In the aftermath of the killing of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and five Dallas police officers the nation is reeling to make sense of racism and violence in our country.
There are ways in which current events evoke immemorial fears and nightmares about past eras of racial violence in America. But to stop at that comparison prevents an honest examination of now and precludes the possibility of righting our ship. Understanding the honest history of a moment is crucial in reforming it and, from where I sit, you cannot talk about today’s race problem without talking about the history of prohibition and the criminalization of drugs.
Chief among the causes of the systematic targeting of black lives is the war on drugs. It has served as justification for maintaining a police presence in neighborhoods of color and the militarization of neighborhoods, specifically black neighborhoods, across the country.
Prohibition in America dates back to the early 1900’s when California instituted laws prohibiting marihuana, the Spanish word for cannabis, that Mexican immigrants fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution brought with them into the U.S. Outlawing this name specifically ingrained prejudice in the laws, as the important factor in determining legality was who was calling the plant by what name not whether the plant was harmful or not.
The federal government was not far behind. In 1930, Henry Anslinger was appointed to head the newly formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger was the champion of drug prohibition and in 1937 he helped to pass the Marihuana Tax Act, prohibiting the growth or use of the plant without explicit permission from the federal government.
The money that came in support of this prohibition came from special interest groups, namely lumber, petroleum and paper, all of which were interested in suppressing hemp, the most direct competitive threat to each of these markets. There is a strong connection between this particular brand of profiteering and prohibition laws, which will be the focus of next week’s column.
For now, the focus is on how prohibition laws were racialized to ensure that they passed. Anslinger appealed to white voting Americans who were keen on keeping society segregated with the power secured firmly in their hands. He took to the streets and the screen with an orchestrated propaganda campaign saying things like: “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” and “This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
The campaign was successful and served as the driving mentality for subsequent versions of racially targeted prohibition, including the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York and the federal prohibition they foreshadowed.
In 1970 the Nixon administration launched the “War on Drugs” by passing the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) that regulates drugs based on their potential for abuse as well as the medical benefits they may provide. In a swift pivot, Nixon moved the conversation away from racial language toward a new, more politically correct target — the drugs themselves.
In an address to the nation, President Nixon said, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”
But changing the protagonist and the narrative did not change the story or eradicate the racism, it just made them more subtle, pervasive and defensible. As the drug took center stage, new kinds of criminals were invented — the drug pusher worst of all, but the drug user, too. These patriotic defects were to be dealt with harshly. After all, this was war.
The CSA provided the justification to increase police presence in poor neighborhoods where the use of drugs was more visible and this came with a powerful cultural impact on these communities as the presence of an armed militia became the new norm.
The violence of the last week is not new nor is it over. It does not belong to just a couple of cities, to just one race or even to just this country. The war on drugs is among America’s primary justifications for maintaining a military presence in countries around the world.
In 1963, writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said in reference to the bloody integration occurring in the South: “There is no moral distance, which is to say there is no distance, between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham.”
It is our responsibility to act to right the errant history of prohibition and endorse drug policies that restore communities instead of depleting them.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
