The “war on drugs” has always been about racism

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Democrats are talking about a failed war on drugs because they lack the courage to speak out about this uncomfortable truth: it didn’t fail.

As Kathleen Frydl eloquently points out in her book The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973, the country’s gradual shift from the regulation of recreational drugs to their criminalization materialized in 1968. Prior to that, the federal government’s version of the war on drugs included fiscal policies. like the Marihuana Act of 1937, sending tax collectors after the industry.

After 1968, under the Department of Justice instead of the Treasury (or, I don’t know, Health and Human Services), it was clear that the war focused on prosecution, not treatment. So even before President Richard Nixon declared cannabis and other recreational drugs as Public Enemy No.1 in 1971, the Johnson administration had set the policy that would swell America’s prisons for decades to come.

About 1.3 million of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in this country are in state prisons. Drug-related offenses are the most common reason for incarceration in state prisons. The country has the highest prison population on the planet. Doesn’t it seem a bit absurd to characterize the war on drugs as a failure when the intention was to send people to jail for drug crimes?

But where the failed drug war rhetoric turns from absurd to offensive is when Democrats speak as if the racial disparity in drug-related arrests is unintentional.

For decades our federal government has waged a war on drugs that has unfairly affected low income communities and communities of color. It’s time for Congress to end the federal ban on marijuana and reinvest in communities hardest hit by the failed war on drugs.

These are the words of Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who, along with two other Democratic co-sponsors, announced the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act last week. While I applaud the decision to end the marijuana ban, I’m not a fan of the soft landing it gave to our anti-drug history.

Unfairly impacted?

No, bruh, we’ve been targeted. We are targeted.

Today, blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than our white counterparts, despite comparable rates of use. And these arrests, we know they can ruin lives.

There are over 500,000 people in jail right now simply because they cannot pay the bond.

We know that the FBI’s illegal counterintelligence program used the policies of the War on Drugs to try to discredit the civil rights movement and attack black leaders such as members of the Black Panther Party.

We know that Nixon’s own domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman said the drug laws provided a pretext to arrest their leaders, loot their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. He even said: did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.

And we know that in 1971, the same year that Nixon started his war on drugs, he was recorded laughing with California Governor Ronald Reagan as they call Africans apes and cannibals. Later, as president, Reagan put Nixon’s war on drugs and mass incarceration on steroids.

So, no, I will not tolerate attempts to portray the war on drugs as a failure. I will not accept a narrative that suggests that this was simply flawed legislation or that racial disparity was an unforeseen byproduct. None of this was driven by science. It was motivated by prejudice and politics. For decades, anyone who wanted to be president had to be considered the toughest on crime and drugs. This would include President Biden, who, as a senator in 1994, sponsored the Crime Bill that helped double the prison population from 1994 to 2009.

It is not unfairly impacted. It is state sanctioned racism masquerading as good policy.

Yes, it is disgusting. Yes, it is infamous. But it is also the truth. Renaming it does not change anything.

@LZGranderson

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