6 ms·

There's a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people's drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man's aspirin). A few rocks of crack

There's a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people's drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man's aspirin). A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it's no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.

rb808 8y ago
I think the difference is more than race. Wealthy professional coke users don't cause a lot of violent crime or robberies.
- bsanr 8y ago
  Don't they? If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, it stands to reason that coke users are, in actuality, causing more crime. If you were to say, "Which drug users commit the most crimes," that's a bit murkier, leaning towards poorer drug users. But it's very hard to argue that the violence at every step of the cocaine trade, particularly in foreign countries, isn't caused by the market upscale coke users create. They're only a step or two removed from that violence, and certainly the impetus for it. If police and policy-makers were serious about curbing drug use and truly thought their methods worked, they'd go after coke and crack users with the same methods and intensity.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, It doesn't; the intensity of the drug war produces the amount of money involved and the street price, as it creates a barrier to entry (reducing competition) and produces supplier costs; it thus increases the minimum sustainable cost and the ability of suppliers to charge above that cost.
    - bsanr 8y ago
      Okay... It seems more chicken or egg, as the market would not have been lucrative and therefore attractive to participants without high potential earnings <i>independent</i> of the costs. But even if we assume causation runs the way you state, the point is that a drug war's intensity and the amount of money wrapped up in it are inextricably linked. If you're buying expensive drugs, then it's highly likely that high-cost operations are involved. In a lawless industry, that means more lawlessness.
      - rb808 8y ago
        OK I get your point. I was saying a neighborhood full of poor crack addicts will be a dangerous place, so requires "aggressive policing", more than a neighborhood full of coke snorting yuppies. However both are supplied by the same violent supply chain that the "war" is supposed to stop.
        bsanr 8y ago
        Just to expand and conclude: if aggressive policing works to stem the drug flow by choking the demand, then such tactics should be used for "coke snorting yuppies" as well as "poor crack addicts." That it isn't suggests that there's another impetus (or, an impetus for not using them on the former). The tactics used in enforcing drug laws are often harsh, if not cruel. In the past, the line between American institutions meting out harsh or soft punishments for transgressions has been the same as the one between white and black. So I'm perfectly comfortable saying that race makes all the difference in this context.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
roenxi 8y ago
Aren't minorities the majority in Baltimore? I don't know what the difference is between Baltimore City and whatever is Baltimore in practice, but the statistics I've seen today [0] suggest that "minorities" are white people. Honest question - how can the criminal justice system in Baltimore be biased against 'black people's drugs' as a minority when they are numerically in the majority? It is an interesting logistical challenge to discriminate against a 60% voting block in a democracy. Is criminal justice enforced by non-city actors? (I'm not an American) [0] planning.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/2a_City%20Profile%20-%203.30.16_0.pdf
- nyolfen 8y ago
  the federal penalties for crack were indeed more severe than ordinary cocaine, and black legislators championed the laws that made it so: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/why-many-black-politicians-backed-the-1994-crime-bill-championed-by-the-clintons.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/why-many-black-p... crack cocaine did incredible damage to urban black communities, and the laws were a reflection of that. obviously the laws went on to do incredible damage in their own right as well.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    Crack didn't do the damage, the illegal black market for crack did most of the damage. Black people, heavily suffering from violence associated with illegal black markets, mistakenly backed mandatory harsh sentencing which devastated their communities even more. Dealing with crack usage as a public health problem would have been far superior. The harshest of the drug war existed prior to the 1994 crime bill as well.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      haven’t encountered many crackheads, eh? crack did plenty of damage itself
      - cromwellian 8y ago
jackfoxy 8y ago
I recall I watched too much CNN in the mid-80s and my recollection is that news network was right out front in promoting crack as a special case drug problem that required special law enforcement.
refurb 8y ago
I think the bias against crack has more to do with the public perception of a crisis versus powdered cocaine. Crack was regarded as a national emergency in the 80’s. That never happened with powdered cocaine beyond the local drug wars in Miami.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Right. And the (white) public perception of such things has SO MUCH to do with the public perception of race and what they assume it means, and, to use a phrase that's become popular, "anti-Black tropes". The white public perception. Which is enough.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Are you saying there were no concerns in the black community about crack? And no requests to “put those dealers in jail?” I doubt that’s true.
    - jrochkind1 8y ago
      No, I'm saying the public perception of "crack vs cocaine" (and crack as a "national emergency" and not cocaine) was significantly influenced by public anti-Black (and anti-poor) biases and perceptions.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Exhibit A: George Bush Sr scaremongering over a bag of crack cocaine on nation wide TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCPX5eQwik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCPX5eQwik). This is quite similar to the scaremongering of terrorism that got us the Patriot Act, and the Iraq invasion, and the Trump/Fox News's current scaremongering of caravans as if they're an invading army. The powers that be of reactionary politics love to use fear to divert attention and scapegoat racial minorities or foreigners in order to avoid having to address real problems and potentially stop protecting their paymasters.
  - 8y ago
pryce 8y ago
The 'drug war' has always been intended to treat black and white users differently (and consequently the drugs they tend to reach for differently, not the other way around as many people assume); in many ways that was the whole point. See this article from Harpers [1]: > I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. > “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, 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.” [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
- wolfgangK 8y ago
  Or maybe there might be an other confounder than skin color ? Maybe SES status of drug addict influences the way they finance their habit You might want to compare the impact of crack in black neighborhoods on violent crime and the impact of opioids in white neighborhoods on violent crime. Assuming the justice/police system is actually concerned about violent crimes, Occam's razor shaves off the racist assumptions pretty nicely. Also cf. Locking up our own https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-o...
  - pge 8y ago
    +1 for Locking up Our Own - really interesting study of how the crack war led to massive incarceration of black youth, using DC as the primary case study
anovikov 8y ago
What about black professionals who did coke? I mean it might be more about class (in the good sense of the word, as in: "classy") rather than race. Good example: go out in the street in Russia at night drunk, unshaven and with dirty clothes, and you'd be beaten and robbed by cops. Do same in a good suit and shaven and you'll be alright.

rb808 8y ago

I think the difference is more than race. Wealthy professional coke users don't cause a lot of violent crime or robberies.

bsanr 8y ago
Don't they? If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, it stands to reason that coke users are, in actuality, causing more crime. If you were to say, "Which drug users commit the most crimes," that's a bit murkier, leaning towards poorer drug users. But it's very hard to argue that the violence at every step of the cocaine trade, particularly in foreign countries, isn't caused by the market upscale coke users create. They're only a step or two removed from that violence, and certainly the impetus for it. If police and policy-makers were serious about curbing drug use and truly thought their methods worked, they'd go after coke and crack users with the same methods and intensity.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > If cocaine is more expensive, and the intensity of a drug war follows the amount of money involved, It doesn't; the intensity of the drug war produces the amount of money involved and the street price, as it creates a barrier to entry (reducing competition) and produces supplier costs; it thus increases the minimum sustainable cost and the ability of suppliers to charge above that cost.
  - bsanr 8y ago
    Okay... It seems more chicken or egg, as the market would not have been lucrative and therefore attractive to participants without high potential earnings <i>independent</i> of the costs. But even if we assume causation runs the way you state, the point is that a drug war's intensity and the amount of money wrapped up in it are inextricably linked. If you're buying expensive drugs, then it's highly likely that high-cost operations are involved. In a lawless industry, that means more lawlessness.
    - rb808 8y ago
      OK I get your point. I was saying a neighborhood full of poor crack addicts will be a dangerous place, so requires "aggressive policing", more than a neighborhood full of coke snorting yuppies. However both are supplied by the same violent supply chain that the "war" is supposed to stop.
      - bsanr 8y ago
        Just to expand and conclude: if aggressive policing works to stem the drug flow by choking the demand, then such tactics should be used for "coke snorting yuppies" as well as "poor crack addicts." That it isn't suggests that there's another impetus (or, an impetus for not using them on the former). The tactics used in enforcing drug laws are often harsh, if not cruel. In the past, the line between American institutions meting out harsh or soft punishments for transgressions has been the same as the one between white and black. So I'm perfectly comfortable saying that race makes all the difference in this context.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

roenxi 8y ago

Aren't minorities the majority in Baltimore? I don't know what the difference is between Baltimore City and whatever is Baltimore in practice, but the statistics I've seen today [0] suggest that "minorities" are white people. Honest question - how can the criminal justice system in Baltimore be biased against 'black people's drugs' as a minority when they are numerically in the majority? It is an interesting logistical challenge to discriminate against a 60% voting block in a democracy. Is criminal justice enforced by non-city actors? (I'm not an American) [0] planning.baltimorecity.gov/sites/default/files/2a_City%20Profile%20-%203.30.16_0.pdf

nyolfen 8y ago
the federal penalties for crack were indeed more severe than ordinary cocaine, and black legislators championed the laws that made it so: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/why-many-black-politicians-backed-the-1994-crime-bill-championed-by-the-clintons.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/why-many-black-p... crack cocaine did incredible damage to urban black communities, and the laws were a reflection of that. obviously the laws went on to do incredible damage in their own right as well.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Crack didn't do the damage, the illegal black market for crack did most of the damage. Black people, heavily suffering from violence associated with illegal black markets, mistakenly backed mandatory harsh sentencing which devastated their communities even more. Dealing with crack usage as a public health problem would have been far superior. The harshest of the drug war existed prior to the 1994 crime bill as well.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    haven’t encountered many crackheads, eh? crack did plenty of damage itself
    - cromwellian 8y ago

jackfoxy 8y ago

I recall I watched too much CNN in the mid-80s and my recollection is that news network was right out front in promoting crack as a special case drug problem that required special law enforcement.

refurb 8y ago

I think the bias against crack has more to do with the public perception of a crisis versus powdered cocaine. Crack was regarded as a national emergency in the 80’s. That never happened with powdered cocaine beyond the local drug wars in Miami.

jrochkind1 8y ago
Right. And the (white) public perception of such things has SO MUCH to do with the public perception of race and what they assume it means, and, to use a phrase that's become popular, "anti-Black tropes". The white public perception. Which is enough.
- refurb 8y ago
  Are you saying there were no concerns in the black community about crack? And no requests to “put those dealers in jail?” I doubt that’s true.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    No, I'm saying the public perception of "crack vs cocaine" (and crack as a "national emergency" and not cocaine) was significantly influenced by public anti-Black (and anti-poor) biases and perceptions.
cromwellian 8y ago
Exhibit A: George Bush Sr scaremongering over a bag of crack cocaine on nation wide TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCPX5eQwik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCPX5eQwik). This is quite similar to the scaremongering of terrorism that got us the Patriot Act, and the Iraq invasion, and the Trump/Fox News's current scaremongering of caravans as if they're an invading army. The powers that be of reactionary politics love to use fear to divert attention and scapegoat racial minorities or foreigners in order to avoid having to address real problems and potentially stop protecting their paymasters.
- 8y ago

pryce 8y ago

The 'drug war' has always been intended to treat black and white users differently (and consequently the drugs they tend to reach for differently, not the other way around as many people assume); in many ways that was the whole point. See this article from Harpers [1]: > I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. > “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, 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.” [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

wolfgangK 8y ago
Or maybe there might be an other confounder than skin color ? Maybe SES status of drug addict influences the way they finance their habit You might want to compare the impact of crack in black neighborhoods on violent crime and the impact of opioids in white neighborhoods on violent crime. Assuming the justice/police system is actually concerned about violent crimes, Occam's razor shaves off the racist assumptions pretty nicely. Also cf. Locking up our own https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-our-own-james-forman-jr.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/books/review-locking-up-o...
- pge 8y ago
  +1 for Locking up Our Own - really interesting study of how the crack war led to massive incarceration of black youth, using DC as the primary case study

anovikov 8y ago

What about black professionals who did coke? I mean it might be more about class (in the good sense of the word, as in: "classy") rather than race. Good example: go out in the street in Russia at night drunk, unshaven and with dirty clothes, and you'd be beaten and robbed by cops. Do same in a good suit and shaven and you'll be alright.