Parasitic

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Dylan Ratigan: Racism was rebranded ‘the war on drugs’

MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan on Monday highlighted the concerning racial disparities that existed within America’s war against illegal drugs.

“Our big story on this Martin Luther King holiday is the new math of racism in America,” he said. “The greedy bastards have rebranded racism, calling it ‘the war on drugs.’ They’ve made it both acceptable and profitable. While the concerns of racism from the 1950s and 60s have improved in this country, if you look at the numbers the war on drugs has become a racist war.”

He noted that African Americans are ten times more likely than white Americans to be imprisoned for the same drug charges. He also noted there were more African Americans in prison or on probation today than there were slaves in America before the civil war.

Dylan added that American taxpayers spent $74 billion on prisons in 2007, with a growing percentage of that money going to private prisons.

“And yes, publicly traded for profit prison companies exist,” he said. “These companies have massive political and lobbying wings to keep the war on drugs alive, as they also happen to use the very prisoners as cheap labor.”

As a white blogger, I am happy to inform everyone that racism totally doesn’t exist anymore.

Oh wait.

This, this, this. How many times must we say it?

People of color (and in this instance, African Americans specifically) aren’t more likely to use drugs, but their arrest rates are higher based on racism and class disparities. Lower income people using drugs is more visible, and therefore more arrestable, than middle income drug use because the dealing is more public and likely to happen on the streets, whereas people dealing to middle class folks are doing it more privately, so it’s harder for law enforcement to detect. Therefore, since African Americans are statistically much more likely to be urbanized and living in lower income areas than whites, they’ll be dealing with higher arrest rates, though they aren’t necessarily more prone to drug use. And the “War on Drugs” has been, for decades, a politically convenient way for elected officials to say they’re being tough on crime because so many people associate drugs and (violent) crime. However, most people don’t understand that the reasons they’re connected are more complicated than it looks at a glance. So if law enforcement can “clean up” areas and get the drugs “off the streets” there, they look like they’re doing a good job… Even though it’s not effective, as since simply incarcerating users doesn’t actually reduce drug use or crime in any real, tangible way. Seriously, the whole “War on Drugs” is a complete farce.

Then tie those arrests in with arrestees’ later education and career opportunities, as well as the the effects on their families, and we have a PRIME example of structural racism right here.

(Not to mention the fact that the history of drug laws themselves is steeped in racism. Specifically, super racist politics led to the banning of opium, cocaine, and marijuana.)

(And don’t even get me started on the implications of privatizing and capitalizing on the prison system, or the fact that if we ARE going to say that drugs are just evil and we want to minimize drug use, our money would be MUCH more efficiently spent on treatment.)