Are Drug Laws Racist?
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A 2001 article by Reuters said the following:
In a petition to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the signatories said the US war on drugs was “not a war on plants and chemicals, but on citizens and other human beings who all too often are members of racial and ethnic minorities.”
Whites use as many drugs as Latinos and African Americans.
But among those incarcerated for drug offenses in the United States, 57 percent are black and 22 percent are Hispanic — partly because the drugs they use, such as “crack” cocaine carry tougher sentences, the letter said.
“The war on drugs is rooted in racial bias,” it charged.
I am very familiar with the line “partly because the drugs they use, such as “crack” cocaine carry tougher sentences.” I read in a new edition of the Text book, Social Problems by D. Stanley Eitzen, Maxine Baca Zinn, and Kelly E. Eitzen Smith, the same line, almost verbatim. This, however, is specious thinking. Search for the words “crack laws” and you will get a litany of sites that read such things as:Crack Cocaine Sentencing Policy: Unjustified and Unreasonable, and Crack laws have been challenged on several levels as “cruel and unusual” and racially biased.
The point is missed. If anything these laws are the polar opposite of racist. Crack was destroying the inner cities in the mid 80’s to mid 90’s.
Between 1984 and 1994, the homicide rate for black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the black community also experienced an increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.” (source: How bad was Crack Cocaine? The Economics of an Illicit Drug Market. Researched by Steven D. Levitt and Kevin M. Murphy )
When lawmakers saw figures like those above they tried to stop it, the only way they could:stricter laws. College professors will attempt to redirect the weak minds of students, but if you take two seconds to ask “why,” you will see the truth. The problem is most people don’t ask “why.” They see larger numbers of minorities in jail for drug offenses and claim racism…if only they took a second to think about why those laws were enacted (think again about the 50% increase in homicides,) they might think “it’s not racist to want people to stop killing each other.”
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