Beyond all the rhetoric (AKA hot air), the facts tell the story.
Here's an excellent article on the matter from a highly reliable source.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3042936.htmlHoover Digest 2004 No. 2
2004 No. 2
THE DRUG WAR:
The American Junkie
Joseph McNamara
Why the drug war has amounted to one long and costly mistake.
By Hoover fellow Joseph D. McNamara.
The average white American’s image of drug users is that of dangerous young people of color—males who will rob them to obtain money to buy drugs or youthful black female prostitutes spreading disease and delivering crack babies as a result of enslavement to drugs. These cherished misconceptions are the enduring and erroneous foundations of the ill-conceived “war on drugs.”
Actually, the overwhelming majority of American drug users have historically been Caucasians. The fact that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at vastly disproportionate rates for drug offenses contributes to false stereotypes and permits the continuation of one of the most irrational public policies in the history of the United States. Blacks make up approximately 15 percent of America’s drug users, but more than one-third of adults arrested for drug violations are black. Similar distortions in drug arrests and incarcerations apply to Hispanics.
Relatively few of America’s estimated 90 million illegal drug users go on to commit non-drug crimes. In fact, the majority of police I hired during my 18 years as police chief in two of the largest cities in America admitted prior use of illegal drugs. They did not commit other crimes and grew out of their early drug use. As one candidate put it to me, “Of course, I smoked pot. I was in the Army. I went to college.”
And I can remember, some 40 years ago, as a young policeman in Harlem, gathering with my colleagues in a tavern after work, listening to them complain vigorously about the junkies who made our work so difficult. During our discussions, we drank prodigious amounts of beer without the slightest awareness that we were consuming a drug that could be as lethal as heroin. Indeed, far more of my fellow police died in driving accidents after these drinking sessions than were slain in the line of duty.
Even today, 90 years after the federal government first outlawed narcotics with the Harrison Narcotic Act, December 17, 1914, public and police attitudes toward the dangerousness of drugs are shaped by ignorance of their impact and by mistaken prejudices regarding their users. Stereotypes created more than a century ago by nativist American elites targeting blacks, immigrant Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish populations and their “strange” religions, languages, and cultures led to anti-drug legislation.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who held many of the same racial, ethnic, and class biases, greatly encouraged the anti-drug groups. Roosevelt, who was not an alcohol prohibitionist, was motivated by an anti-opium attitude, as well as by a desire to develop America into one of the great world powers. He hoped that stopping England, France, Holland, and Spain from compelling the unwilling China to accept highly profitable (for the exporting nations) opium shipments would win Chinese goodwill and allow Americans to compete with the colonial trading nations in opening the vast China market to other goods.
Despite revelations from Rush Limbaugh, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush (when questioned about prior drug use he didn’t deny it, simply said that he did young and foolish things), our government continues to paint users of certain chemicals as evil and immoral, when in fact they often are successful people from across the political spectrum. Luckily for most of them, they didn’t get busted under today’s draconian laws and were able to mature into careers that most of us can admire.
The impetus for the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 came from the lobbying efforts of American missionary societies in China. These groups enlisted the aid of other alcohol temperance organizations and religious groups in the United States to get their version of sin written into the penal code. The anti-drug arguments advocating the Harrison Act were replete with statements claiming that it was the duty of whites to save the inferior races. Those moving to criminalize drugs made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and “Chinamen” seducing white women with drugs. This racist nonsense would be laughed at today, but it was quite influential in the passage of anti-drug legislation.
It is one of the ironies of history that national black political leadership today paradoxically seems to accept the racist implications of white southern politicians in 1914: that Negroes were especially susceptible to the negative impact of drug use. With the notable exception of Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, who called for the medicalization of drug use, many African-American politicians describe decriminalization of drugs as racial genocide, thus subliminally reinforcing fears that people of color are more susceptible to drug use and the harm it can cause.
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