Why The War on Drugs Was Really a War on Race

Many have heard the term “The War on Drugs.” For many, this may seem like a bold but necessary response to the drug problem in the United States. After all, drug addiction is a massive problem in America. It tears apart families and is devastating to lives across the nation. In the 1970s, there were many movements that then-President Richard Nixon felt compelled to fight back against. He warned that people who participate in these acts would be apprehended, and spoke frequently about the need to follow American laws and respect them, speaking out primarily about drugs. This started the era of treating drug addiction and drug dependency as a crime issue rather than a health issue. The “War on Drugs” was never meant as a fight against harmful drugs, but as a powerful movement to tear apart and incarcerate black communities after slavery was abolished in the United States. While President Nixon introduced this idea to the American people, the following President, Ronald Reagan, took action on the literal “War on Drugs.”

The history behind the “War on Drugs” is worth diving into. To do this, we must look into the thirteenth amendment of the United States, which states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude”. This seems fair enough, and even quite logical. But, this amendment has a clause, which makes all the difference. This clause states, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Many, including myself, agree that this clause is a loophole that leaves room for increased incarcerated of the people in mass amounts. According to Flores A. Forbes, a formerly incarcerated author, “Our ultimate target is the millions of formerly incarcerated people who are treated like former slaves and, following their emancipation from prison, like second-class citizens. We are collaborating with the civic, private, and public sectors to organize an effort that is not just about social justice, but economic justice. The ‘exception’ clause represents, in essence, an economic detour to a people’s real freedom.” This loophole in the 13th amendment leaves too much room for discrimination and inhumanely cheap labor for imprisoned individuals.

While I agree that those who intentionally cause harm or break just laws of the United States should be reprimanded, this was not the case after the abolishment of slavery in 1865. Before this, black people contributed significantly to the American South’s economy and workforce. When slavery was finally abolished, the economy took a significant loss. In a racist attempt to compensate for this negative effect on the economy, black people in the south were discriminated against and often arrested for minor crimes. They were put in jail and incarcerated for our government to receive free labor to compensate for the Slave labor lost. According to Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, “What we see after the passage of the 13th Amendment is a couple of different things converging. First, the 13th Amendment text allows for involuntary servitude where convicted of a crime. At the same time, ‘black codes’ in the south created new types of offenses, especially attitudinal offenses—not showing proper respect, those types of things.” Black people were arrested for minor crimes, such as loitering or being “disrespectful,” fueling the idea that black people were inherently dangerous or “animal” in a way.

The demonization of the black community was incredibly present in the news, media, and television. They were portrayed as criminals, rapists, and drug addicts. According to racialequitytools.org, “While many aspects of black males’ real lived experience tend to be missing from the collective media portrayal, some aspects are very much present, and are, in fact, exaggerated.” While we may have been subconsciously conditioned to think that black people are inherently more dangerous and more likely to commit crimes than white people, this mindset is what the media wants you to believe. According to Travis L. Dixon, “Perhaps the most-discussed pattern is the association between black males and criminality, particularly in television news — where they are not only likely to appear as criminals, but likely to be shown in ways that make them seem particularly threatening (compared with white criminals, for instance). Blacks are overrepresented as perpetrators of violent crime when news coverage is compared with arrest rates but are underrepresented in the more sympathetic roles of victim, law enforcer.” Thus, this proves the notion that black men are no more susceptible to committing crimes than white men, but we have been programmed to believe the opposite of this.

While this was all going down in the late 1800s and 1900s, when Richard Nixon was elected as President of the United States in 1969, the prison population in the United States began to increase. Richard Nixon was a Republican from California who previously served as Vice President and Senator. He believed in strong conservative values and often spoke up about issues that were “tearing apart” America. The late 60s and early 70s in the United States were famous for many movements, such as Women’s liberation, The Black Panthers, Gay liberation, and The Anti-War movement. President Nixon was quoted as saying, “There can be no progress in America without respect for law.” He often spoke about fighting back against these “dangerous” social movements and vowed to take every action necessary to deplete them. President Nixon stated, “We need total war against the evils that we see in our cities. Federal spending for local law enforcement will double. We must wage what I have called ‘total war’ against public enemy #1 in the United States; the problem of dangerous drugs.” President Nixon coined the term “The War on Drugs,” which started the era of treating drug addiction and drug dependency as a crime issue rather than a health issue. According to Nixon, “America’s #1 public enemy is drug abuse.”

President Nixon felt compelled to fight back against these issues, as he thought they caused crime and drug abuse rates to skyrocket, or at least that was what we were lead to believe. John Ehrlichman, a top advisor to Richard Nixon, was caught on tape saying, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” This statement devalued all of the president’s previous claims and standpoints on this issue, but most of the American public turned a blind eye to this truth that was revealed. During Nixon’s time as president, incarceration rates continued to rise. Hundreds of thousands of people were being sent to jail for simple possession of marijuana, which was a very low-level offense. Most of those sent to prison were black men. The oppressor couldn’t be “slavery,” but it could be “jail,” which was seemingly the same thing.

Black men were ripped from their families and thrown in jail for the same crimes that white men would get a simple slap on the wrist. In 1981, Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, was elected as President of the United States. Voters liked him because of his skilled public speaking and optimistic viewpoints on American politics. His wife, Nancy Reagan, was also popular in the public eye. During President Reagan’s time as president, he made many drastic strides that even the former president Richard Nixon avoided. While President Nixon spoke out most about the metaphorical “War on Drugs,” President Reagan took action on the literal war on drugs, with First Lady Nancy Reagan as the mouthpiece. According to drugpolicy.org, “Richard Nixon officially launched the drug war in 1971, but his war was modest compared to Reagan's war. Reagan's presidency marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law violations increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 by 1997.” (Newman, Par. 2). Nancy Reagan started a drug prevention campaign called'Just Say No.' The advertising campaign had the primary purpose of discouraging children from partaking in and abusing recreational drugs by offering various ways of saying “no.” In her announcement of the “Just Say No” campaign, Nancy Reagan was quoted as saying, “There is a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country, and no one is safe from it. Not you, not me, and certainly not our children. Because this epidemic has their names written on it. Many of you might be thinking, ‘well, drugs don’t concern me,’ but it does concern you, because of the way it tears apart our lives, and because it’s aimed at destroying the brightness in the lives of the sons and daughters of the United States.”

While the “Just Say No” campaign was in full effect, there were also many sketchy things going on behind the scenes. President Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which “was a law of the War on Drugs passed by the U.S. Congress. Among other things, they changed the system of federal supervised release from a rehabilitative system into a penal system. The 1986 Act also prohibited controlled substance analogs. The bill enacted new mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, including marijuana.” This bill targeted black, poverty-ridden communities and sent thousands of people to prison for first-time nonviolent drug offenses. At the same time, the more expensive, powder form of crack, most commonly known as cocaine, had little to no repercussions. Cocaine was seen as more “sophisticated” and was more expensive. Therefore, it was primarily associated with rich white men. When caught with the drug, individuals often received a “slap on the wrist” in comparison to the drug’s rock-form counterpart. This unequal punishment fueled the prison population even more, and by 1990 the United States prison population was over 777,000. Even today, we still see the detrimental effects in our prison system because of the racist “War on Drugs.” The United States has the largest prison population in the world. The United States, commonly referred to as “the land of the free,” makes up 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners, which is the highest rate of incarceration in the world. African Americans are five times more likely to be imprisoned than whites, with 1 out of every three black men are behind bars today. Despite “African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates... the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites,” according to the NAACP (NAACP). While slavery was “abolished” in 1865, the general idea of keeping black men separated from society and being put to work for the profit of white men is still very alive and well today.

Some disagree with the viewpoint that the prison population in the United States is too high. They may contend that “if you can’t do the time, don't do the crime.” To that, I would respond with a sincere sympathy towards their lack of education and general ignorance towards our nation's racist and prejudice history towards people of color and minorities. The “War on Drugs” was a significant failure. It tore thousands of families apart and pushed the narrative that black men are dangerous beings that need to be kept in prison for the safety of our communities. The “War on Drugs” fueled the idea that black people are second class citizens and should “behave” and “work hard” to succeed like the rest of us. What many fail to understand is that white privilege is very real and still prevalent in our society today. While on paper, it may seem that white people have the same equal rights as people of color in our country, the reality is that minorities must fight a more difficult battle to succeed or even make it to the top in our society today. The media has put the idea in our minds ever since slavery was abolished that black people are “dangerous enemies to the public” and should be locked up. To the individuals that have been subconsciously persuaded to believe these false narratives, I plead with you to educate yourself on the grounds in which this country's origin, and the systematically racist and oppressive ways the media and government operate.

Overall, it is clear that the “War on Drugs” was never meant as a fight against harmful drugs, but as a powerful movement to tear apart and incarcerate black communities after slavery was eradicated in the United States. Our criminal justice system, founded on systematically racist ideals and overwhelming prejudice, clearly needs to be completely reformed. In the “land of the free,” we should not make up 25% of the world’s prison population. We need to start treating drug addiction and drug dependency as a health issue rather than a crime issue. By continuing to throw black men in prison over first-time nonviolent drug offenses, we are fueling the idea that black people are “dangerous people” who are a “threat to white communities.” To guarantee a bright future for everyone in our country, regardless of race, we need to change our viewpoint on drug addiction and racism as a whole in the United States.