Our Drug Laws Have Always Been Racist: America's Ugly History of Prohibition as a Tool to Oppress

[jtuck004]

Minorities

A short history of our racist drug war.
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In the United States, starting in the mid-19th century, this became a strategy for marginalizing immigrants. This included the Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived on American shores during the Potato Famine in the 1840s, then German immigrants, followed soon after by Chinese immigrants at the time of the Gold Rush in the late 1840s and the transcontinental railroad in early 1860s. The tone for contemporary enforcement of drug laws was set over a century ago with demonization of Irish whiskey drinkers, German beer drinkers and Chinese opium smokers.

The first opium laws were directed at the Chinese. The alcohol laws were propelled by anti-Irish and anti-German immigrant sentiment. After the end of slavery, laws against cocaine were directed toward African Americans. In 1903, cocaine was taken out of Coca-Cola because of fear of sexual arousal by cocaine in black men (but not white men). With the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the U.S saw an influx of poor Mexicans into the Southwest who brought marijuana with them. Soon anti-marijuana laws passed in many places, first in western states and then eastern states.
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In testimony to Congress in 1937, Anslinger summed his racist notions with this broadside: “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. The Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
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Ehrlichman continued:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
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http://www.alternet.org/drugs/our-drug-laws-have-always-been-racist-americas-ugly-history-prohibition-tool-oppress

Little has changed, though Chuck Rosenberg is the latest racist bureaucrat to continue these policies. It's like having the head of ISIS working in our government, little difference.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. I've noticed calls to ban other things also tend to rely on racial/ethnic/gender biases.