For 40 years, we have been waging a “war on drugs.” Families are being kicked out of housing when many have done nothing wrong. Drug addiction is bad. But the war on drugs is worse. Frances Johnson, a 68-year-old grandmother in Washington, D.C faced eviction simply because her grandson was arrested for possessing a small amount of marijuana.
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Color of Change has initiated an email campaign addressing the incarceration rate of Black men. Click the link to show your support and while you’re at it, get on their email list to stay up to date on their campaigns on our behalf. They are holdin’ it down for real.
The so-called “war on drugs” has created a national disaster: 1 in 9 young Black men in America are now behind bars.1 It’s not because they commit more crime but largely because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of crack cocaine, the kind found in poor Black communities, the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine2, the kind found in White and wealthier communities.
These sentencing laws are destroying communities across the country and have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use and crime.
Do not let it be said that the Bush administration forgot the War on Drugs while waging the War on Terror.
Now Clinton’s behind the curve on another war.
The Supreme Court on Monday said judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to allow some 19,500 federal prison inmates, most of them black, to seek reductions in their crack cocaine sentences.
Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes once ruled the drug trade in Harlem. They came out of retirement to talk business. Lucas hit the ultimate Hollywood jackpot, getting Denzel Washington, no less, to play him in American Gangster.
Wild Roots Media
