Hi, I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History!
You know, every nation’s government has to create policies.
Policies are plans that detail what the government wants to achieve.
Sometimes those policies have good outcomes, and sometimes…not so good.
Today we are going to talk about the War on Drugs, a policy initiative that has gone on
for years.
It was designed, ostensibly, to stop drug use and drug dealing across the United States,
but what ended up happening is that it entangled millions of Black people in the criminal legal
systems for generations.
For some people, this was an adverse consequence of a well-intentioned policy, but for others,
this was exactly what they wanted the policy to do.
Don’t believe me?
Well, you might soon.
Let's start the show!
(Intro Music) The official War on Drugs lasted from Richard
Nixon’s Presidency in the early 70s and according to many activists continues to this
day, though it hasn’t been as much of a national obsession since the end of Bill Clinton’s
presidency.
It was an initiative promoted by the federal government, and multiple presidents—of both
political parties—that aimed to stop the use, distribution, and trade of illegal drugs.
But the thing is...a big part of how it did this was by implementing stricter, more severe
prison sentences in an effort to deter drug dealers and users.
But the outcomes of the War on Drugs shows that even if you don't explicitly mention
race in a policy, you still may be making a policy about race - sometimes that’s intentional
and sometimes it’s not.
In order to understand the War on Drugs, we have to talk about the origins of the criminalization
of Black communities.
As we’ve discussed, this has been a consistent theme throughout American history, but debates
on how to address drug use in society began to affect Black communities more directly
in the 1960s.
Even though President Lyndon B. Johnson is best known for passing the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he also declared what was called a “war
on crime” in March of 1965.
The War on Crime was not exactly the same as the War on Drugs, but it put in place many
of the powers that would eventually make the War on Drugs as expansive and as devastating
as it was.
The war on crime produced the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 which authorized the
federal government to take a direct role in militarizing local police.
Then the Safe Streets Act of 1968 invested 400 million dollars in the war on crime and
created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to oversee the funding.
Much of it went to supervise low-income urban communities, even though those communities
weren’t the only places crime and drugs could be found.
But low-income urban communities are where Black Americans often lived.
These policies and research like the Moynihan Report - a report on poverty in Black communities
- served to develop and spread stereotypes about black urban poverty.
They said that the tangle of poverty and drug use was largely the result of individual and
cultural flaws.
The Moynihan report said that “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro
society is the deterioration of the Negro family.
It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”
Moynihan acknowledged racism still played a role, but seemed to think that the real
issue was the structure of Black families…which given all the structural impediments Black
people were facing, just seems…off base.
All of this helped lead to the end of the previous war on poverty and shaped the rationale,
legislation, and policies for the war on crime.
Grassroots organizations like the Black Panther Party caught on to what was going on pretty
quickly and organized to protect Black communities from the police violence that followed from
being overpoliced.
Black Americans were brutally beaten and harassed by police, and many of them lost their lives.
They also realized the importance of political organizing and cultural power during these
times so they created breakfast programs and community schools in an attempt to provide
the resources for themselves that they felt the government wasn’t providing for them.
The War on Drugs really ramped up during the Nixon presidency.
He was the first person to use the term “War on Drugs”, and stated that drug abuse was
“Public Enemy Number One.”
President Nixon increased federal funding for drug control agencies and in 1973, he
established the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the DEA, a special police force targeting
illicit drug use and drug smuggling.
The Nixon Administration also categorized marijuana as a schedule 1 drug, which is the
most restrictive drug category in the United States.
Meaning punishments for being found with that drug would be severe.
During Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, there were some efforts to make drug policy slightly
less punitive, and between 1973 and 1977, 11 states decriminalized marijuana possession.
But the War on Drugs was far from over.
In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan brought back many of the drug possession and distribution
policies of the Nixon Administration.
The First Lady, Nancy Reagan, even started her famous “Just Say No” campaign, which
was intended to address the dangers of drug use.
The Reagan Administration also pushed for smaller government, arguing that the expansion
of social resources, like welfare programs and increased funding for community programming,
contributed to individual flaws and social failings.
During Reagan’s administration is when we see some of the most severe policies related
to drug use in United States history.
They passed harsh penalties at the federal level and encouraged state legislators to
implement them as well.
This led to a massive increase of incarceration for non-violent drug crimes.
And these policies impacted Black and Latinx populations the most.
And it is arguable that the Reagan Administration did intend to make some of their policies
about race.
I mean they created The Welfare Queen stereotype, a harmful caricature of a Black woman who
used welfare, and child rearing, to take money from the government.
While never actually saying the Welfare Queen was Black, Reagan relied on racist language
to promote this idea and he used similar language while promoting the War on Drugs.
In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which also had very harmful implications
for Black and Brown communities.
It created longer prison sentences for individuals who utilized crack cocaine, which was usually
used by Black Americans, and shorter prison sentences for those who used powder cocaine,
which was usually used by white Americans.
For example - if a person had five grams of crack, it would trigger an automatic five-year
sentence.
But a person had to have 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence.
So these War on Drugs policies had a disproportionate impact on communities of color.
Because it wasn’t just Black people using drugs.
A LOT of people were using drugs.
People of all races and backgrounds.
But the Presidential Administrations in the United States disproportionately targeted
and penalized Black and Brown Americans for drug use.
And penalizing them more severely than their white counterparts.
Crack cocaine had a devastating effect on the Black community during this time period.
It created addictions, deaths, and drug-related crimes - hamstringing many vibrant communities
of color.
But it’s important to address /why/ this was happening.
There were huge structural changes in cities, which led to white flight, deindustrialization,
loss of employment, rise of low paying service jobs and urban blight.
Many Black middle-class families also left cities for the suburbs.
The loss of jobs and services in inner cities led to the growth of alternative economies.
It also led to crime and social dislocation.
And it was the combination of all of these social, economic, and political forces that
contributed to the devastation of drugs on Black urban communities.
It wasn’t just individual failings.
During the Clinton Administration, the Violent Crime Control Act allowed for over 9 billion
dollars to be allotted for prison construction in the United States and 8 billion dollars
for 100,000 police officers.
There was also an expansion of the federal death penalty, mandatory minimum sentencing,
and truth-in-sentencing incentives to encourage states to advocate for harsher punishments
without parole.
This is also when the three strikes provision was promoted in the United States.
This meant that a defendant might get a life sentence for almost any crime, no matter how
minor, if they had two prior convictions that were considered a violent offense.
All of these policies created a huge increase in incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses
- going from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997.
Most of those incarcerated folks were Black Americans.
And after all this, the War on Drugs didn’t decrease drug use.
Some people pushed back against criticism of the war on drugs and the subsequent consequences
of mass incarceration by saying that Black Americans /supported/ it, but that sort of
take is rooted in a misremembering of the past.
As the scholars Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver have
written, “Calls for tough sentencing and police protection were paired with calls for
full employment, quality education and drug treatment, and criticism of police brutality….It’s
not just that those demands were ignored completely.
It’s that some elements were elevated and others were diminished…
When blacks ask for /better/ policing, legislators tend to hear /more/ instead.”
Most experts agree that the War on Drugs was a failure.
It didn’t decrease the number of drugs used in many communities.
And it actually had some awful consequences.
It was the catalyst that produced the Carceral State - a term that, in part, describes the
billions of dollars the US government filters into the criminal justice system, which disproportionately
affects people of color.
That money goes to the budgets of police, sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys,
and even prison staff.
Here are some stats on what the War on Drugs actually did:
* One FBI study noted that while blacks represented only 12 percent of all illegal drug users,
they made up 41 percent of all those arrested on cocaine and heroin charges.
* Women, disproportionately Black women, are the fastest-growing incarcerated population
in the U.S. * Since 1970, America’s incarcerated population
has increased by 500 percent - resulting in over 2 million people in jail and prison today.
* Despite being only about 5 percent of the global population, the U.S. contains roughly
20 percent of the world’s prison population.
According to studies, today Black and white people use and sell illicit drugs at similar
rates, but black people are roughly 2.6 times as likely to get arrested for drug crimes.
And I’ve seen this first hand.
I’ve taught in prisons where young men have been locked up for doing the same things some
of my white college classmates did.
The difference is that one group was targeted, and another group wasn’t.
And oftentimes that’s what decides who ends up in prison, and who ends up free.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.