Unfortunately, I had to miss Thursday’s class discussion on
Marked, but I still wanted to be able to talk and vent about the drug war and
incarceration in America. I would be
willing to wager a good bit of money that most people in the honors department
were proud graduates of D.A.R.E or another drug awareness program. I sure was.
The fifth grade D.A.R.E. program with our School Resource Officer taught me
that drug users were useless members of society whose only goal was to make
money selling drugs to young kids. We were taught the merits of “Just say no”
and to trust our local police officers to maintain safety and justice for all.
Drug users were a detriment to our society and should be locked up for good.
Of course, now I know better. I began researching the war on drugs fairly
recently (something that happens to you after attending a liberal arts college,
I suppose). It was within the past two or three years. I began looking at how
the current war on drugs came to exist. I was shocked. I want to examine the
unequal laws and ineffective strategies employed by the United States in its
war against drugs. Unfortunately, the history of the US drug war is
convoluted and incredibly long, so I want to focus on the prohibition of
marijuana. I hope that it won’t come off as a 1,000 word diatribe about “legalizing
it.” Rather, I would like to demonstrate that the US has never had good
intentions with its war on drugs.
Where does
the War on Drugs start? It depends on how you look at it. President Nixon was
the first President to openly call for a War on Drugs in 1971 in response to
rampant heroin abuse by soldiers serving in the Vietnam War (Link). However, one can look back further into the history of different,
occasionally softer, drugs to catch a glimpse of where all of this began. Opium
had become a very serious problem in the US and several laws were enacted to ban
the substance. Many individuals at the time –and currently it seems- believed
that cannabis was a dangerous gateway drug that would coerce the nation into the
death grips of opium dens. Although the actual attack on marijuana came a bit
later.
In the late
1930s the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed. This bill was intended to
heavily tax marijuana to curb consumption. It wasn’t until 1951 that possession
of marijuana was determined to be a federal crime (along with much harder drugs
such as cocaine and opiates). Despite marijuana being a mostly harmless drug,
the bills passed easily (Link). There are several theories as to the nature of this bill
passing. First, many believe that William Randolph Hearst saw the mass
production of hemp as a threat to his paper production and lobbied for its
banning. Another commonly held theory is that the prohibition of marijuana was
a flagrantly racist attack on Black and Mexican-American communities. This
theory has a fair bit of credence. Consider the following quote from Harry J.
Anslinger, the US senator that spearheaded the campaign against marijuana:
"Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death — the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind."
-WRH
Yeah, that was said by a US senator. If you don’t believe
that there were racial motivations behind the banning of cannabis in this
nation, well then you’re ignoring hard facts. One might argue that the racial
profiling of the Drug War is something of a distant past. They would be
terribly wrong. I’m not even going to examine the effect that unequal crack
cocaine sentencing affected the 1980s prison boom seen below. I will also
ignore how cocaine, a predominantly white, upper-class drug is treated much
more lightly than other hard drugs. Instead, to keep things in their simplest
form, I’ll stick with marijuana.
The incarceration rates of people of color compared to whites
is absolutely staggering. Take this quote about incarceration rates in
California from the LA Times as an example, “According to the CJCJ (Center on
Juvenile and Criminal Justice), half of California's marijuana possession
arrestees were nonwhite in 1990 and 28% were under age 20. Last year, 62% were
nonwhite and 42% were under age 20. Marijuana possession arrests of youth of
color rose from about 3,100 in 1990 to about 16,300 in 2008 -- an arrest surge
300% greater than the rate of population growth in that group” (Link)
Here’s another
startling statistic from the same article, “Blacks make up less than 7% of the
state population but 22% of people arrested for all marijuana offenses and 33%
of all marijuana felony arrests. More African Americans are arrested in
California for marijuana felonies than are whites, even though whites are six
times more represented in the state population.” This is not just a phenomenon in California,
check out the image below describing the arrest and conviction disparity in the
city of Chicago. These statistics are absolutely shocking. This is hard
evidence showing not only national police profiling, but an entire system
designed to incarcerate minorities more than whites.
First of all, I am vehemently opposed to the United
States “War on Drugs.” I believe just in its very nature, it’s a waste of money
and more has far more power than it should. It seems that every other day you
can find an article about how the police or the DEA raid some house for
marijuana and shoot some unarmed civilian or their dogs. Actually, how about I
just list all of these links?
(Link 1)
(Link 2)
(Link 4)
So,
in summary, the War on Drugs is probably one of the biggest threats to minorities
in the United States. I should also mention that after Portugal legalized most
drugs, they saw a marked decline in overall drug use. Look forward to the next
thrilling installment of my blog where I discuss the dangers of privatized
prisons! America is broken.
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