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I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on

I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on drugs", but at the time there were basically no black people here, so it couldn't be linked to race.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over. It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives. The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  I get it, but I would be cautious in making it look like the war on drug was created just/mostly because of racism, because something very similar happened even in countries where that wasn't a reason.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    You are suggesting that to the wrong person. The comment I am replying to is the one that brought up the war on drugs as a racist thing.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
From the Republican horse's mouth: "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 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." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
- danmaz74 7y ago
  Interesting, thanks.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over. It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives. The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.

danmaz74 7y ago
I get it, but I would be cautious in making it look like the war on drug was created just/mostly because of racism, because something very similar happened even in countries where that wasn't a reason.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  You are suggesting that to the wrong person. The comment I am replying to is the one that brought up the war on drugs as a racist thing.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

From the Republican horse's mouth: "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 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." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman

danmaz74 7y ago
Interesting, thanks.