Affirmative Inaction

By Tim Wise, LiP Magazine. Posted September 3, 2002.

The war on drugs never came to my college dorm. Not because of insufficient enemies in sight -- for indeed there were plenty -- but rather because the drug war has rarely ever made its way to the cloistered residences of mostly white, well-off private school co-eds. Too busy busting the black and brown in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, I guess, to make a stop Uptown, where the Tulane freshmen on the 8th floor of Monroe Hall were busy filling up two foot bong chambers with pot smoke, and then inhaling until our eyes rolled back in our heads.

It's not like the drug warriors didn't know we were there. They've seen the studies on college drug use; they know what's going on in the dorms, in the frat houses, and in the cramped college apartments. The campus cops know, the Administration knows, and the city police know too. They know but they don't care; for the white and economically-advantaged, drugs have been essentially decriminalized for a long time.

Back in high school even, weekend parties at the homes of fellow white brethren would be routinely visited by police who had received a noise complaint. Although I find it hard to believe that they could have missed either the underage drinking or the smell of pot smoke hanging in the air, never once did they search anyone, raid the house, or make a bust. They would ask us politely to turn down the music, hop in their cruisers, and head down to the 'hood to arrest some folks who had made the mistake of doing their drugs somewhere other than our party.

Or on the road following the Grateful Dead in 1990 (don't ask): a traveling pharmaceutical warehouse if ever there was one. Everyone knew that the falafel stand was a front; that there was hash in the brownies; that nobody dances like that who isn't dosed out of their mind. But when I slid quietly into the beat-up Chevy in the parking lot to purchase my daily supply of psilocybin (hallucinogenic mushrooms, for those who don't know), I never worried about whether the dealer was a cop. After all, it was the Grateful Dead and the crowd was white; surely there had to be some black folks in Louisville to shake down; maybe a LL Cool J show to bust up.

Oh sure, I know there are some white college kids who have been busted in drug raids; and yes, some have even done time. I know one of these folks myself actually; arrested at a different University than my own for selling acid -- lots of it. And yes he went to prison; and now he's out; and he's the President of a company just five years after his release from the joint. Note to self: if I ever decide to sell drugs, make sure to be rich first, so I can have a nice range of opportunities waiting for me upon my release. I'm already white, so I figure I'm halfway home.

This is all to say that if we're going to understand the implications of the war on drugs, we have to go beyond the standard analysis. It's one thing, after all, to note the costs of this war to people of color -- and many writers have done a marvelous job of that, including Silja Talvi in this issue -- but it's quite another to recognize the flipside of that cost: that for every black or Latino or American Indian casualty in the drug war, there are thousands, or indeed millions of white folks who broke the same laws, did the same drugs, sold the same merchandise, and yet the closest they've been to a prison cell is watching OZ on a flat-screen TV.

Even in the midst of the insanity that is the war on drugs, there is white privilege. Not just class privilege -- for there are plenty of middle class black and brown folks wearing prison blues and plenty of poor and working class whites whose indulgence of narcotics gets ignored -- but race privilege. The kind of privilege that keeps one from being suspected (despite the studies that show whites are equally or more likely to use drugs than blacks and Latinos); keeps us from getting searched (despite the fact that according to the Department of Justice, whites are twice as likely as blacks to have drugs in our cars when we are searched); keeps us from getting arrested; and keeps us from going to jail. At the worst, it's off to rehab: 28 days and out; and then it's back to that two-foot bong; back to poppin' X at the club; back to makin' pipes out of Pepsi cans -- anything to get high. Crazy shit. And everyone knows it and looks the other way.

White privilege: the same privilege that makes Amsterdam a hip, bohemian, cosmopolitan hangout for world travelers looking for a good high; but renders South Central L.A. -- where you can also score some pretty good shit -- a place that white folks are afraid to even look at on a map. Not hip, not cool, and definitely not a tourist destination.

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