The Targeting of a People: War on Drugs in America has caused a Social Regression
- Lorenzo Alexander
- Jul 7, 2016
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 19, 2023
The War on Drugs in America has had a huge effect on the incrimination of those convicted for drug related offenses. A declaration by president Richard Nixon in 1971 very quickly ended up being linked to the crack epidemic of the 1980’s, over-imprisonment, and eventually became a disconnect between minorities and police. The deviance of selling, using and enforcing illegal narcotics completely reflects the conditions of late modernity being that immediately after the social liberation was accomplished by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, social control became a means for America’s framework after 1970.
The War on Drugs was an initiative to try to destroy the drug trade and help those who struggled with a heroin addiction that were coming back from the Vietnam War. Many people questioned that initiative over time when these policies started doing more too hurt minorities than help them. One of Richard Nixon’s top domestic policy advisors John D. Ehlichman was quoted saying this in an interview; “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The interview showed the actual intentions of the government when it came to the War on Drugs. By 1973 300,000 people were being arrested every year as a result to the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act and most of the people who were targets of arrest were African American males. Despite the harsh sentences for drug offenders, it has been found that the War on Drugs hasn’t stopped the use of drugs. Since 1970-2010, the United States spend 1.5 trillion dollars on the cause although drug addiction has stayed at the same rate.
During the Reagan era, the War on Drugs continued to proceed although Nixon was forced out of office due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. The media got involved giving the title of “crack” a smoke able form of cocaine and during the 80’s cities like Los Angeles police implemented a zero-tolerance policy. Another policy that came about was the DARE program which was used by schools to help educate and inform kids about drug use. All of these policies had no research done behind them to validate whether it would be successful or not. The war on drugs was all a political hysteria, before Reagan fully escalated the drug war, 150 of every 100,000 Americans were in prison, now that ratio is 707 for every 100,000 and most of that number is made up by minorities. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation's "number one problem" was just 2-6 percent. But although those percentages are low, the number of those getting incarcerated did not slow down.
Just like in a lot of cases in American history, when things get overexposed there tends to be a connection in the relationship with how fast the popularity of it changes. For example, when news platforms are warning and educating those about domestic terrorism, I’m sure you’ll see an increase of Islamophobia. To a larger extent, the over publicity and outcry over drugs and the crack epidemic led to the popularity of the drug. When it got to the end of the 80’s the number of those reached grew from 2-6 percent to 64 percent. But what proves that the public reaction was just a response to the government’s hysteria was the fall off. Less than a year later that 64 percent dropped back down to less than 10 percent of people who believed that drugs was a problem in the United States. With all these numbers changing so fast and dramatically, the only thing that remained constant was the rate at which minorities were being arrested and incarcerated.
Mass incarceration effects not only an entire race, but also an entire country. No other country has put more people in prison than the United States and now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants and 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. America should look at nations like Portugal who decriminalized the possession of drugs in 2001 and looked more toward rehabilitation. Portugal was able to decrease the rates of drug use overall among 15 to 24 year old population (age range proven to be most at risk for initiating drug use) and also tremendously decreased drug induced death rates.
Me being from a low-income area with a strong population of African Americans, I was exposed to a lot of the evils and hardships that the War on Drugs has done and hasn’t done in black communities. Jail and prison are supposed to be places seen for rehabilitation but most statistics show that a lot of the time the people who go to jail, end up going back. Without the tools to survive in the real world, a lot of felons and criminals look to jail as their home. The tools I refer to is guidance. By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were imprisoned. These fathers not being able to raise their kids already helps lead the youth onto a path a destruction and delinquency. Even in cases where the father comes back into a child’s life, he must begin his path to fatherhood with smaller employment opportunities, a gap of his child’s development and even a life of poverty. It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of all parolees in Los Angeles and San Francisco are homeless. Of course selling drugs is never a smart or moral choice, but to a lot of young men seeing their families struggle, it comes to that. If a child is having to grow up in a household with only one parent, it becomes a lot harder on that child’s early development. There becomes feelings of loneliness, depression and anger towards the world than can impact a child’s life forever. According to CNN, 67 percent of African American children grow up in single parent families while 25 percent of children do in white American families.
With the incarceration rate high and a much need for criminal reform, the best way to combat these issues would be electing the right officials. Unfortunately, in recent studies, it has been concluded that there has been a rise in non-voting felons. Nine states impose lifetime voting bans on convicted felons. On Election Day 2016, 1.4 million voting age black men will be ineligible to cast ballots because of state laws that strip felons of the right to vote.
Another problem notably seen was the disconnect between police and the community. Policies like in New York the stop and frisk laws can account for some of the mistrust for police. Mayor Bloomberg at one point allowed for police to stop, question and search you just based on the judgement of your appearance. This led to a lot of racial profiling until the policy was eventually revoked due to violations of American’s constitutional rights. The relationship that’s supposed to be assumed when dealing with police is comfort. Instead, people rarely look to them to help solve problems or conflicts regarding what’s going on the community due to lack of trust and even fear. When the cops aren’t actively around doing their job and enforcing the law because people live in fear of them, the neighborhood develops its own moral code of ethics. Rules like “no snitching” and gang affiliation begin to grow and more kids get adopted into the illegal street life. Kids dropping out of school early to begin selling drugs in order to try to make a decent living for them and their families was nothing unusual in my neighborhood. There were kids with the potential to do great things like become a doctor, athlete or anything they wanted to be but due to a lack of guidance and understanding on how to obtain those dreams was what cause them to resort to criminal activity so young. I took a poll to see how many people are able to get their hands on illegal narcotics and if so have they ever took part in doing them.
So with hundreds of years of slavery, separate but equal Jim Crow laws and the war on drugs/ mass incarceration, how can low income African American men and other minorities ever obtain an equal opportunity in the United States as compared to a high income white man in America? The deviance of distributing illegal narcotics can be met with an argument questioning how the government handled the issue of drugs in America. As already stated, the War on Drugs initiative was unclear and covered up by the government. There has been no reparations and very little prison reform. As the drug related offenses has decreased, these torn apart homes and communities have now started a new culture in the rise of violent crime. More gangs are being formed and people are becoming more dangerous due to the lack of rehabilitation in the prison system.
http://www.attn.com/stories/1503/war-on-drugs-real-reason http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/06/28/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-minorities-and-the-poor/#614683d534b6 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/
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