The Ron Paul thread touched on a pretty interesting topic. Some, like FinnAgain feel the laws themselves are not racist; rather, it is the disparate implementation of these laws combined with the realities of being human that give rise to racist effects.
I disagree. The drug war began as a racist and xenophobic reaction and has only continued in that manner. It was the policy itself that targeted racial minorities. Why is marijuana illegal?
We all know Harry Anslinger. Here is his testimony to Congress in 1937:
It appears the war on drugs began targeting minorities and was sold based on appealing to racial fears. I consider this a racist policy. Did this stop in the 1930s? No.
This, of course, led to a 100-1 disparity in crack vs cocaine sentencing.
So what do you think? What would make you think the drug war is itself racist? Or can policy itself not be racist, only the implementation of policy by humans?
What’s that quote? The escalation of the drug war is a continuation of Jim Crow by other means.
But nah, it all boils down to the You Must Obey principle. The rest (widespread profiteering, institutional inertia, job sink, racism, grinding the underclass ) is incidental. If we made all these drugs legal we would have to redirect this gigantic dragon at some other societal ill.
Prohibition was also sold, in part, using racial as well as ethnic fears. Prohibitionist complained about saloon owners buying black votes in exchange for booze, the violence and destruction caused by inebriation, as well as the degradation of white men and women who would associate with blacks. I don’t mean this to be a tangent or anything I just wanted to provide a little background information.
Some historians argue that lynching fell out of vogue because the legal system took over the job of persecuting blacks.
I do think the war on drugs does impact African Americans far more than it does whites.
Being a minority does not give you an uncontrollable urge to do something illegal (besides driving while black I guess).
The rest is just half ass excuses for bad/ill advised behavior.
The civil rights movement when down the shitter IMO when “they” went from “dont even give them an excuse to think they are better than us” to “you whitteys get away with this (immoral/illegal shit) most of the time, why shouldnt we?”
No, it isn’t, and it’s not about “whittey” either. It’s a discussion of the effects of a series of laws. I’ll say the same thing I said in the other thread: anti-drug laws are not racist by themselves. But their implementation and enforcement is, and so far the other posts in this thread show that’s been the case for a long time.
Are they really though? I understand that the laws regarding crack cocaine v. "regular’ cocaine are moving towards some sort of parity. Other than that I see it as more of a class/poverty issue than a racial one.
In countries with mostly homogenous societies the vast majority of those arrest for drug use and possession are the poorer segments of society.
Emphasis mine. It appears this “bad/ill advised behavior” is done by whites at 5 times the rate of blacks, yet blacks are imprisoned at 13 times the rate of whites. What is your explanation?
Well, apparently, DESPITE knowing they are going to get shafted BIG time for doing something uneccessary, counterproductive, and illegal, minorities PERSIST in doing it anyway. Not exactly a ringing endorsment of why I would want to hire one or have one move in as a neighbor.
The laws are 24 years old and the reasons for the discrepancy were documented to be false 23 years ago. There has been “talk” for maybe the last four or five years. That seems to be a pretty wide disparity.
The Plain Dealer ran an investigation in the fall of 2008 that demonstrated that blacks were more frequently sentenced more harshly and provided fewer options for treatment than whites, regardless of economic situations. While the laws may not be racist in intent, the drug war is definitely racist in implementation.
That doesn’t say anything as broad as you’re suggesting. It points out that, for marijuana in specific, many of the arguments which were made are racist. And that’s certainty true; pot was made illegal largely because of racist and xenophobic reasoning.
But that does not mean that it’s kept illegal because of that, or that the WoD, which aims at interdicting the movement of all illegal drugs, is racist.
And that’s simply one example that makes the point. “Moving toward” and “some sort of parity” is not parity. And since there is, currently, no parity, yes, minorities are punished worse and more often for doing the same thing as whites, especially with regard to illegal drugs.
And you’d be incorrect. At best they’re equivalent.
But that’s not in the content of the laws. There’s no provision that skin color adds +5 years to your stay in jail. Crack isn’t legal for whites to smoke either, and whites with crack aren’t treated as if they had coke instead.
Hell, the sentencing guidelines for LSD make crack’s guidelines look rational; the weight of the blotter material is counted as the weight of the LSD itself so you have to pity the idiot who gets caught with a bunch of dosed sugar cubes when the cops show up. This is because the WoD is wacky and irrational, more about maintaining control of independent adult’s recreational activities from a moralistic perspective than keeping any one race (or group of races) down.
I’m sure you’ll find that people who are against pot will react quite unfavorably to a white dude walking down the street smoking a joint, too.