in the Bronx that does harm reduction, and it changed my understanding on drug addiction. People like Reverend Luis Barrios hid syringes and did all sorts of things out of the need to keep users safe, because they’re not going to stop using drugs as long as the conditions don’t change.
There needs to be a level of support. Harm reduction programs serve as a cushion, as we transition to something that works for the people. They are necessary. To cut the funding and displace them only creates a bigger problem. Where do these folks go? It’s important to understand these are attacks on poor people, primarily Black and Brown communities, so there is a racist aspect to it.
Harm reduction is important, but not enough—we have to reorganize society. Rather than cutting harm reduction, we should be investing in it and figuring out ways to create the society that allows people who are suffering a health issue to move forward.
AL: Another aspect of the drug war is its relationship to policing and the militarization of the police. Despite the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, very little seems to have changed. What’s your stance on policing and law enforcement?
CDLC: The criminal justice system serves profit, and the agenda of the ruling class. Police exist to protect private property, not people. If we follow the roots of policing, it comes from slave catchers. They were there to bring back people who had fought for their freedom. It is not true that the more police, the safer we are.
Very few laws in the criminal justice system are there to protect people. You have to jump hoops to be able to get our people justice in this country. It serves another institution that reigns king: the mass incarceration complex. It is there to provide cheap labor. A lot of these prisons are private prisons that make money from having bodies in these jails. It’s also a form of population control.
Our communities have unfortunately been taught that policing is the only way we can be safe. Our understanding of community safety needs to shift: It means creating the conditions for people to live dignified lives.
If you think about gated communities, how many policemen are in those communities? Not many. Because they don’t see the types of crimes, poverty crimes, that we experience in the ‘hood. A lot of these are crimes of survival; obviously there are other types. So there is a need to dismantle the mass incarceration project, which is a project of the ruling class.
How do we create a criminal justice system that doesn’t tell folks that have been rounded up and taken in: You have to plead guilty in order to get X, Y and Z? It’s all a lie; usually people plead guilty and are put through the system, and their rights are abused and taken away. The amount of people who can’t vote, these are mechanisms of control. If we want to abolish systemic oppression, we have to abolish the system that produces the oppression.
There are a lot of creative campaigns: “Defund the Police,” it’s a good campaign, but how much did it really advance? In 2023 we saw crazy increases in police department budgets around the country.
“The state is preparing to heavily militarize, and criminalize these movements. What are we going to do about that?”
AL: How do you think the Defund the Police might have gained more traction?
CDLC: It’s important to understand the root of the problem. Defund the Police campaigns did a lot of work in terms of narrative change, and having people understand the crude reality that there’s more investment in policing than in solving real material issues. But we need to call things what they are: There’s no defunding the police that is enough that actually goes across the US.
Ultimately dealing with the symptom of the problem is not enough. Right now we’re looking at the development of Cop Cities all across the US. We have to know and study the economic base for that.
We are entering very uncertain political and economic times. We’ve been in crisis since 2008 in this country; it got even worse post-pandemic. People are resisting not only police brutality, but also on the question of Palestine, on immigrant rights and women’s rights. People will continue to be out, and that will grow in this country because of the conditions. The state is preparing to heavily militarize, and criminalize these movements. What are we going to do about that? Small campaigns are not going to be the solution. We have to build an independent movement of working class people that are politically aligned, and very clear on the strategy of the ruling class.
AL: Shifting to foreign policy, situations in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, even China, have a heavy bearing on the US and international drug war. We see Republicans threatening war in Mexico to combat trafficking organizations. How do you think about these issues?
CDLC: The same methods used here in the US domestically by the capitalist state are then amplified internationally. When we talk about US imperialism we have to recognize it is the expression of US capitalism at home. If the US uses the criminal justice system to persecute, lock up, dehumanize and criminalize communities that are historically marginalized, then they have that same approach to the Global South. It’s a way of maintaining them in their place.
The War on Drugs did that in the 1980s, with the idea that we need to justify occupation and financing paramilitaries across Latin America and the Caribbean. War, invasion, occupation, political and economic domination, came from the War on Drugs.
You mentioned Colombia. Colombia was for a long time the beauty and best friend of the US, because it served to surveil what was happening in the continent, like when Venezuela had its revolution.
When we can put these situtations in a larger context and understand the hold the US gained through the War on Drugs, we understand this was not about people’s health, or stopping drugs from coming to the US. It is about controlling.
We need to implement a foreign policy with another approach to building relationships with other nations. An approach not built on dominance, policing and extraction, but collaboration and solidarity, and allowing other nations to develop in sovereignty. There’s no reason the US should have a Southern Command. Our foreign policy cannot be based on policing, bullying and submitting other countries to our will. The Democrats and Republicans are not going to change that.
AL: The drug war also contributes to destabilization and violence in Latin America, fueling migration to the US as people flee. You’re a child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. How would you address migration and border issues?
CDLC: Our politicians want to blame immigrants. Was it Trump that said, “They want to take Black jobs”?
Historically, both the Democrats and Republicans have had very similar anti-immigrant positions. They want the labor of immigrants because it produces capital for them, they just don’t want to deal with the immigrants. We have a lot of consciousness-raising to do to understand immigrants are not our enemy. They come here because life has been made hell in their countries. A lot of folks are migrating from Cuba because of the 60-year blockade that doesn’t allow Cuba to live. There’s the sanctions on Venezuela, a genocide happening in Palestine, and a US-backed invasion in Haiti.
We’re going to see a lot of people migrating to the US, and they’re following the traces of things that have been stolen from them.
AL: Gun policies are also adjacent to the drug war. How would you approach issues including domestic gun violence and international trafficking of US-made weapons?
It is an outrage that US-based gun manufacturers contribute so greatly to violence all around the world. Not only do they profit off of death in this country, but they export their deadly products globally. It is also important to remember, for instance, that the ATF for years helped gangs in Mexico acquire guns on the pretext that this was part of a larger investigation related to the “war on drugs.”
We believe the issue of violence in America should be tackled holistically, and gun control needs to be designed in a way that does not contribute to the further criminalization of oppressed communities. One key step that should immediately be taken is to lift the special immunity from lawsuits that Congress gave to the arms industry in 2005.
“If people in these different spaces were to organize together and understand the root of the problem, things would be very different.”
AL: Those of us in the drug policy space tend to be laser-focused on specific causes. We often have to remind ourselves how closely other issues, such as immigration or climate justice, intersect with those concerns.
CDLC: The segmenting and fragmenting of how we think of things is intentional: “Black people have a problem, let’s create this organization for you. Immigrants want some rights, let’s create this organization for them.”
What I’ve learned over 30 years of organizing is that every issue we deal with in this country has to do with capitalism. It has to do with the economics of who profits. While they have fragmentation of society, we don’t win. If people in these different organizations and spaces were to speak to each other, organize together and understand the root of the problem, things would be very different.
The ruling class would be scared out of their boots. The question of Palestine is scaring them that much. You have people from all backgrounds, all generations taking the streets, disrupting everyone anywhere they go, and taking action. That threatens them.
I think about Fred Hampton Sr. and the original Rainbow Coalition. There were a lot of people sitting at that table that had cultural, ethnic and racial differences. But they understood they had the same enemy. When we understand we have the same enemy, our strategy is unified.
Photograph courtesy of the PSL
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