Illegal drugs / legal racism

This open-air marijuana market in Washington Square Park, Manhattan, occupies a grey area of legality / Vermont was once the nation’s biggest producer of the legal opium, the potent ingredient in laudanum, widely used among middle class whites to treat pain, insomnia, and "women's problems."

So many lives have been damaged or lost to US drug policies and laws that were, from their earliest days, grounded in and servants to racism. The 19th century South was obsessed by myths of "Negro cocaine fiends," with "experts” testifying in Congress that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.”

Chinese immigrants, brought to the US West to build the railroads—and often issued a ration of opium to allow them to endure egregious conditions—were demonized as frenzied opium addicts. Despite the unreality of this canard, Chinese immigration was restricted, deportations and killings were rampant.

Continuing disparities in the justice system—epitomized by far lighter sentences for powder cocaine (favored by whites) than for crack (preferred by Blacks)—codified racism under the guise of drug policy.

Today, the majority of people in federal and state prisons for drug offenses are Black or Latinx. Tens of thousands have been deported for simple marijuana possession and in 2019, some 500,000 people were arrested for that crime.

That number is declining now as finally, marijuana is legalized in many states. But still, the 150-year-old drug war itself winds on. It is often said that it has failed, but it is also possible to see the war on drugs as a resounding success in justifying racism and in marginalizing and incarcerating great swathes of the inconvenient poor and people of color.