I don't know why this isn't touched on. I'm gonna keep it short. The War On Drugs which was started by Nixon and later ramped up Reagan was used to DESTROY the inner city Black homes. We are talking about planting drugs inside the inner cities. This led to the absence of the Black male in the home. Which made more single parent households. It has increased the prison population of Black males up to 40%. They (CIA and drug agents) even admitted that the government had a hand. So, why hasn't there been any arrests made for crooked officials? Oh I know why 
It's because it's easier to target the community that's easy prey. This has led to crack babies and more dysfunction. Yep, this was a genocide. POINT BLANK.
It's because it's easier to target the community that's easy prey. This has led to crack babies and more dysfunction. Yep, this was a genocide. POINT BLANK.THE DRUG WAR IS THE NEW JIM CROW
The Drug War is the New Jim Crow by Graham Boyd
Published in NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2001
Despite the growing public feeling that the drug war has failed, Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that he wants to escalate it.1 ""I want to renew it,"" he told CNN's Larry King. ""I want to refresh it, relaunch it if you will.""2 And Bush's nominees to fight the drug war have joined in Ashcroft's chorus. John Walters, the new drug czar, and Asa Hutchinson, the choice to head the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), are promising ever more interdiction, incarceration and arrests.
As the nation prepares to careen further down this pernicious path, the drug war's costs urge a different course. Today, thanks in no small part to harsh sentences for drug crimes, especially for low-level nonviolent offenses, almost two million people fill the prisons and jails of the United States.3 The population of this vast American Gulag, if brought together in a territory of its own, would rank as the 35th most populous state, just surpassing Nevada's 1.99 million residents.4 While incarceration rates for non-drug crimes have remained remarkably stable over many decades, the drug war has provided a new, ever increasing supply of prisoners over the past 15 years. With 5% of the world's population, the United States now holds 25% of the world's prisoners, winning it the dubious title of the world's leading jailer. The rate at which we lock up our citizens now surpasses every other country that has ever kept such statistics.
Pervasive racial targeting provides another peculiarly U.S. stamp to the drug war. We are incarcerating African-American men at a rate approximately four times the rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under apartheid.5 Worse still, we have managed to replicate-at least on a statistical level-the shame of chattel slavery in this country: The number of black men in prison (792,000) has already equaled the number of men enslaved in 1820. With the current momentum of the drug war fueling an ever expanding prison-industrial complex, if current trends continue, only 15 years remain before the United States incarcerates as many African-American men as were forced into chattel bondage at slavery's peak, in 1860.
The war on drugs thus offers seamless continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system.6
The drug war's uncanny revisiting of the badges and indicia of slavery began, ironically enough, as a slogan from the Party of Lincoln: a ""war on drugs"" to outdo the Democrats' ""war on poverty."" This rhetorical flourish outlived its use as a verbal sally in partisan skirmishes to have real and sinister effects. A declaration of war, now as at other moments in our national history, allows us to throw out the normal rules of conduct under the imperative of a higher goal assumed to trump all other considerations. Lincoln himself suspended the fundamental right to the Writ of Habeas Corpus, citing the exigencies of the Civil War as rationale for the summary imprisonment of perceived enemies. Closer to our consciousness today, and especially haunting in its racial targeting, is the incarceration of 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. While no one would now defend using ancestral traits as a proxy for disloyalty, in the heat of war the majority of U.S. citizens defended or ignored the concentration camps, complacent in their trust of leaders claiming all means necessary in the paramount goal of national security.
The same logic of urgency and exception, that same projection of national security into the domain of individual freedom, structures the contemporary war on drugs. People all over the United States accept the idea that we need to lock up our fellow citizens in service to a higher goal, this war we are fighting. When George Bush, Sr. entered office in 1989, a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 62% of Americans would be willing to give up a few of the freedoms we have in this country in order to fight the war on drugs.7 They have gotten their wish: a shrunken Bill of Rights, diminished democratic rights and a new Jim Crow. With millions behind bars and the toll mounting every day, the war on drugs has slipped the reins of metaphor to become a literal war.
The caustic effect of punitive drug policies has slowly eroded the cornerstone of U.S. democracy. It is no surprise that the court cases that have most destroyed the Bill of Rights, methodically abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and property rights, have centered on fear of drugs.
The Supreme Court declared an end to the free practice of any religion in a 1988 case entitled Smith v. Oregon, brought on behalf of Native Americans who use peyote for religious purposes. The Court threw out the longstanding rules protecting religious freedom, requiring instead that all religious practices must now yield to laws of general application, even if the law has a decimating effect on the religion. Congress, in response, voted unanimously to restore religious freedoms under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Not to be outdone, the Supreme Court expanded the purview of its decision to encompass all religions in an opinion rejecting a Catholic church's challenge to local zoning laws that threatened its existence. A conflict between Congress and the Supreme Court had outgrown peyote and Native American disputes to threaten every religion.
The war on drugs has similarly decimated the Fourth Amendment, a measure intended to limit the power of law enforcement to search and arrest. Unlike other crimes, drug offenses do not typically have complaining witnesses, people who come forward to request police assistance. The parties are mostly consenting participants who likely wish to hide their drug activity. In order to unearth drug crimes, the police resort to wiretapping, surveillance, peering through private windows, flying over houses, undercover operations, bribery of informants, entrapment by offering to buy or sell drugs, and countless other shady or corrupting police practices. Businesses, schools and government agencies have increasingly required intrusive drug tests. For example, until the ACLU brought suit to stop it, Michigan forced all welfare recipients to submit to urine drug tests regardless of suspicion.8 Schools across the nation have sought to drug-test students, threatening to create a broad doctrine of treating students as second class citizens under the Constitution.9
Property rights, once sacred in the United States, have also been sacrificed to the war on drugs under the strange fiction that property could be ""guilty."" All assets suspected of ""participating"" in a crime can be seized and sold, with the profits flowing to law enforcement budgets. The burden of proof for demonstrating the property's innocence falls upon the rightful owner. Often without even accusing any individual person of a crime, the police confiscate the homes of innocent people rumored to have some relative who uses drugs; they seize the money of unsuspecting bystanders whose only crime is to carry an unusual amount of cash (""only drug dealers do that""); and they have gunned down property owners standing in the way of the quest for attractive assets. Beyond the deeply arbitrary process, asset forfeiture poses a deeper threat. A significant part of drug enforcement efforts has shifted from prosecuting drug crime to seizing property; indeed, by the late 1990s, many drug enforcement agencies were raking in more money than they received from their budgets. Self-financed police need not justify their activities through any regular budgetary process. Under the drug war, police construct a veil of secrecy, freedom from legislative oversight, and latitude to set an agenda accountable to no one-a system that lies very far from presumed democratic institutional practices in the United States.10
Another core tenet of democratic culture, freedom of speech, has also drawn fire in the drug war. California passed its medical marijuana initiative in 1996, exempting from arrest those patients who had a doctor's recommendation for marijuana use. The White House was irate. General Barry McCaffrey, the drug czar at the time, threatened to arrest and revoke the licence of any doctor who recommended marijuana to a patient (or even discussed its benefits). The ACLU went to court defending doctor's freedom of speech and won an injunction protecting doctors' speech.
Yet another free speech and medical marijuana case reached sublime heights of absurdity. The District of Columbia included a voter initiative on medical marijuana in the 1998 election. Congressman Bob Barr passed a law-a provision buried into the budget act that year-that forbade the District of Columbia from counting the duly cast votes. Never before in U.S. history has an election been canceled for fear of its outcome. A federal judge saw beyond the drug war rhetoric and ordered the votes to be counted.11 The initiative had passed by a margin of two-to-one, further demonstrating the chasm between public opinion and elected officials.
Of all the constitutional depredations of the war on drugs, one stands out for its continuing damage to democracy: the disenfranchisement of former felons. The United States is the only democracy in the world to deprive its citizens of the right to vote after they have completed their sentences. Coupled with the unprecedented rate of incarceration, disenfranchisement laws fundamentally restructure political power and entrench the politicians who support and benefit from drug war policies. In the states with the most widespread and lasting loss of voting rights, harsh drug laws find particularly solid political support.
The political impact of felony disenfranchisement laws became starkly evident in the 2000 presidential election. Butterfly ballots and hanging chads were not the only culprits in that controversial election. In Florida even a minor drug offense-low-level, nonviolent drug possession-is counted as a felony. Many drug offenders often never face any time in jail, but they lose their right to vote-forever. The outcome of the Florida vote and of the presidential race turned upon just a few hundred votes. Yet, over 200,000 African-American men (31% of all African-American men in the state) were barred from that election, as they will be from every other election forever. Given the overwhelming support for Vice President Gore among black voters, if ex-felons had been allowed to exercise their rights there would have been no need for a recount and the White House would now have a different occupant. Ironically, the Clinton Administration presided over the massive wave of incarceration that cost Gore this election.
The right to vote did not exist for slaves, even though each slave counted as 3/5 of a person for representational purposes. Today, 13% of all African- American men-1.4 million-are disenfranchised in the United States. More than ten states have disenfranchised over 20% of their male black citizens.12 The seduction of drug war rhetoric must be powerful indeed to have allowed the erosion of a right that was so hard won, presaging a return to de facto racial subjugation, to Jim Crow in the name of drug policy, to a unique form of American apartheid.
The war on drugs subjects the United States to much of the same harm, with much of the same economic and ideological underpinnings, as slavery itself. Just as Jim Crow responded to emancipation by rolling back many of the newly gained rights of African-Americans, the drug war is again replicating the institutions and repressions of the plantation. And like slavery and Jim Crow, the drug war garners appalling levels of support. Each has its own rhetoric, each its own claims to unassailable legitimacy. The brutality of slavery was justified on economic and paternalistic grounds. Jim Crow pretended that separate but equal treatment sufficed, even as blacks faced daily lynchings and every form of overt discrimination. The drug war claims morality and protection of children as its goals, while turning a blind eye to the racial injustice it promotes. And with all three systems of oppression, much of society sits idly by, accepting the rhetoric that later will seem so unbelievably corrupt. We will one day understand that the war on drugs was a war on people and communities.
And there are many more racial dimensions of the drug war. African-Americans do not use drugs more than white people; whites and blacks use drugs at almost exactly the same rates.13 And since there are five times as many whites as blacks in the United States, it follows that the overwhelming majority of drug users are white. Nevertheless, African-Americans are admitted to state prisons at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than whites, a disparity driven largely by the grossly racial targeting of drug laws. In some states, even those outside the Old Confederacy, blacks make up 90% of drug prisoners and are up to 57 times more likely than whites to be incarcerated for drug crimes.
The Drug War is the New Jim Crow
