DRUGS AND CRIME
A time line showing that from 1930 to 1970, during the Depression, World
War II, the post war boom, and the 1960s, the rate of incarceration in America
was, on average, 110 per 100,000. The rate of incarceration remained nearly
flat. This time line shows that the rate of incarceration shoots up steadily
after 1970.
For the first seventy years of this century, Jim Crow was in effect.
So what happens in 1970 to this flat, stable crime rate?
Certainly one can see segregation as a form of punishment. When that
form of punishment was taken away, the majority of society unleashed this "racially
neutral phenomenon," the war on drugs of Nixon and Reagan and their
successors. It was because of this that the incarceration rate, for people of
color in particular, exploded.
History of drug and crimes
Most
scholars and journalists who write about the politicization of drugs sometimes
assume it began either in the latter half of the 1960s, when political
candidates at all levels of government became preoccupied with the subject of
street crime, or in the 1980s, when incarceration for drug offenses began to
rise sharply. But understanding the development of the relationship between
social exclusion and drug policy in American history requires an
examination of much earlier concerns about mind-altering substances and the
laws that reflect those concerns.
We can relate the development of the law to social and economic forces quite
independent of the moral imperatives or potential victimizations presumed to
justify criminal sanctions.
Targeting groups
for criminal punishment has often been caused by either the scarcity or the
superfluity of labor.
The first drug
prohibition law, an 1875 San Francisco ordinance prohibiting public opium dens,
was enacted in an atmosphere of hostility directed at Chinese immigrant
laborers no longer needed to build the railroads. Later, when the Depression
made Mexican immigrant workers a drain on the economy, opposition to their
marijuana smoking increased.
As David Musto
reports in his superb history of drug control efforts in the United States,
despite the widespread consumption of morphine and cocaine by native-born
whites during the late nineteenth century there were no drug laws criminalizing
their use. At the same time, we have other statutes that forbade aliens to
possess firearms.
Efforts to
re-enslave blacks at this time were blatant and far-reaching, however, and
Southern blacks became the focus as the source of a cocaine problem. The frenzy
over marijuana that began in the late 1920s included allegations that Mexican
were selling joints to schoolchildren and, because of the effects of the drug,
encouraging homosexuals “to act out their drives openly.”
Contagion
was not the worst form of depravity that racial and ethnic minorities were
thought to have perpetrated on whites as the result of their drug use. Musto argues
that the association of violent crime with cocaine-crazed blacks, which was
often perpetuated in public forums by doctors and other influential citizens,
made the passage of cocaine prohibition laws in the last decade of the
nineteenth century an easy task.
The campaign to pass the Harrison
Narcotics Act in 1914 had race at its core. The predecessor legislation
proposed in 1910 by a Republican Congress had gone nowhere, and the supporters
of the legislation knew that they had to get the support of conservative Southern senators and congressman. It would
be impossible to pass legislation expanding Washington’s power if the folks who
were conservative and hated Washington’s power were going to be opposed. And
so it was put about that cocainized Negroes were responsible for the rape of
white women; that
cocainized Negroes were
responsible for the problems of crime in the South; and that cocainized Negroes
became super human in their strength and police officers had to increase the
caliber of handguns from .32 to .38 in order to stop them - to shoot them when
they are out of control.
Despite
evidence that blacks used cocaine, which was a popular ingredient in tonics and
hay fever remedies, less than whites, crime waves were attributed to blacks
with a cocaine habit.
Hamilton
Wright, often called the father of American narcotic laws, wrote in a 1910
report to the President that “The cocaine vice ... has been a potent incentive
in driving the humbler negroes all over the country to abnormal crimes.” In the
South, images of black drug fiends raping and terrorizing white women evoked
the taboo of interracial sexual relations and led to riots and lynchings.
Singling out particular groups for control
by the criminal justice system is part of a process of designating “dangerous
classes” in society. The centuries old distinction between the deserving
poor and those who are not only poor but unruly, idle, and rebellious
attributes dangerousness as much to condition as it does to behavior. This
distinction was an outcome of social and economic upheavals like urbanization
and industrialization. The source of dangerousness then extends beyond the
immorality of individual deviance to the larger threat to society the
“dangerous classes” present.
In
early nineteenth century America, the redefinition of poverty as a moral
condition that accompanied the transition to capitalism and industrialization
helped discipline workers to a low-wage market economy. It helped to ensure the
supply of cheap labor during a time where poverty signaled personal and moral
failure.
The
unprecedented flow into cities of people displaced from farms by agricultural
mechanization and from far-off lands by poverty added threats of disease and
dissent to those of urban crime. After the Civil War the newly freed blacks
were demonized as both primitive and dangerous, and the perceived immoralities
of the Chinese in the West included prostitution, gambling, and opium. In the
early decades of the twentieth century, the association of blacks and cocaine as
well as that of Mexicans and marijuana brought drug-taking within the confines
of dangers posed by the “criminal element.”
Throughout the 1980s there was a
level of hysteria about drugs in Congress. It was simply taken for granted that
drugs are evil, drugs enslave, drugs are a plague, and that drugs are a scourge
The growth of
the administrative state and a more sophisticated understanding of what
constitutes social harm have not laid the idea of the dangerous classes to
rest. At the turn of the millennium, divisions of race, class, alienage, and
social ideology persist and perpetuate the idea, though often with a new label.
Included in
today’s dangerous classes are racial and ethnic minorities, young people, and
recent immigrants (previously, family dissolution, and unwed mothers). What
constructs them as enemies is a bridge between group identity and an experience
of social threat familiar to many people, such as a neighborhood assault, a
secretive adolescent, or the dramatic depiction of a murder on the nightly
news.
This is where illicit drugs come in. Mediating the
relationship between the designated groups and the larger dangers they signify
is the symbol and the reality of illicit drug use and drug dealing.
Youth who smoke
pot, blacks who staff the retail levels of the drug industry in urban ghettos,
and third-world cocaine suppliers carry the message.
As long as some members of the identifiable group engages
in the threatening conduct, the danger can be presumed to emanate from all in
the class.
I am
suggesting that drug policy reform must go hand-in-hand with broader movements
for structural change. The current “war on drugs” is essentially a rear-guard
action against full equality for racial minorities. In the long run the
most effective challenge to racial oppression in a particular area will be the
empowerment that flows from the general experience of full equality.
Legislative
bodies will continue to pass drug laws that have racially disproportionate
effects as long as so few legislators belong to minorities (African American
and Hispanic).
The hegemony of drug war
discourse has become so powerful that it has undermined scholarly analysis and
independent examination in today’s society. This undermining of judicial
inquiry by a hegemonic drug war discourse is a dangerous phenomenon.
“Hegemony” refers to the
persuasive use of power by dominant groups to maintain authority over
subordinate groups by “winning and shaping consent so that the power of the
dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural.” Hegemony is thus
achieved by framing issues and ideas. In the case of drug war discourse, hegemony
has been achieved by the repeated characterization of drugs and drug users in
strongly negative terms and the framing of anti-drug policies with metaphors of
war, plague, and epidemic. This discourse has usurped moral authority and
silenced oppositional voices.
The federal government has
steadily moved toward defining illicit drug use as a criminal (as opposed to a
medical or social) problem that needs a criminal law solution. The two
consequences are (1) a hegemonic discourse that usurps moral authority, while
presupposing agreement; and, (2) the use of metaphors to frame the issue and
justify drug laws and policy.
President Richard M. Nixon was
the first president to use the war metaphor in describing his domestic policies
on drugs and drug use. The metaphor quickly entered popular discourse and
became a tool used by politicians and policy makers to frame drug abuse, which
some analysts consider to be essentially a medical problem, as a national
crisis manageable only by criminal sanctions.
Thus, drug use became a national
emergency requiring the extreme measures due any war or national crisis.
Supporting and informing these
ever-tightening policies has been a hegemonic discourse that (1) usurps moral
authority while silencing oppositional voices and (2) uses metaphor to channel
ideas.
Lack of facts or evidence does not
curb such all-encompassing statements.
Metaphor is used to support this
hegemonic discourse and frame the issues. The favored metaphors include
war, scourge, and epidemic. Such metaphors stigmatize drug use and drug
users, and create a climate in which informed conversation about the legal and
social aspects of drug use are severely circumscribed.
The most popular rhetoric used in
drug policy discussions today is, of course, the rhetoric of war. This rhetoric
not only gives legitimacy to arguably ineffective policies, but also has the
effect of equating disagreement or dissent with treason. Drug users become
the enemy within, who by the very act of using drugs forfeit their
constitutionally guaranteed rights. The description of government policy as a
war implies a national emergency that warrants extreme measures.
The discourse has become so
pervasive and overwhelming that even dissent becomes channeled to support the
hegemonic framework of the discourse. Rhetoric has been substituted for fact
and evidence and the power of this discourse has caused the courts to abandon
objective balancing in cases involving drugs.
So pervasive is drug war
discourse that it is difficult to find opposing views expressed either from the
bench or in general public discourse. When they are expressed, these
comments must be couched in such a way that they assure the listener and reader
that the judge, whatever his doubts, is willing to follow the current anti-drug
policies.
In addition,
whenever you want to give a view that distances away from the prevailing
discourse, you feel compelled –as I did at the beginning of my lecture- to
explain that you are not in any way endorsing any type of drug use.
Other
statistics
In
the United States, whites account for over 67% of people who have ever used
crack (2.3 million out of 3.4 million total). But less than 4% of the
defendants prosecuted in federal courts for crack- related offenses in 1994
were white. Whites accounted for 51% of crack users in the Los Angeles metro
area, but not a single white has been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in
Los Angeles federal courts since 1986, and only 4% of those prosecuted in state
courts were white.
Only 11% of drug users are black but in state prisons for drug felonies 60% are black and 42% in federal prisons.