War on Drugs

Let’s talk about the war on drugs, loosely coined. This post is going to be heavily statistic and fact based, and while that may seem a bit “un-blog like,” it is my experience that you rarely get opportunities to have arguments regarding race that are primarily statistical. However, when it comes to the war on drugs, it’s elementary to illuminate the bias in law enforcement. Further, it’s fact; there is no white twist that can be applied to these numbers. All of the stats referenced in this post were collected from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program and U.S. Census. To begin, let’s cover the disparity in racial incrimination. In Jay-Z’s narrative released from the New York Times, “The War on Drugs,” he calls attention to the dramatic increase in incarceration rates in under fifty years. “When the war on drugs began in 1971 our prison population was 200 thousand, today it is over 2 million.” But exactly who is this dramatic increase made up of. It is common knowledge today that Blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested for possession or distribution of drugs, despite close to equal rates of use. Statistically speaking, in multiple jurisdiction counties across america, the rate is as high as a 10-1 arrest rate for blacks compared to whites; in the D. C. police district, Blacks are 8.05 times more likely to be arrested than a white person. In 2010, over 700,000 blacks were arrested on drug counts, compared to a measly 200,000 whites, not counting Latinos. As the ever-wise John E. Mulaney said about marijuana legalization, “don’t woo if you’re white, sir, we don’t go to jail for marijuana, it’s always been legal for us.” These are numbers that can’t lie and can’t be hidden, so let’s move on to something more sneaky of our government. Cocaine! Cocaine was a popular drug that swept the nation, becoming an epidemic in the 19th century. In 1986, crack-cocaine, and inexpensive, smokeable form of Cocaine was introduced. Their form of administration was different, and their quality was a bit different, but they are fundamentally the same drug. However, despite being the same chemical drug, it was not until 2010 when Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act into congress, that the disparity between the amount of powder cocaine and crack cocaine required to fulfill criminal charges was reduced to almost equal amounts. What this means is that before Obama, in 2010, people caught with the inexpensive version of the drug were going to jail more often and for more time than people who were using powder cocaine, and which demographic do you think it was? Here’s where my issue is, it just feels like slavery to me. Like, is the war on drugs, or is the war on black people? The statistics have shown us, it isn’t white people that are going to jail throughout this drug war, but why? Why are we trying to incarcerate more blacks than whites? Maybe because federal prisons are built on the backs of free labor? And as long as we can keep black people in jail for SOMETHING, then we can perpetuate some form of black slave labor in America?

#Tabatha