This is an excerpt from the chapter entitled "What the War on Drugs Became":
What The War on Drugs Became
A “war” on drugs, a “fight against crime.” Who wouldn’t support these noble-sounding efforts? When you look a little closer, however, it takes on a different meaning when we say we are declaring war on drugs in poor and minority communities. The location of the “war” is an essential element to consider. In an earlier chapter, I quoted T.D. Jakes saying that in poor communities, drug use is criminalized, and in the suburbs, it’s treated with empathy.
America has been conditioned not to think twice about the poor or minority drug user being treated like a criminal and all that entails. The best outcome for these “criminals” is being roughed up or incarcerated. The worst outcomes? Being brutalized and or shot. We see commercials for treatment centers or hear stories of celebrities entering rehab for drug addiction. America has unknowingly created a caste system that incarcerates its poor drug users and uses its police force to enforce it. For the more affluent, America encourages 12-step groups and even televises intervention shows. While the “war” rages on in poor communities, particularly communities of color, it’s as if “truce” has been declared for those who can escape this inequitable treatment by their affluence or the color of their skin.
“Since the mid-1980s, the United States has pursued aggressive law enforcement strategies to curtail the use and distribution of illegal drugs. The costs and benefits of this national ‘war on drugs’ remain fiercely debated. What is not debatable, however, is that this ostensibly race-neutral effort has been waged primarily against black Americans. Relative to their numbers in the general population and among drug offenders, black Americans are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated on drug charges.
Public officials have been relatively untroubled by the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of blacks for drug offenses. Their relative indifference-and that of the public at large-no doubt reflects, to varying degrees, partisan politics, ‘tough on crime’ punitive philosophies, misinformation about drugs, an uncritical embrace of drug war logic, and misguided notions about the needs of poor urban communities. But to some extent, it also reflects conscious and unconscious views about race. Indeed, those views have been woven into the very fabric of American anti-drug efforts, influencing the definition of the ‘drug problem’ and the nature of the response to it.
Although whites are relatively untouched by anti-drug efforts compared to blacks, supporters of the drug war may not see a problem of race discrimination because they do not believe the purpose of drug law enforcement is to harm blacks-if anything, drug law enforcement is seen as protecting minority communities from addiction, harassment, and violence. Perhaps without realizing it, they have accepted the same definition of discrimination that the courts use in constitutional equal protection cases-absent ill-intent, there is no discrimination (Human Rights Watch, 2009)
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