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Drugs And Racism

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The War on Drugs in Correlation with Racism Drugs and racism. The two seem distant, yet through careful analysis a trend can start to emerge in regards to the dichotomy under scrutiny. Some say that President Nixon’s “War on Drugs” campaign in 1971 was a prime example of combining drugs and racism into one single problem creating the illusion that all minorities are habitual drug users. The fact of the matter is, the association of race with drug use was used way before the 1970’s. Why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal today? It 's not based on any scientific assessment of the risks of these drugs, but it has everything to do with who is associated with these drugs thus producing the emergence of anti-drug laws.

Opium and the Chinese …show more content…

The harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including New York Representatives Major Owens of Brooklyn and Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control (Brooks, 2003). Crack was destroying black communities, and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. Some suggest that the crack–powder distinction was enacted partly because of conscious or unconscious racism. But it is noteworthy that none of the black members of Congress made that claim at the time the bill was initially discussed. The absence of any complaint by black members of Congress that the crack–powder differential was racially unfair speaks volumes. After all, several of these representatives had long histories of distinguished opposition to any public policy that smacked of racial injustice (Manderson, 1999). However, in 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between offenses for crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. This—albeit a small one—was a major step in the right direction towards reversing the racist connotation associated with crack cocaine and instead focusing on the main issue that is all drugs are bad and are a problem regardless of the …show more content…

They seem to have no fear. I have also noted that under the influence of this weed they have enormous strength and it will take several men to handle one man while, under ordinary circumstances, one man could handle him with ease.

Similar views are had by Harry Anslinger, the father of the war on weed. He fully embraced racism as a tool to demonize marijuana. As the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anslinger institutionalized his belief that pot 's "effect on the degenerate races" made its prohibition a top priority. Here are just a few of his most famous and most racist quotes; gathered from an article written in 2014 by Nick Wing from The Huffington Post:

There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any

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They began by introducing Berlin Boyd’s case and defining it as a vote that “pushed the need to do something different to aid African Americans in Memphis, to level economic disparities, and help keep them out of the criminal-justice-system quagmire” (Sells and Watts 276). The authors explain that when officers catch someone with marijuana, it is up to their discretion. They are allowed two choices: to issue a $50 fine or current state charge ($2,500 fine). By providing that comparison, it is evident to the reader that that is an unjust way to charge those with marijuana. The authors then show the statistics of the people who get arrested in previous years and state that “The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says blacks in the Memphis area are 4.2 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession as a white person, though the two groups use marijuana at comparable rates” (277).

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Though the creation of certain policies criminalized drug use and began to target minority communities predominantly African American and Latino. It used a campaign with the message of violence and danger that needed to be controlled within the African American and minority

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In The New Jim Crow, published in 2010, American writer and civil rights activist Michelle Alexander argues that a new racial caste system was born in the United States after the death of Jim Crow. A system that was caused by the war on drugs, which was created in 1971 by President Ronald Reagan, as well as the Fourth Amendment. Alexander conveys her argument that the war on drugs, and the government's disregard for the Fourth Amendment, led to the unfortunate birth of mass incarceration using logical and ethical appeals. In the beginning of the excerpt, Alexander discusses the Terry v. Ohio decision and how it limited the effectiveness of the Fourth Amendment when it comes to drug crimes.

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Annotated Bibliography Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: The New Press. Alexander opens up on the history of the criminal justice system, disciplinary crime policy and race in the U.S. detailing the ways in which crime policy and mass incarceration have worked together to continue the reduction and defeat of black Americans.

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In 2010, the US Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) which reduced the sentencing difference between offenses for crack and powder cocaine. Many people in law enforcement believed that there is more violence associated with a crack cocaine crime, rather than a powder cocaine offense. Due to the increasing amount of reports and cases of aggressive offenses, Urban Leaders in America allowed the sentences of the crime to be extended because of the violence in a drug trafficking offense. In the article, “Data Show Racial Disparity in Crack Sentencing” by Danielle Kurtzleben, states that, “The figures for the 6,020 powder cocaine cases are far less skewed: 17 percent of these offenders were white, 28 percent were black, and 53 percent were

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2619 Words | 11 Pages

Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow is a truly thought provoking book attempting to show the enduring issues of racial inequalities in our Criminal Justice system. Racial inequality in America is a huge and controversial topic, especially in reference to America’s system of Criminal justice. In “The New Jim Crow” Alexander focuses on the racial undertones of America’s “War on drugs”. Alexander uses the chapters of her book to take us on a journey through America’s racial history and argues that the federal drug policy unjustly targets black communities.

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Legislation in response to reduce the racial disparity began in the mid-1990s, and culminated in the signing of the FSA. The FSA has been described as improving the fairness of the federal criminal justice system by prominent politicians such as, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. However, Some members of Congress are opposed to the Act. Lamar S. Smith (R-TX), the top-ranking Republican on the United States House Committee on the Judiciary, has criticized the act and argued against its passage (Bumgarner

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An 18 year old first time offender caught with less than two ounces of cocaine received a 10 year sentence. A 46 year old father of three who sold some of his painkillers to someone he thought was his friend, received a 25 year sentence. In 2006 37.5% of all state and federal prisoners were black. One in 33 african american men were in jail, compared to one in 205 white men and one in 79 hispanic men.

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One example of drug laws as institutional racism was giving the use of crack cocaine a higher classification then regular cocaine. This is because crack cocaine

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279 Words | 2 Pages

Statistics prove that Mandatory Minimums affect minorities disproportionately. In fact, African Americans are over 10 times more likely to enter prison for drug offenses than their Caucasian counterparts despite both racial groups using drugs in equal amounts. This shows the racial bias of the Justice System at work by using Mandatory Minimums to punish minorities with harsher sentences. Blacks and Hispanics make up 74.4 percent of the people convicted of drug charges while only making up less than 30 percent of the population. Indicative of this widespread problem, 39.4 percent of convictions in 2011 involved Mandatory Minimum Sentencing (United States Sentencing Commission 148).

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Like it is mentioned in the movie 13th “The so called war on drugs was a war on communities of color”. So, now black people are being arrested much more than White people even though the drug use is close to the same as Angela F. Chan points out in her article for the Huffington Post. “Even though Black people use drugs at the same rate as White people, they are incarcerated for drug crimes at 20 to 50 times the rate of White people in some states”. A law that was passed during the war on drugs was mandatory sentencing.

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In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Era of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, she begins by points out the underlying problem in our Criminal Justice system. The problem being prioritizing the control of those in this racial caste rather than focusing on reasonable punishment and efforts to deter crime. Alexander begins by speaking of her experience as a civil rights lawyer and what soon became her priority after seeing a poster that mentioned how the war on drugs is the new jim crow when it comes to the application and outcome of it. As Alexander points out the correlation between the war on drugs and it being the new jim crow, she discusses the mass incarceration that is prevalent in our society and the number of African American

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For example, agencies have been established with the sole intent to manage drug use and distribution and technology has been exclusively developed to detect the presence of drugs. Yet, evidence has indicated that such exhaustive efforts have been relatively unsuccessful. First, it has been assumed that drugs have perpetuated violence in society and based on this rationale, it was believed that by the suppressing the pervasiveness of drugs that incidents of violence would simultaneously diminish. However, reality has failed to align with the expectations that had initially been anticipated. Research findings have suggested that the decriminalization of drugs would result in a less adversarial drug market in which conflicts have tended to arise among dealers as well as between dealers and buyers (Common Sense for Drug Policy, 2007, p. 21).

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This piece of work is mainly about the social analysts position to the issue of racism and mass incarceration and also how the various principles of distributive justice can be applied to different positions in our issue of focus. It is quite evident that the main work of the social policy analysts is to identify current problems, evaluating them and coming up with solutions regarding to it. Once they discover the problem they try to check for the causes that may leading to that problem and also other problems that may be related to it. However, different social policy analysis’s have differing views regarding a certain problem and also

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890 Words | 4 Pages

The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by increasing and enforcing penalties for offenders. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today (History.com Staff). The drugs that were being transported when this initiative was put into action were coming from South America (Mexico was first, but US locked down borders, so South American drug lords seized the opportunity). South American drug trafficking was, in the end, the tipping point for the American government. Thinking this through logically, one can’t have a war on drugs without the drugs themselves.

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