So You Think You’re Anti-Racist But You Support The War On Drugs? You’re Kidding Yourself.
2020 has thrust the urgent need for anti-racism into mainstream awareness. Let’s be ideologically consistent.
Since the pandemic began, the West has been in turmoil. First, confusion about the severity of Covid-19 divided communities and families, and disagreements about its consequences still rage despite overwhelming evidence that even among the “recovered,” the virus isn’t good.
In the United States, interpretations of Covid — that is, its seriousness and the extent to which we should worry about its impact — are split down partisan lines. Unsurprisingly, Democrats have capitalized on the pandemic to point out that President Trump, who has long been a source of mockery among world leaders, has displayed bumbling incompetence in the face of adversity.
Slightly less predictable have been the conspiracy theories uniting the far-right and “wellness” communities, or the surge in global support for anti-Black racism initiatives triggered in May by the murder of George Floyd. Since then, activists have gained unprecedented momentum in their efforts to defund (or in some cases, abolish) the police, with those who have long existed in Liberal-centrist or “apolitical” bubbles less able than ever to overlook the (valid) rallying cry, #ACAB.
Concurrently, hate crimes against Chinese and Chinese-presenting people have risen sharply, so much so that “outbreaks” of xenophobia have been referred to by some as a concurrent, equally nefarious problem.
As hostilities have grown, anti-anti-fascists (er…) have adopted a (comically misguided) interest in socialism, while true socialists — who are least likely to be pro-cop — have been called terrorists and are now being abducted (and murdered) by — you guessed it — the cops.
Also, the world is also burning.
It’s a mess, alright, and individually, these events may seem anomalous. Together, though, they reflect what many already knew: late-stage capitalism is deadly, and the notion that “we’re all in this together” (whether that be Covid or life itself), though charming, is bullshit.
As the academics say, “there’s a lot to unpack here,” and as tempting as it is to just throw out the suitcase, we don’t have that luxury.
Others far more qualified than I have already written about why 2020 isn’t just a lousy year — an outlier we can anesthetize ourselves through via drinking to oblivion and a slew of bad memes — so I won’t repeat them here. Personally, I have watched the last nine months unfold with a combination of mounting horror, cynicism, and hope. And, as one whose daily life is inextricably intertwined with the war on drugs, I have also engaged in meaning-making through a lens of prohibition.
With that in mind, let’s explore how the drug war has shaped some of this year’s biggest talking points, with a particular focus on race.
First, I’m fully aware that drug policy did not incite a global pandemic. I’m not about to make that leap. That said, immediate increases in xenophobia associated with the realization among westerners that Covid (or, in Trump’s words, “the Chinese virus”) is real is absolutely tied to it. How? Read on.
A sizeable group of Chinese men (and some women) came to the U.S. at the onset of the California gold rush in 1849, and they arrived in relatively stable numbers for the next thirty-plus years. During this time, they were exploited for their labour, and they contended with various forms of racism. Concurrently, foreign intrusion in China by the Brits (and later, the French) provoked two opium wars, both of which concluded with the Chinese acquiescing to the sale of British-imported opium on home soil (and with it, the promotion of Christianity). Opium was thus a salient commodity in the U.S. by the time virulent anti-Chinese public attitudes and pressure from labour unions prompted the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.
Within this environment, two pieces of legislation — 1880’s Angell Treaty and the 1909 Opium Exclusion Act — were developed to consolidate profit from opium among middle- and upper-class, American Whites. On these, Natalie Papillion writes,
“Despite American law enforcement’s awareness that problematic smoking-opium use was largely concentrated in Anglo-American communities, mass raids on Chinese homes and businesses quickly followed the Act’s passage. These efforts succeeded in terrorizing and brutalizing Asian-American communities…”
In short, anti-opium laws weren’t about drugs so much as they were enacted to minimize the capacity of the Chinese to gain social, economic, and political power. They also justified a hate-crime spree not unlike current events. The moral panic surrounding opium was only tangentially related to its pharmacological properties, but images of opium dens evoked horror and ire because they threatened White supremacy.
The archetype of the predatory opium hawker was entrenched in law by men, but it gained traction culturally via Christian women whose self-appointed distinction as “Mothers of the nation” entailed denigrating non-Whites. Imperial feminists in the U.S. and Canada believed it was their duty to maintain racial purity via selective breeding, and the assumption that Chinese men were seducing virginal Whites after placating them with opium can be traced to suffragette advocacy. For example, prominent Canadian anti-immigration crusader Emily Murphy penned several letters in Maclean’s Magazine warning that drug-addled femmes would accede to the sexual demands of Chinese men and give birth to mixed-race babies, while her rambling treatise The Black Candle detailed the ignorance that inspired these men to addict, overpower, and violate:
…“[I]t is only natural that the Chinaman should prefer teaching the art of ‘hitting the pipe’ to white ‘devils,’ like you and me who probably have no souls anyway, and certainly no ancestors.”
…“[I]f you claim that the oriental pedlar, and opium sot are abandoned and irreclaimable — mere black-haired beasts in our human jungle — then, it is quite plain that we should insist on their exclusion from this continent Any other course would only be a demonstration of broken-headed inepitude.”
Today, the “yellow peril” — a (literally) colorful metaphor for uncivilized bodies and minds — remains a source of angst among settlers. It is also still affiliated with the illicit import of drugs, only opium has been ousted by fentanyl. A synthetic opioid 80–100x stronger than morphine, fentanyl is prescribed to treat severe pain and is favoured among traffickers and dealers as a cost-effective way to augment the potency of street-based substances. It is now present in most overdose deaths, and even though we don’t have concrete data on precisely where it comes from, those in power still like blaming China.
Discourse that paints the Chinese as “unclean” (and thus culpable for the pandemic) is connected to drug stigma. From opium to fentanyl, The role of the Chinese in the colonial imagination has always been to infuse “our” (White) culture with biological aberrations that corrupt the social body whilst killing individuals. Covid-related xenophobia is an extension of this. Even Chinese ascendance up the socioeconomic ladder hasn’t placated nationalists, and I would argue that Chinese wealth acquisition since the 1960’s due to policy reform has exacerbated White entitlement. The “immigrants are stealing our jobs” trope endures, but since we can no longer legally discriminate on the basis of race, our attachment to symbolism (“the Chinese are dirty”) is even more entrenched. The Chinese and drugs (and especially “Chinese drugs”) emblematize middle-class Whiteness’s contempt for the “Other,” so while prohibition didn’t cause xenophobia, it has legitimized it. Fentanyl-related deaths will continue to soar until we legalize drug use, as will the anger we displace onto the Chinese.
For more on that, just ask Trump.
Moving on, all 20th century drug laws were fuelled by fears of “degenerate” races. If opium was distinctly Chinese, cannabis (and later, heroin and crack) were/are Black. The consequences of this have been dire for Black people, and while resistance to drug-related policies (and the police who enforce them) is far from novel, 2020 has made anti-cop activism tougher to ignore.
A (very condensed) overview of anti-Blackness in drug policy is as follows: First, pot in the West was initially seen as an insidious substance that flowed across the United State’s southern border, and though it remains disproportionately linked to Latinx populations as reflected in arrest statistics, perceptions of it as a predominantly Mexican vice have shifted. By the time cannabis was banned in the U.S., it was viewed as a fixture of “inner-city” (read: mostly Black) regions, and cannabis laws have since been used to justify racial profiling. Today, marijuana arrests make up 43% of all drug arrests (90% of them for simple possession), and Blacks are incarcerated for marijuana offences at roughly 4x the rate of Whites despite consuming less of it.
Similarly, heroin — which was first sold legally to upper-class Whites as a non-addictive, over-the-counter alternative to morphine — was criminalized in the U.S. as it gained popularity among jazz musicians. Jazz (again — Black) culture has been erroneously blamed for heroin addiction, but drug scholars point out that the Italian Mafia proliferated it through Harlem well into the ’70s. In 1971, on the heels of the African-American Civil Rights movement, President Nixon tapped into wealthy, White conservative fears about equality in a bid to keep his job by declaring his notorious “War on Drugs.” The ramifications of this are still overwhelmingly felt among Blacks almost exactly fifty years later.
Today, not only are Black people disproportionately arrested for drug possession, but the punishments they endure once convicted are substantially inflated relative Whites.¹ Nearly half of Americans serving “virtual life” prison sentences are Black, Black youth are 4x more likely than Whites to be sentenced with secure placements, and state prosecutors are more likely to charge Black than similar White defendants under habitual offender laws.
Drug-related criminal justice policies aren’t just enforced unevenly, they are also intrinsically racist. For example, sentence enhancements for people discovered selling drugs in school zones disadvantage Blacks, given the wide geographic range these policies cover and high inner-city density compared to White suburbia. Every state has “drug-free school zoning” laws, and a 2005 study found that in New Jersey, 96% of those incarcerated under them were Black or Latinx. Mandatory minimum sentence thresholds also target “Black” drugs, an important example being the crack/powder cocaine divide: Politicians introduced mandatory minimums for crack possession in the 1980’s by claiming that a “crack epidemic” had “ravaged” the inner-city, and while they did so to flaunt their “tough on crime” position (and to distract from the true culprit of inner-city ails — inequality), they failed to acknowledge that powder cocaine, which is stereotypically consumed by wealthy Whites (see: Wall Street) is pharmacologically identical. One would need to be caught with roughly 18x more powder cocaine than crack to receive the same mandatory five-year minimum sentence, so while powerful demographics who have been socialized to desire certain drugs use them with impunity, Black people as a whole aren’t afforded this same privilege.
Particularly relevant to current events, once one leaves prison, the “collateral consequences” for those convicted on drug-related charges are extreme: People with criminal records encounter massive barriers to attaining employment, acquiring private or social housing, getting lines of credit, voting, and accessing social supports. This is true whether or not one has a drug-related record, but the proportion of those who are only “criminals” because of drugs — and the number of these people who are Black — is staggering.
Again, this is an extremely non-comprehensive review of how prohibition is anti-Black. Tellingly, the first recommendation of a 2018 Report by the Sentencing Project to the United Nations on racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system was to end the War on Drugs, given that its latent purpose has always been to keep a small group of Whites in power. Returning to Nixon, his former Assistant for Domestic Affairs and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman was startlingly transparent about prohibition’s true purpose during a 1994 interview with reporter Don Baum. About the “War on Drugs,” he stated:
In other words, prohibition has always been a political tool, and a highly effective one at that. In the four decades before Nixon solidified that we are, in fact, “at war” with drug (users), male incarceration rates in the U.S. were stable at approximately 200 men per 100,000 population each year. By the mid-1980’s, this figure had doubled, and it doubled again over the next ten years. Although it is difficult to discern precisely how many people are imprisoned because of drugs, reports suggests that drug offenders compose roughly 20% of America’s 2.3 million prison population.² There has been a slight dip in the raw numbers of people incarcerated in recent years, but mass imprisonment — and the strategic, purposeful mass imprisonment of Black people, especially on drug charges — is about as American as apple pie.
So, if the War on Drugs is nearly fifty years old, why is it so relevant to the Black uprising we’ve seen in 2020? It’s simple: In the words of Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizers,
What confuses many so-called “Liberal” Whites (never mind conservatives) is the assumption that BLM is just about police brutality.
It.
Is.
Not.
Public executions of Black people by police are highly publicized, tragic events that emblematize the immense overreach in state power that characterizes Black people’s daily lives whether or not they’re murdered. They are a tangible symptom of “a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” and nowhere is this systematic and intentional targeting more apparent than in the content and context of drug laws.
Take George Floyd: “The facts” are that he was murdered after police were called because he used a counterfeit $20 bill at an independent grocer (Palestinian store owner Mahmoud Abumayyaleh, who was not present at the time, has since issued a statement of regret and expressed solidarity with Floyd’s family). Racists have gleefully pointed out that Floyd had a lengthy criminal record that included theft, criminal trespassing, and aggravated robbery which, according to Minneapolis Police Department Ltd. Bob Kroll and many like him, is relevant. It isn’t, but let’s indulge the White supremacists for a moment (at least before we punch them): How was drug policy a precursor to Floyd’s death?
George Floyd was raised in a low-income, predominantly Black neighbourhood known as “The Bricks” in Cuney County, Houston, by a single Mother. In 1997, he had just returned from Texas A & M University following a transfer from South Florida Community College, where he played basketball on athletic scholarship, when he was arrested and charged with delivering less than a gram of cocaine. I don’t know why Floyd was “drug trafficking,” but I can certainly speculate.
This particular encounter landed him in jail for six months, shortly after which he was sentenced to an additional ten months due to theft. Noteworthy here is that Floyd’s childhood neighbourhood is a notorious site of (illegal) over-policing, so much so that an officer who once arrested him for possessing a $10 crack rock is currently the central figure in a scandal that may entail dismissing over a hundred racially-motivated, illegitimate drug charges. Floyd’s next arrest in 2001 concluded with a 15-day incarceration period because he “failed to identify to a police officer” (that is, he couldn’t or wouldn’t produce I.D. when asked). This charge was undoubtedly influenced by Floyd’s arrest history, as were his multiple, mostly groundless police encounters in the years following.
Floyd’s charges did get more serious over time, but each of them, including those for armed robbery and assault, was directly linked to drug use (and the fact that it’s illegal). How might Floyd’s life have been different had he not received his first conviction — if by 22 years old he wasn’t embroiled in a pre-ordained, interminable cycle of racial profiling, incarceration, release and heightened scrutiny because of his priors? Given what we know about the systemic difficulties that prohibit former convicts from living “normal” lives, as well as the stigma and alienation that accompany them, is it any wonder that Floyd’d relationship with substances (and the behaviours required to support it) escalated in severity? By the time he moved to Minneapolis in 2014, Floyd had enrolled in a church-sponsored discipleship program and was looking for redemption. He wanted out of the drug world, but for those situated at the intersections of racial marginalization, poverty, and criminality, the exit isn’t clearly marked.
Floyd’s hideous conclusion, “I can’t breathe,” was just as much an indictment of a suffocating system as it was a real-time narration of Officer Derek Chauvin’s murder. If drug use weren’t illegal, and if the same opportunities were afforded to people who use drugs as those who don’t, Floyd likely wouldn’t have been in Minneapolis, he wouldn’t have been a criminal, and on May 25, 2020, he wouldn’t have had to use fake money to buy a pack of smokes.
Even in death, Floyd hasn’t been liberated from the drug war. Chauvin’s trial begins next March, and his lawyers are preparing to argue that the traces of fentanyl and meth in Floyd’s bloodstream excuse Chauvin’s use of force because as an “addict,” Floyd had been “erratic.” The lawyers may even suggest that Floyd fatally overdosed just as Chauvin’s knee was on his neck, which is categorically absurd but only needs to cast reasonable doubt on Chauvin’s intentions to help him get acquitted. Our hatred for drug users — especially poor, Black drug users — is so profound that it obscures and perverts reason among otherwise “reasonable” people.
These are, of course, some of the same people who purport to be “anti-racist” but simultaneously disparage drug use and users. The two positions are diametrically opposed, mutually exclusive, and with this piece I hope, if nothing else, I have evoked an untenable degree of cognitive dissonance within at least a few of you.
(Here is also a good time to point that Breonna Taylor, whose surviving family, community, and supporters are currently protesting the outcome of her murderers’ grand jury trial, was originally shot as police executed a “no-knock” warrant that was granted only because Taylor was suspected of receiving drugs via mail from an ex-partner — Helon Redmond adeptly eviscerates dominant narratives about her life and death over at Filter Magazine).
In sum, racism is a state-endorsed structure, not an event. Within this structure, police are the most effective apparatus for upholding racism, and drug laws (and the stigma they propagate) are the mechanism through which police violence against racialized people is legitimated.
When we say “All cops are bastards,” we do so with an awareness of how every police officer, regardless of their personal beliefs, has sworn to uphold laws that are “manifestly unjust, or even cruel and wicked.” Nowhere is this allegiance to injustice more evident than with drug use.
For cops amidst prohibition, racism is literally part of the job description.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that legalization would not be a silver bullet for inequality. White supremacy is a voracious machine, the appetite of which will never be sated. If we were to end the war on drugs today, other forms of discrimination would replace it as a major source of food. To use a different metaphor, if all cops are ‘bad apples’ on a rotten tree, the war on drugs is the tainted fertilizer that douses the entire orchard with poison: As a society, our only viable option is razing that shit to the ground, churning the soil (read: BIPOC-led systems-change) and using entirely different seeds to plant anew.
To do that, though, people need to stay alive (and to also feel physically and psychologically safe from time to time).
That’s where legalization comes in.
2020 has been the year of well-intentioned but clueless White people “waking up” to the fact that racism exists. First, you’re late. Second, given that you’re now here, and some of you are genuinely earnest, step two isn’t just admitting that we (White folk) benefit from racism, but fleshing out the nuances of how privilege is legislated, institutionalized, and enacted. This must include a serious examination of drug laws (ideally from the perspective of those they most harm), followed by (and here’s the most important bit) acting on our findings.
The Karens of the world, some of whom are not unlike the Emily Murphy’s of yesteryear, what with their faux-progressive liberalism, high educational attainment, and puritanical morality disguised as “concern” for the greater (White) good, may try to dissuade you. They may even be you. But, like Murphy, history will not look kindly on those opposed to legalization.
The war on drugs is about so much more than drugs. It is a multi-pronged, mostly invisible set of policies, practices, and beliefs designed to terrorize, disappear, and kill racialized people before blaming them for their murders. If we have any hope of moving toward a just and equitable society, it’s time to put it to rest.
Notes:
- Thanks to The Sentencing Project, whose “Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System” provided the scaffolding for the following three paragraphs
- This does not include people who are incarcerated for secondary offences related to drugs such as parole violation following possession charges
- I recognize that Black people are not a homogenous group, and that while many Black activists do support defunding or abolishing the police, others have advocated for enhanced training and accountability, instead (alongside a few notable public figures who claim that racism doesn’t exist). Clearly I don’t claim to speak for Black people as a group or as individuals, but my political allegiances (and thus the framing of this article) are born of my own experience with police and drug use, as well as listening to my racialized comrades who advocate legalization.
