And 9% were white…

There will be a cease fire on the war on drugs for a while. The election is coming up and—this will shock you—I have some things to say about it. I will try to post interesting drug-war related links from time to time.

 “African Americans comprise 14% of regular drug users, but are 37% of those arrested for drug offenses.”—Drug Policy Alliance

In most cases it’s not deliberate. It flows out of the ugly underbelly of our cultural psyche.

New York has a “stop and frisk” policy that has come under fire lately. The police were given the task of stopping and frisking anyone who “seemed suspicious." Unsurprisingly, the 85% of suspicious persons were brown.

According to the ACLU:
In the first six months of 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 337,434 times
298,919 were totally innocent (89 percent).
179,449 were black (53 percent).
107,812 were Latino (32 percent).
31,891 were white (9 percent).
The vast majority of criminals in New York—and the US generally—are white, but color is an automatic cause for suspicion.

Then the downward spiral starts:

“And that’s just the first step. Once someone is arrested, it’s up to the prosecutor to decide what to charge them. And blacks and Latinos routinely face far more serious charges for the same offense than whites. They also get to decide whether to charge them in state or federal court (federal laws carry harsher penalties). In one study in California, of 2200 cases referred to federal court for crack, not a single one of the defendants was white. Not one.”

All of them were brown. 100%. Every. Single. One.

So it’s no shock that drug laws fall disproportionately on people of color.

Is all this deliberate racism? Racism, of course. Deliberate? Not in most cases, but that’s only in my (not so) humble opinion.

Enter the war on drugs. Marijuana was first criminalized in the late 1930s. I think the main reason for that was Victorian prudery about “intoxication.” Disappointed that alcohol could not be permanently outlawed, the blue-nosed defenders of public morality needed a new target.

Marijuana was perfect. Unlike alcohol, it had no powerful defenders. It was mostly used by blacks and Latinos who had zero power. If criminalizing marijuana made their lives more miserable and put more of them in prison, in 1938 that was a happy bonus.

It still makes the lives of people of color more miserable and puts more of them in prison but society no longer views that as a bonus. It’s a scandal. It’s a horrifying injustice.

Legalizing drugs  would improve the lives of people of color simply by virtue of the fact that fewer of them would be in prison. 

“In the twenty-five years since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the United States penal population rose from around 300,000 to more than two million.[11] Between 1986 and 1991, African-American women's incarceration in state prisons for drug offenses increased by 828 percent.[12]” —Wikipedia

828%. Read it and weep.

Off-topic, but it needs to be said:What can we do about endemic racial bias? It’s all unconscious. It has to become more conscious. People need to learn to challenge their own thoughts and assumptions. I don’t want to get into white shaming here. Every single person makes evaluations about the people around them all day long, every minute. It’s almost instantaneous and completely unconscious. That person is safe. That person is not. That person is good. That person is not. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a skill you need. All I’m asking—all we can ask of ourselves and each other—is TAKE A SECOND LOOK.


For an in-depth discussion of this topic I highly recommend Ed Brayton’s blog:

America’s Racist Criminal Justice System, pt. 1
America’s Racist Criminal Justice System, pt. 2
America’s Racist Criminal Justice System, pt. 3
America’s Racist Criminal Justice System, pt. 4