Black cocaine%2c White cocaine Essays (358 words) - Drug Control Law

Marlon Josephs Professor Ehtesham-Zadeh Engl. 1101 26 October 2018 Black Cocaine, White Cocaine Few people of Generation X have forgotten the hoke yness of the anti-drug campaigns in the 1980's and 1990s. An egg cooking in a frying pan represents '' the brain on drugs.'' Nancy Regan warned young people everywhere. She encouraged them to '' just say no to drugs.'' The Reagan administration built a global operation to eradicate illegal drug use, dismantle drug trafficking networks, and criminalize people who use drugs. The war on drugs, consciously, has become a war on similar segments of society; minorities, the poor, and the deprived. In the US, black Americans make up only 12 percent of all drug users, but 38 percent of all those arrested for drug-related offenses are black. We are jailed ten times more often than white Americans. What began as a vision of a drug-free society where abstinence would usher in an era of virtue has become an unnecessary and brutal war against disenfranchised people. The phenomenon of mass incarceration and the war on drugs are deeply linked since drug-related crimes have been the leading cause of imprisonment in the United States: between 1993 and 2009, more Americans were arrested for drug crimes than violent ones. The successive anti-drug laws, increasingly punitive, have had a substantial impact on the increase in incarceration, which affects the population differently depending on the color of their skin. Without a clear approach based on rehabilitation, anti-drug policies only perpetuate ethnic inequalities, which contribute to locking up thousands of African-Americans in federal prisons, destroying families and maintaining the spiral of poverty to which entire communities are subjected. Today, with billions of dollars spent, millions jailed, and hundreds of thousands killed, the public has realized this war has failed terrifically. The war on drugs consequences is felt all throughout the country. Entire communities have been left devasted. US prisons are brimming with non-violent drug offenders. Profoundly unequal outcomes across racial groups and the disproportionate war on drug misery suffered by communities of color.