After the civil rights bill of 1964 and during the waning phase of liberalism, America elected its first truly conservative president since after F.D.R in 1932. Richard Nixon rode into the White House on a wave of growing cynicism fueled by anxieties over a weakening economy, public disillusion with welfare and fears of social upheaval.
Drugs became a symbol of the anti-establishment youth and came to represent the fears many had at the time of a failure in society. Nixon, in a brilliant political maneuver, established what he declared as a “war on drugs” in order to both steer and ease the public’s fears.
“We knew we were lying about the health effects of marijuana. We knew we were lying about the relationship between heroin and crime. But this is what we were doing to win the election. And it worked”
This “war” meant bolstering the presence and budget of federal drug agencies including the DEA. It also consisted of the placement of one of America’s most highly used drug, marijuana, in the category of Schedule One.
Although Nixon’s escalation of anti-drug policies began as a way to play into the public’s fear of radicals, both hippies and blacks, it wasn’t until the 80’s where we would see the “war on drugs” get truly malevolent and racially motivated.
Ronald Reagan not only continued Nixon’s legacy, he escalated it significantly. Thanks to widely publicized anti-drug campaigns such as Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” and the creation of zero-tolerance drug policies the rates of incarceration skyrocketed from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.
It wasn’t just the higher arrest rates that made that “drug war” so damaging it was also its blatantly discriminatory implantation that caused harm to so many in the black community.
According to the NAACP, around 14 million white and 2.6 million African Americans have reported using an illegal drug, a rate of five to one. Yet despite only representing 12% of the U.S. population, blacks account for 38% of those arrested and 59% of those in prison for drug offenses.
A large portion of the blame can be laid on the Reagan administration’s escalation of the “drug war” and their focus on solving inner-city crime through arrests rather than reform. The administration needed to make it seem as though they were combating the growing crime rate in the 80’s and to do so they needed to to increase arrests in urban areas across America.
Urban arrests, however, meant little more than black detainment and to target the African American community mandatory sentencing and harsher penalties for crack-cocaine (the oft considered “black drug”) over cocaine (the “white drug”) were instituted. It is worth noting, however, that despite being known as a “black drug”, crack cocaine use is more than 2/3 white. Yet despite this statistic, as of 2002 more than 80% of those sentenced under federal crack laws were black.
Like the Jim Crow laws before it, the “war on drugs” helped to further strain the already troubled relationship between law enforcement and African Americans. The black community was being targeted and punished unfairly and discriminatory. Although mainly the fault of government policies, the sentencing and detainment of so many African Americans were carried out by the police, an institution supposedly dedicated to justice. Yet the justice carried out was anything but…
Refrences
http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet
https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/paradox/hduke.html
http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war
Race and Justice in Black America 
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