9 Things To Know About The ‘War On Drugs’

Aaron Bandler, Daily Wire

“They got started out as a kid smoking…what we call recreational marijuana, and then from there, that led into prescriptions taken out of their parents’ or grandparents, medicine cabinet and become a cool kid, and before you know it, it turned in to where they just were hooked,” Manchin said.

Manchin was mocked for using the “war on drug” phrase since, of course, there has been a war on drugs since the 1970s, and it has been roundly criticized.

Here are nine things to know about the war on drugs.

1. It is not a scheme to lock up blacks. Some critics of the drug war have argued that it is nothing more than an excuse to send African Americans to prison, citing the disproportionate rate at which blacks are incarcerated for drug crimes. They also point to a quote from a former aide to President Richard Nixon, who started the war on drugs.

“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,” said John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former domestic policy chief. “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.”

The above quote has been disputed by Ehrlichman’s family, and it also doesn’t fit Nixon’s presidency. It’s also hard to argue that the drug war is racist when many black leaders supported laws subjecting crack cocaine crimes to stricter sentences — including the Congressional Black Caucus–since crack cocaine was tearing apart the black community.

“The absence of any charge by black members of Congress that the crack–powder differential was racially unfair speaks volumes; after all, several of these representatives had long histories of distinguished opposition to any public policy that smacked of racial injustice,” wrote Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. “That several of these representatives demanded a crackdown on crack is also significant. It suggests that the initiative for what became the crack–powder distinction originated to some extent within the ranks of African-American congressional officials.”

In a piece for National Review, Roger Clegg notes that studies suggest the reason why blacks are disproportionately incarcerated for drug crimes is because they disproportionately commit drug crimes. “If a disproportionate number of those arrested for drug crimes are black, it is because a disproportionate number of drug criminals are black,” he writes. “It is not true that all groups use illegal drugs at the same rate, and in any event it is not for using drugs but for selling them that people are typically sent to prison.”

2. The drug war is not clogging up prisons. One of the criticisms of the war on drugs is that it is putting a strain on prison resources due to supposed over-incarceration. Heather Mac Donald noted in 2015 congressional testimony that the rise of prison populations has been the result of violent crime, not drug crime, and most of those who do reside in prison for drug crimes are the result of trafficking rather than simply possession:

Today, only 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time for drug offenses—nearly all of them for trafficking. Drug possession accounts for only 3.6 percent of state prisoners. Drug offenders make up a larger portion of the federal prison caseload—about 50 percent—but only 13 percent of the nation’s prisoners are under federal control. In 2014, less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court were convicted of simple drug possession; the rest were convicted of trafficking.

In other words, ending the drug war would do very little to reduce prison crowding, only a decrease in violent crime would do that.

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