The War on Drugs was a rhetorical war on people of color due to a history of systemic racism. After the Civil War ended African Americans were arrested in mass for extremely minor crimes, such as loitering, due to a loophole in the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment granted freedom to everyone except criminals, so when slavery became illegal they used this to essentially incriminate African Americans, again, forcing them to provide labor to rebuild the South. This led to a rapid increase in incarceration for black people.
When open terrorism became illegal people switched to legal racism such as implementing segregation and Jim Crow laws which demoted African Americans to a permanent second-class status. During the Nixon administration, the idea of Law and Order was emphasized which led to an era of mass incarceration. During this time hundreds of thousands of people were sent to prison for crimes such as possession of marijuana, which is such a low-level drug. However, when you looked at the statistics of people arrested during this time, it was clear black people were targeted. A Nixon official even admitted that the “War on Drugs” was truly just about putting black people in jail. During this time the biggest enemies of Nixon’s campaign were the antiwar left and black people, so they used the War on Drugs to get the public to associate hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin. Then, they incriminated those drugs heavily and therefore disrupted those communities. They used the idea of a War on Drugs to deliberately target African Americans.
Cocaine is perceived as a drug for sophisticated, wealthy people and there is an idea that only ‘pretty people’ do cocaine. Drug dealers realized they could easily convert powder cocaine to a solid that could be smoked, known as crack. Crack is essentially the same substance as powder cocaine, the only difference between the two is an additional proton. However, the sentence for crack was significantly heavier than for cocaine as it was more inexpensive and more popular in poorer African-American communities. They made the minimum sentence be 5 years without parole for possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine or 500 grams of cocaine powder.
(Word Count: 367)