War on Drugs

History

In the 1960s the civil rights movement, backed largely by Democratic leaders, resulted in the passing of historic civil rights legislation, eliminating long-standing segregation laws, mainly in the South. However, the rising expectations of Blacks in northern states were largely unmet. Riots took place in many northern cities. An unpopular war in Vietnam, college student protests, and recognition of great poverty in the United States led to more protests and conflict. The Republicans capitalized on this, and Nixon won the 1968 presidential election. While a Democratic president had declared a war on poverty in the mid-1960s, President Nixon declared war on crime and called for law and order. “Law and order” became a catch phrase for stopping protests and cracking down on Black crime and violence. In 1971, Nixon identified drug abuse as “America's public enemy number one.” The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grew dramatically under Nixon, with federal drug enforcement resources climbing from 65 million in 1969 to 719 [Page 880]million in 1975. The various community and social programs of the Democratic Party's “Great Society” in the 1960s gave way to a punitive crime control strategy with drugs as a key element. Although crime control is primarily a state and local matter, the federal government had an established place on drug control through federal laws. As the War on Drugs greatly escalated, President Reagan characterized the poor, particularly Blacks, as lazy, referred to “welfare Cadillac moms,” and identified illegal drugs as public enemy number one. This led to massive funding for both federal and state law enforcement, plus a massive increase in arrests, correctional institutions, and imprisonment based upon new, more severe penalties.

Race

Historically, race and ethnicity have played a central role in drug legislation, with concerns raised about the Chinese and opium, Blacks and cocaine, and Hispanics and marijuana. Racism and stereotypes were crucial in these antidrug campaigns. This was also true during Prohibition, when images of “drunken negroes” in the South and “drunken immigrants” (particularly Irish Catholics) in the North fueled the effort to ban alcohol. However, the War on Drugs has led to even more dramatic racial and ethnic disparities. Over half of federal and state inmates today are minorities. About 30% of all young African American men in the United States are under correctional supervision on any given day. Although the majority of crack users are White, nearly 80% of sentenced crack offenders are Black, and approximately 10% are Hispanic. The Black incarceration rate nearly tripled between 1980 and 2000 and is now over 8 times that for non-Hispanic Whites. Native Americans are also dis-proportionally represented by a figure approximately 10 times that for non-Hispanic Whites.

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