At home, fear of crime--particularly drugs--was stimulated by "a variety of factors that have little or nothing to do with the crime itself," the National Criminal Justice Commission concluded. The results have been described by criminologists as "the
American Gulag," "the new American Apartheid," with African Americans now a majority of prisoners for the first time in
U.S. history, imprisoned at well over seven times the rate of whites, completely out of the range of arrest rates, which themselves target blacks far out of proportion to drug use or trafficking.
Abroad, the threats were to be "international terrorism," "Hispanic narcotraffickers," and most serious of all, "rogue states."
Drug use is falling anyway; drug war is fraudulent
The utterly fraudulent war on drugs was undertaken at a time when everyone knew that use of every drug-even coffee-was falling among educated whites, and was staying sort of level among blacks.
The police obviously find it much easier to make an arrest on the streets of a black ghetto than in a white suburb. By now, a very high percentage of incarceration is drug-related, and it mostly targets little guys, somebody who’s caught peddling dope.
The big guys are largely ignored.
Drug-related crimes, usually pretty trivial ones, are mostly what’s filling up the prisons. I haven’t seen many bankers or executives of chemical corporations in prison.
People in the rich suburbs commit plenty of crimes, but they’re not going to prison at anything like the rate of the poor.
Drug War is an excuse for US military intervention abroad
Now when some client state complains that the US isn’t sending it enough money, they no longer say “we need it to stop the Russians,”-rather, “we need it to stop drug trafficking.”
Like the Soviet threat, this enemy provides a good excuse for a US military presence where there’s rebel activity or other unrest.
Source: What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky, p. 82-83
Jan 13, 1991
Target tobacco & alcohol instead of marijuana
At the time the drug war was launched, deaths from tobacco were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren’t the drugs the Bush administration targeted.
It went after illegal drugs, which had caused many fewer deaths-3,500 a year.
The administration also targeted marijuana, which hadn’t caused any known deaths among some 60 million users. In fact, the crackdown exacerbated the drug problem.
Source: What Uncle Sam Really Wants, by Noam Chomsky, p. 83-84
Jan 13, 1991
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