The war on drugs: a racially biased project

Canalete, Rio Grande, RS, (Foto: ilustração)

Por Pedro Moreira 

 In a speech for the nation, on June 17, 1971, the U.S. President Robert Nixon (1913-1994) firmly said: "Public number one enemy in the United States is drug abuse." The occasion for this statement was the creation of a project to fight drugs production, distribution, and consumption. The international press named it "War on Drugs", and, in fact, received that speech as a serious war declaration. Nixon's speech continues: "In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.” Nearly 60% of the incarcerated population is formed by Blacks and Latinos, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Prisoners in 2014 (2015, p. 14). What were the consequences to this military approach to drugs? The U.S. drug policies have negatively affected the black community more than the other ones, and the high number of black men incarcerated is an evidence of it.

As a consequence of Nixon’s drug policy, the racial disparities have increased in the legal system. Also, it is important to mention that the most incarceration related to drugs are due to marjuana possession. According to the Report: war on drugs in black and white (2013), “marijuana possession arrests account for nearly half (46%) of all drug arrests” (p. 4). Even though whites and blacks consume marijuana at similar rates, blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites. It occurs, also, due to systemic reasons (structural racism). The same Report (2013) informs that a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white. In this sense, the increasing incarceration of people that consumed, produced or distributed drugs as cannabis affected more black people than the white one. It seems to be a clear racialization of the drug law. Thus, it is possible to affirm that the war on drugs has been used as a vehicle for police to target communities of color. The philosopher Angela Davis advocates for a prison-free America because of the racist implications of mass incarceration. According to the author (2003), when one thinks of prisons he/she does not consider the possibility of being arrested, in contrast, the possibility is reserved to the “evildoers'' or “criminals”, nevertheless these stigmas are, in the American collective imaginary, possessed by people of color.

Also, the racial disparity deepened by the drug policy led to inequality in duration of judicial sentences. Besides the difference in the rates of imprisonment of black people and white people, there are differences in the amount of “doing time” completed by whites and blacks. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission (2017), “Black male drug offenders received sentences that were 9.2 percent longer than White male drug offenders”. Thus, the war on drugs, specifically against marijuana, made it possible for the judges to enforce different times in prison based on race. This reality is connected to the criminalization of the young black men, it is, the association between blacks with criminal activities.  This prejudice is one of the most critical consequences of the racism, and the mass incarceration that created a product highly explored by the media of black bodies being arrested一there are television programs like Cops, that streams police actions. That conception of blacks as criminals has allowed many attacks from police against black innocent men (see the case of Georg Floyd). If the cardinality is naturally connected to black people 一as the racist thinking says一, then it is possible for the government to assume that there is a connection between criminality and drug abuse. According to The Senate Task Force for a Drug-Free America, “the connection between crime and drugs is well-proven” (1990, p. 19). It would implicate the idea that where there is drug, there is, necessarily, criminal activities. For the association between blacks with criminality, as said by Angela Davis, the results of a war on drugs was the mass incarceration of black people. This thinking reveals the racist ground for the American drugs policies, and legal system.

It is evident that the United States has been incarcerating more black men than other countries. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (2011), the incarceration rate for black men  was 4,347 people per 100,000, in 2010. Although the North American country does not have a legalized racial segregation anymore (the Jim Crow laws ended up in 1968, with the Civil Rights Movement), their percentage of black men inprisoned are higher than the South Africa's in the era of the segregation law. This contradiction is well-elucidated when it comes up to the statistics. Willian Worger (as cited in Kristof (2014) states that, in 1984, the incarceration rate in the African country was 440 persons imprisoned per 100,000 population, and Blacks were about 94% of those incarcerated people. The data are from Willian Worger's research of that period, he is a professor of History at the University of California.. This comparison helps to understand the disproportionality between the official law and its application when it comes to the drug policies. These numbers allow one to think of a political and racial biased war on people of color, more precisely.

Alongside the perverse consequences of that policy, the war on drugs is an inefficient and very expensive program. The Report: war on marijuana in black and white (2013) points out: “States spent over $3.61 billion combined enforcing marijuana possession laws in 2010.” This shows that there is a huge amount of money dispensed in the program against drug consumption and production, instead of being invested in educational programs, for instance. In other words, many resources and professionals are allocated in such a military industry which might produce a reduction in incentives in the areas of prevention and education, that is, in the social assistance and human rights programs. Betsy Pearl (2018) stimulates that “Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion”. Counting billions of dollars, the war on drugs has spent money from the public coffers. However, all that investment did not result in less drug abuse, or more public safety. In contrast, although the billion dollars were supposed to be used in public security, the increasing police violence against certain social groups, and the mass incarceration of them reveal an absurd reality. 

Indeed, the black people have been injured by the American policies on drugs, even then it is evident that they contribute to the maintenance of the nation, by working, studying, and voting, as anyone else. Although in the slavery era black people had no civil rights acquanted by the law, nowadays, they have suffered a harmful distancing from the letter of the law. And, it allows the State to damage black lives, by putting them into prison. The official power is keeping the worst heritages for the black. For example, according to Alexander (2010), “More black men are imprisoned today than at any other moment in our nation’s history” (p. 175).  That provides a critical comparison to be made: the U.S. are repeating the same levels of human cruelty and freedom deprivation as in the past. In fact, according to Davis (2003),  “it was [easy] to produce a massive system of incarceration with the implicit consent of the public'' (p. 14). It occurs under everyone's noses because people were convinced, by many public campaigns, that giving up some human rights is the best path to achieve the so-called national security. In this case, they do not find it problematic to lose some of their civil rights, such as the right to move without being stopped by a policeman without fair reasons, for instance. However, the white community is being freed to be subordinated to police brutality. Actually, as this essay has stated and argued until now, the major target of the structural apparatus of repression are the black an latino people. 

Although the American Constitution forecasts universal equality between all men, children, and women, regardless of race, the american system is not complying with that point. For example, the 13º amendment makes it unconstitutional for one to be held a slave. Yet, “except as a punishment for crime” (U.S. Const.  amend.  XII). In this sense, a person cannot be enslaved, unless he/she has committed a crime. So, in order to allow a “modern slavery”, historically, the institutions have seen black people as criminals. It is known the criminalization of the black body was one strategy to guarantee the Southern economic balance. Laws were written, as the Jim Crow segregation rules, to relegate black people to a permanente second-class citizenship status. And, their force of work was used to rebuild the economy of the South, after the American Civil War. It is not a coincidence that, right after the end of that war, as blacks were made free by the Constitution, a first mass incarceration “boom” took place. In addition to that, the freedom of speech, guaranteed by the American Constitution, was  neglected by some war-on-drugs exceptions. As Boyd (2001) claims, in the year that California passed its medical marijuana initiative, in 1996, authorities threatened to arrest and revoke the professional licence of a doctor who recommended the use of marijuanna to someone. The discussion of its benefits in some medical treatments was strongly discouraged by General Barry Mc Caffrey, a drug-on-war head at The White House. 

The war against drugs reveals a misunderstanding of what constitutes the drug issue. Clearly, it is a health department question. By criminalizing it, or conducting it in the military field, governors only achieved the main interest: to fight against poor color communities that were related to drug abuse, due to the social and historical conditions of social resources (access to school, work, and justice). Because of the racist implications of the war on drugs, many black men and women were separated from their families. And, as it is to be supposed, many of them were the head of their families. Angela Davis (2003) argues that “many people in black, Latino, and Native American communities now have a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education” (p. 10). Their subtraction from the familiar context, black and latino children were once again harmed by the official policies. The incarceration did not only injure black people in the economic and social ways, but, primarily, in the personal field, by relegated them to a life of punishment, not to a path of social reintering.

The most visible accomplishment of war on drugs is the racialization of justice. That is, the deepening of the racially biased judicial convictions and sentences. Obviously, it brings several problems for the supposed democratic regime because it violates fundamental human rights. Those rights are an international commitment, and, by violating it, the U.S. infarcts the world community standards. One of these consequences is the exportation of the war-on-drugs strategies to other countries. By the influence of the U.S. political and economical leadership in the international scenery, many countries, including Brazil, have adopted the American rhetoric in the fight against drugs. According to information from Infopen (2019) of Depen (National Prison Department), Brazil has 773,151 prisoners 一 an increase of 8,6% in comparison to the year of 2018. Thus, the American legalization of military strategies against drugs, disguised as a legitimate war against an “universal enemy”, have become the norm, nor the exception; it is, the increasing mass incarceration of black people, due to drug offenses, is now the pattern seen as inevitable, not only in America. The war on drugs may be seen as a racist program that has aflicted many black people directly, providing such a great disparity in the judicial sentences between whites and blacks. 

References

Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. London / New York. The New Press.

American Civil Liberties Union. (2013). The war on marijuana in black and white: billions of dollars wasted on racially biased arrests. (First digital edition) https://www.aclu.org/report/report-war-marijuana-black-and-white. 

Bernards, N. (Editor). (1990). War on drugs: opposing viewpoints. Greenhaven Press.

Boyd, G. (2001) The drug war is the new Jim Crow. https://www.aclu.org/other/drug-war-new-jim-crow

Carson, E. A. (2015). Prisoners in 2014. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf

Davis, A. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

Departamento Penitenciário Nacional. (2019). Levantamento nacional de informações penitenciárias. Ministério da Justiça (Brasil). https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiMmU4ODAwNTAtY2IyMS00OWJiLWE3ZTgtZGNjY2ZhNTYzZDliIiwidCI6ImViMDkwNDIwLTQ0NGMtNDNmNy05MWYyLTRiOGRhNmJmZThlMSJ9 

Guerino, P. et al. (2011). Prisoners in 2010. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p10.pdf

Kristof, N. (2014). U.S. imprisons blacks at rates higher than South Africa during apartheid. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/11/nicholas-kristof/kristof-us-imprisons-blacks-rates-higher-south-afr/

Pearl, B. (2018). Ending the war on drugs: by the numbers. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2018/06/27/452819/ending-war-drugs-numbers/

United States Sentencing Commission. (2017). Demographic differences in sentencing. https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-differences-sentencing