We’ve been talking a lot lately about the war on drugs. People commonly use this phrase to discuss the U.S. government’s efforts to fight drugs since the 1970s, but apparently, the U.S. government has been fighting different wars on drugs for a long time.
A fascinating article by the Drug Policy Alliance claims that these wars on drugs haven’t been just wars on drugs, but prejudice against different people. It says that the U.S. government enacted laws against opium in the 1870s to target Chinese immigrants. Laws against cocaine in the U.S. South in the early 1900s targeted black men, while anti-marijuana laws in the Southwest and Midwest during the 1910s and 1920s affected Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants.
One wonders if things are really all that different today. In 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that even though white people and black people use marijuana at about the same rates, police arrest several more black people for possessing marijuana. Illinois, for example, arrested around seven times more black people than white people for marijuana possession.
Even if police arrested people at the same rate, are these arrests doing any good? If police arrest a person for possessing drugs, it puts a drug user in jail. But what about the person or people who supplied the drugs to that person? The people who transported the drug? The people who made or cultivated the drug? Arresting people doesn’t seem to stop other people from using, dealing, transporting, or manufacturing drugs. Arresting people for possessing drugs seems to be like shooting the messenger. It’s attacking an easy target, not trying to stop the real source of the danger.
Speaking of danger, “I am the danger,” said the fictional character Walter White in the acclaimed television program Breaking Bad. Mr. White was right. His character had his hand in manufacturing, distributing, and selling crystal meth. He was truly dangerous, unlike the sad people on the program hooked on the drugs he produced. If the U.S. government spent more time on prosecuting and publicizing more people like Walter White instead of his clients, it might have a better chance at winning its wars on drugs.
