Sure, but they could never find tools that are anywhere near as effective. As it stands now, they have probable cause to **** with people 100% of the time and they are encouraged to do so because they consistently yield positive results in the form of drug arrests.

I don't disagree that drug laws are a tool of racist policy, but they have had an astounding effect.

Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971.

Drugs are equally illegal in plenty of countries that don't have this same problem.

But yeah, drug laws are ****ed up

There are many countries with ruthless drug laws like Afghanistan but they have neither the will nor the wealth to enforce them. No country come close to imprisoning drug offenders the way the US does.

Okay? Even if true, that doesn't change anything regarding my stance on the need to end drug laws in order for there to be any chance to fix the problem in this country.

What happened in the last few years?

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Obummer

ignorant bystander here: what is it about US drugs laws that discriminates against minorities?

Anyone who thinks welfare started destroying communities in the 70s should look at this.

Sentencing in some laws (crack vs cocaine) and the fact that they get arrested at 4x the rate of white people despite same tendency to use drugs as white people.

Crack is now treated 18:1 vs cocaine at sentencing rather than 100:1 thanks to the "Fair" Sentencing Act a few years ago.

minorities are profiled more frequently, arrested more frequently, incarcerated more frequently, generally lack access to the same benefit of the doubt and quality of legal representation as their white counterparts so they are charged with more serious violations (think less plea bargaining) and serve longer prison/jail sentences, they are given virtuallly no support/rehabilitation network to re-integrate back into society when they get out of jail which perpetuates a cycle of re-offending and re-incarceration which then perpetuates further profiling on the part of police, not to mention laws/statutes have been passed specifically to increase the severity of punishment for possession/manufacture/sale of drugs that are associated more with minority communities (e.g. crack cocaine vs powder cocaine), the list goes on really

"three strikes" laws, gang injunctions, mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, etc etc etc

As with everything else law-enforcement related, the way in which they are applied. In theory, laws could negatively affect all races equally, just as in theory, Jim Crow literacy tests could have been used to disenfranchise poor whites at similar rates to poor blacks... but they never do, and never did.

And federal funding that focuses on numerical goals, causing police departments to focus even more on minority and poorer neighborhoods for quick and cheap low-level drug arrests.

^^that really is a big facet of the injustice of it all too.

Missed this. A lot of it is thanks to some jurisdictions decriminalizing minor drug offenses. Also, prisons are expensive warehouses. Some states have adopted reforms aimed at lowering incarceration rates due to budget crises.

What's really scary, though, is what has been allowed to happen with private prison corps recently. For decades, these companies either built their own private prisons or contracted to run state-built prisons. A couple of years ago, for the first time ever, one of these companies began making offers to purchase state-run prisons outright. I don't know how many have been sold around the country to date. I do recall Ohio selling them a prison for $70+ million. Here's the kicker: the sale of these prisons comes with a 20-30 year contract that requires the state to maintain a 90%+ occupancy rate. So now we are going to have states that are contractually obligated to arrest X number of people for decades.

More to the point, the move to focus the conversation towards the War on Drugs and away from institutional racism sorta has the appearance of a deflection. Like, when Rand invoked cigarette taxes in the wake of the Garner killing, it misses the point so utterly that it just has to be deliberate.

Thanks Obama

Every law except drunk driving laws are racist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_an...ate_statistics

Also, look at the year 2000 on the graph

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/09/us...re-picked.html

The war on drugs is institutional racism.

Except, for say murder, blacks do commit murder at a higher rate. I would argue that that is also largely an effect of the drug war, but as far as drug use and possession go, blacks do not use more drugs yet they are still arrested and convicted much more often and serve longer sentences for the same crimes.

The drug war is a corner stone of institutional racism and drug offenses are often the first step towards a person getting influenced by prison/criminal culture.

Even worse, the drug war oppresses anybody who doesn't profit from it, so it transcends social racial problems that it contributes to.

Except the war on drugs has a truly massive negative impact on the black community. The cigarette tax may have had some personal relevance to Eric Garner's life, but has at most a tiny impact on the lives of black people.

Still, just because the drug war does have a larger impact on the country and specifically the lives of black people, that doesn't mean that there aren't important racial issues separate from the drug war.

But, even those issues, like police treatment of black people in general, are exacerbated by the drug war which results in an incredible amount of negative interaction between police and black people.

I mean Trolly, look at all those people in prison and think of how many of them are young black men. It's absolutely poisonous to the community and to relations with police.