Friday, April 1, 2016

FactCheck: is the War on Drugs really a war on black America?

LOS ANGELES - APRIL 21: Police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department Counter Surveillance Team and gang units take into custody two Bloods street gang members for the burglary and theft of two tv screens from a nearby home April 21, 2010 in the 77th Division of Los Angeles, California. Major crime figures for Los Angeles have gone down in the last two years. Los Angeles city financial cutbacks have nearly eliminated overtime payments for the LAPD gang and narcotics units forcing police officers to take unpaid leave days once their overtime ceilings are reached. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)August 1968: American politician Richard Nixon (1913-1994) gives the 'V' for victory sign after receiving the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, Miami, Florida. (Photo by Washington Bureau/Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES - APRIL 15: Police officers with the Los Angeles Police Department's gang unit search four young men in the Jordan Downs Housing Project April 15, 2010 in the South East police division of Los Angeles, California. The housing project is a known street gang neighborhood controlled by the Grape Street Crips, associated with the nationwide Crips gang. Major crime figures for Los Angeles have gone down in the last two years. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
Channel 4 NewsBy Patrick Worrall-March 30, 2016 

“Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial lines, people of color are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for drug law violations than are whites.”Drug Policy Alliance website


An intriguing quote by a former aide to disgraced US President Richard Nixon is making headlines.
Harper’s Magazine reports a 1994 conversation with John Ehrlichman, a key White House policy adviser, in which Ehrlichman claims that the “war on drugs” Nixon declared in 1971 was rooted in racism.
Ehrlichman is quoted as saying: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people.
“You understand what I’m saying? 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 criminalising 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.”
If accurate, the quote appears to confirm what many critics of US drug policy have long alleged – that there is a racial bias built into the way drug crime is handled by the justice system.
But what are the hard facts?
The analysis
Drug use
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s latest national survey of drug use suggests a similar prevalence of drug use among blacks and whites.
Some 12.4 per cent of black people aged 12 or over said they had used illegal drugs in the past month. For white people it was 10.4 per cent:

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