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End The War On Drugs Essay

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I believe that ending the War on Drugs would result in several crucial benefits to society. The most important of those is that it would help African-Americans withstand oppression by the United States government. If drug abuse was treated as a public health issue rather than a crime, the results would include significant benefits to the black population, a decrease in discriminatory legislation and law enforcement, more welcoming and effective treatment for addicts, the reduction of criminal activity associated with illicit drugs, and a surplus of money and resources for the government to better direct.
While the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties made a great deal of necessary progress in fighting discrimination and racism, the beginning of the 1970s did not mark the end of oppression for …show more content…

One of the best examples of this is the case of crack cocaine. Crack is the most notable scapegoated substance of the drug war. It is composed solely of cocaine and baking soda boiled in water. The crack rocks people smoke generally are seventy-five to ninety percent cocaine. In composition, the two drugs are very similar. (UUL) The most significant difference between the two substances is the federal laws that exist concerning them; it would take about “one hundred times” the amount of pure cocaine to receive the same average prison sentence of a crack offense (UUL). It is difficult to claim that this legislature is blatantly racist, because it applies to all offenders equally. However, in 2003, approximately eighty-one percent of sentenced crack offenders were black people. If the law applied to all people equally, this would mean that in 2003, about eighty-one percent of crack users were black. That is actually far from the truth; a study the same year found that the majority of documented crack users were actually white

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According to the article, The Drug War, Mass Incarceration, and Race “ Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population,10 and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races.11 But black people comprise 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations,12 and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated”. Despite the fact that colored people are minorities in the country still, make up 1/3 of the people arrested because of the drug policy. The policy effective created to target the minorities by making the cocaine the main focus of the drug. “America of the poor, where, amid hopelessness and lack of education, people will suffer the worst consequences of cocaine”(Kerr, 1) which in many poor communities lived the colored minorities, this made it easier for the police officer to target and arrest the

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Later in the 1980’s, President Reagan revamped this, with it being called Reagan’s Intensified War on Drugs. The issue was that some people believed Reagan had intended certain consequences with this “war” while others disagreed. Things such as police brutality rose and so did arrests on non-violent drug use. That being said, Reagan’s Intensified War on Drugs had more unintended consequences than it did intended ones.

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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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This meant that having only 5 grams of crack in one 's possession meant a minimum of five years jail time while having 500 grams of powder cocaine equaled the same amount of jail time (WIKIPEDIA). This law along with pre-existing racial prejudice made it that black people are incarcerated at a rate ten times higher than whites (5D). This was observed by a sociologist Katherine Beckett and her research team in

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The war on drugs and incarceration of people of color was reinvigorated by Reagans war on drugs with changes to the drug laws. The establishment of harsh mandatory sentencing for crack cocaine, considered a poor black drug but lesser sentencing for powdered coke, a more expensive form favored by whites once again meant people with brown skin were headed to jail in record numbers, “Congress, in virtually record time, established mandatory sentencing penalties for crack that were far harsher than those for powder cocaine. The same amount of time in prison for one ounce of crack cocaine that you get for 100 ounces of powder cocaine. Police here are cracking down on crack dealers. Usually black or Hispanic, Latino, they were getting long sentences for possession of crack.

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