I haven’t got a problem coming out the car.
I just want to make sure I’m not handcuffed.
I can’t go anywhere!
Alright, alright, alright! I’m out. I’m out, man.
-I can’t move-- -Get out of the car!
That was a video that Ryan Colaço filmed recently in London
while being stopped and searched in his car.
What the police in this video didn’t know was that when they stopped him,
Ryan was actually driving home from doing an interview
about police racial profiling
because he’s been stopped 22 times.
At times, I can be followed.
And it is interesting to say as a location scout
because that means I’m all over the UK.
It’s just something that sticks in my head all the time,
and again, I still find it very surreal.
And it was literally like, “Not again.”
This can’t keep happening to me, man.
If you’re Black in the UK,
you’re ten times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police
than if you’re white.
In the US, close to 80 percent of people in federal prison
for drug crimes are Black or Latinx.
The war on drugs has fundamentally reshaped the way we live.
It affects everybody's lives,
but it doesn't affect everyone the same.
These laws function very differently for people who look like Ryan
than for people who look like me.
It’s called proactive policing in the UK, and I’ve seen it.
They look, and they immediately stop you.
Between those seconds of them stopping you,
they’re talking to each other and saying,
“What should we say when we see him?
What should we say? What should we say?”
Should we talk about drugs?
You’re searching for drugs?
You don’t really have any reason to, anyway.
I’ve not done anything.
-This car smells of cannabis. -There is a large smell of cannabis.
And what, there’s a large smell of cannabis?
Did you just say there’s a large smell of cannabis
-coming from my vehicle? -Yeah.
Is there something wrong with you? Is there something wrong?
You know, I’ve never smoked anything in my life.
What happened to Ryan is not a bug in the war on drugs,
it’s a feature.
Racism is written into its source code.
These are issues that people of color have reported on tirelessly
from across the world.
And what we’re going to do now is
show how what happened to Ryan in London in 2020
has its roots in what happened in America in the 1880s.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[Racist to the Core]
Treating us like animals, as they call us,
thugs, as they call us.
This notion of implicit bias,
seeing a young Black man and just making an assumption about who he is,
what he’s about,
how likely is he to be involved in criminal activity
simply because of the way he looks.
Hands up, don’t shoot! Hands up, don’t shoot!
Up through the 19th century, drugs we now consider illegal
were widely used across the world, mainly for pain relief.
Then came the American railroads.
In the mid 1800s,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers came to America
to work on the railways.
But when the tracks were complete,
they were seen as a threat to white American workers.
American racists found that an effective way to stir up
anti-Chinese hatred was to demonize the practice of opium smoking.
Lurid race-baiting descriptions of Chinese opium dens
began appearing in California newspapers.
This strategy worked.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act,
the only US law to ever successfully ban immigration
solely on the basis of race.
The context of the way in which US drug policy was developed
was that there was always, for each drug,
a specific racialized link.
So the very first anti-narcotic laws targeted opium and opium use,
but it specifically targeted
the way that Chinese communities used it.
So what was illegal was smoking opium,
not using it in pills,
which were the ways in which white people used it.
Flash forward a couple of decades
and a new drug emerged to capture America’s fevered imagination,
and a fresh racial minority to use it to persecute.
You mean I’ve been taking dope?
Yes, dope...
cocaine.
The kid catcher.
Once enslaved, its victims sink ever deeper
into a quagmire of moral decay.
Haven’t you any pride or decency left?
You used to be sweet and clean.
The drug was cocaine
and the minority, African-Americans.
That’s when you started seeing stories in the paper
talking about “Negro cocaine fiends.”
And the stories were so prevalent that
many local police departments throughout the South
increased the caliber of the bullets that they were using
because they came to believe you needed a bigger bullet
to bring down a Black man who was on cocaine.
We know, in fact, that that’s not true.
It was these campaigns and stories that, in 1914, led to the passing of
the Harrison Narcotics Act,
the first federal attempt at drug prohibition,
and the blueprint for what would eventually become
the global war on drugs.
In the national conversations leading up to
the passing of the Harrison Act,
one medical expert gave this warning.
[“The cocaine n***** sure is hard to kill”]
If you want to understand just how deeply
the origins of the war on drugs are rooted in racist violence,
that text we just saw should make it clear.
But really, the drug war didn’t properly get going
until this guy came along.
This is Harry Anslinger.
In many ways, he’s really the architect of the modern war on drugs.
Anslinger started running the newly founded Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
known as the FBN, in 1930.
The DEA has inherited the history of racism
and misogyny that dominated that agency
throughout the period of Anslinger,
and that they see themselves as being at war
and the people that they are at war with are primarily people of color.
So he was very focused on things like cannabis and heroin
and drugs that could be associated with racial minorities.
Drug prohibition, driven by racial anxieties,
grew and grew in importance in American law enforcement.
This only became more pronounced in the 1960s,
as drug use became associated with counterculture,
the civil rights movement,
and the opposition to the Vietnam War.
It was Nixon who formally declared a war on drugs in 1971.
And this is where federal spending on drug enforcement
begins to really transform into the monster it is today.
But even under Nixon's new war on drugs,
there were still at least some emphasis on drug treatment
and rehabilitation.
For the origins of the militarized, dystopian war on drugs
we know and love in 2020,
we have to wait for the 1980s
and the racist hysteria that surrounded crack cocaine.
Crack wasn’t actually a new drug at all.
It’s simply cocaine that’s been treated
so you can smoke it instead of snort it.
But the way it was treated by the authorities
and the media was entirely different.
This is at the same time that
Hollywood was celebrating cocaine use,
where people walked around
with little silver spoons around their neck
and nobody thought that there was any problem with that.
At the same time, the police were busy going out into Black communities
and sweeping up Black people
for small amounts of of crack cocaine and locking them up.
Before 1986, the average federal sentence
for African-Americans was already 11 percent higher
than for white criminals.
After four years of crack hysteria,
it had rocketed to 49 percent.
This is where the war on drugs really starts to look like a war.
Police began to look like soldiers
and American money started to flood into military-style
drug enforcement operations around the world.
It was also this era of the drug war that saw America begin its mania
for mass incarceration.
The prison population of the United States was flat
in most of the 20th century.
The last 50 years, there’s this era shaped by a commitment to
mass incarceration and excessive punishment.
The prison population goes from 300,000 to 2.3 million,
and this has really redefined the kind of country we are,
the kind of place we inhabit.
I think the greatest tragedy of the era of mass incarceration
has been its impact on people of color.
America has five percent of the world's population,
but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
And there are very clear racial disparities in this.
The Bureau of Justice estimates that if you're a white male in the US,
there’s a 1 in 17 chance you’ll go to jail or prison
at some point in your lifetime.
For Hispanic males, it’s one in six.
For African-Americans, one in three.
Did I win the war on drugs? No.
In fact, I don’t even think I made a dent in the war on drugs.
We’ve incarcerated a whole generation of people,
mostly African-Americans,
but we haven’t solved the drug problem, like we’ve purported to do.
Yes, we’ve put a lot of people in prison.
But most of the people that we put in prison,
or at least a good number of them,
were put there for nonviolent drug arrests.
The system tilts in a direction that is unjust,
and particularly when you think about nonviolent drug offenses.
This is an area where the statistics are so skewed,
you have to question whether we have become
numb to the costs that it has on these communities,
whether we think it’s somehow normal for
Black youth or Latino youth to be going through the system in this way.
It’s not normal.
This continues today.
On the streets... in 2020.
When George Floyd was killed in Minnesota,
this is what one police officer called out while he watched.
So we see over and over again that when police kill someone,
particularly somebody unarmed,
they look for some history of drugs or drug involvement,
as if somehow that justifies their action,
even though, at most, it’s only tangential.
Every community at every socioeconomic level
uses drugs at pretty much the same level.
So the fact that these things keep happening
primarily to Black and Brown people
has nothing to do with the drugs.
It has everything to do with drug law enforcement.
In the UK, police often claim they use stop and search powers
to deal with knife crime.
But in London, over the first seven months of this year,
only about 20 percent of searches were for knives,
while over 65 percent were carried out under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
The burden of this falls massively disproportionately
on people of color.
And it’s not just in street-level policing,
it’s the entire criminal justice system.
People of color are not only more likely to be arrested,
but when they are arrested,
they’re more likely to receive prison sentences,
and for a longer time.
This is really kind of a touchy subject for me.
My father was in prison.
He had life in the feds.
Also, I’m in prison.
Then on top of that, I have sons.
Two of my sons went to prison.
So they followed the same footprints as I did with my father.
Nobody was there for them.
With that being said, we need to be there for our family.
We need to be there for our sons.
I haven't hugged my son for so many years.
I hunger for that day.
I think it’s important for us to remember when we think about
the deaths of Rodney King,
Laquan McDonald,
Terence Crutcher,
Philando Castile,
Trayvon Martin,
Michael Brown
that these people were all in some way caught up in the war on drugs,
and that was used to justify their premature death
at the hands of law enforcement.
In a historical moment where we’re radically reconsidering
how racial politics has shaped the world,
recognizing how the war on drugs
has always been driven by racist policies,
from its origin up until today,
is crucial for every one of us to understand.
And maybe then, we might be able to imagine something better.