Race and the Drug War

For communities of color, the war on drugs is an inescapable plague -- it's the fear of imprisonment, early morning massive street sweeps, gang task forces and buy-and-bust operations. It's a family member in lockup, dying of HIV or an overdose. It's a war zone, as tragic as any unfolding in the Middle East or Afghanistan.

Since its inception, the drug war has been characterized by institutionalized racism. Its interrelated effects of a booming prison industrial complex, zero tolerance laws, punitive sentencing, increasing HIV rates within U.S. prisons, criminalized youth and mass disenfranchisement have had a devastating impact on communities of color. As people of color struggle on the frontlines of this war, "tough-on-crime" drug legislation is leading the way to a new era of "Jim Crow."

In recent years, however, both community and drug reform activists have begun to fight back. The drug reform movement itself has gained popularity and political momentum, as more and more Americans are voting for drug reform initiatives and a more humane drug policy. And issues of race --which were traditionally pushed to the margins of the drug reform debate by a predominantly white male, libertarian leadership -- are beginning to get more attention within the movement. Some grassroots organizers are now arguing that the drug reform movement should focus on more than just legalization, and begin to address the destructive effects of the drug war on communities of color.

"You can't talk about racism without talking about the war on drugs," Deborah Small, program coordinator with the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), said in a press release for the upcoming "Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs" conference. "Virtually every drug war policy, from racial profiling to prosecutions to length of sentencing, are disproportionately carried out against people of color ... people rarely make the connections."

The connection is made starkly clear by the latest figures released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics: 6.6 million Americans are under some form of correctional supervision (1 in 32 adults); 25 percent of the prison population are nonviolent drug offenders, 74 percent of whom are African American.

The effects of the drug war on people of color is every bit as damning and reprehensible as the Jim Crow laws. And at every point in the legal process -- be it arrests, sentencing, or incarceration -- people of color bear the burden our nation's war on drugs.

Racial Profiling & Tulia

There is no better example of the practice of racial profiling than the case of the small Texas panhandle town of Tulia, where 12 percent of the modest African American population was arrested and prosecuted in 1999 on drug charges, based solely on the word of one undercover cop, who was later exposed as corrupt.

The events in Tulia brought national attention to the larger problem of racial profiling in the drug war. Drug enforcement officials focus the majority of their efforts on street-level dealers -- overwhelmingly people of color -- which are the easiest cases to make, all but ignoring dealers higher up on the supply chain.

The racial effects of this policy are clear. The Texas Narcotics Control Program, for example, does not require the task forces to report the racial breakdown of their cases. But an investigation by the Texas Observer of its internal case logs revealed "an unmistakable tale of disproportionate impact: Row after row and page after page of African American defendants, most of them street-level crack dealers."

But Tulia is hardly an exception. The racial disparity in the pattern of arrests and sentencing nation-wide is equally damning. Whites make up 75 percent of the national population, but only 23 percent of prisoners doing time for drug offenses. But African Americans, on the other hand, only comprise 12.2 percent of the population and 13 percent of drug users, yet comprise 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 59 percent of those convicted for drug offenses.