The Drug game (street politics Book 1)

The marijuana decriminalization movement of the s revolved around the forthright view that white middle-class Americans should not have their futures ruined by policies designed to protect them from international trafficking and urban drug markets. In the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse advocated a philosophically incoherent but politically feasible policy of decriminalization that called for no legal sanctions for personal use or casual sale but the retention of felony penalties against for-profit distribution.

The commission justified supply-side criminalization in large part because outright legalization would exacerbate public anxieties about the so-called amotivational syndrome of psychological dependence, laziness, and anticapitalist behavior among white middle-class youth. Although Nixon repudiated the report, eleven states decriminalized simple marijuana possession during the s, and most of the rest adopted the federal misdemeanor model.

Combined federal and state marijuana arrests actually increased from , in to , in , largely through street-level narcotics sweeps in urban centers.

Drug abuse in athletes

Texas provides a particular revealing illustration of the soft-hard dynamics of racial and spatial discretion in marijuana enforcement. The reform calculus in the conservative political climate was straightforward, the Texas Monthly concluded: The Carter administration initially endorsed federal decriminalization of marijuana possession and prioritized a public health focus on urban heroin addiction.

The war on drugs during the Reagan administration solidified the federal government's alliance with the suburban parents' movement, and it continued the Carter administration policy shift of positioning the twelve-to-fourteen-year-old white pot smoker at the moral core of the national crusade. The perceived marijuana crisis in the white middle-class suburbs guided, and in key ways dominated, the Reagan administration's war on drugs.

By spring the nfp boasted three thousand local affiliates at a follow-up White House conference on the marijuana crisis, which the director of a Washington, D. In October , when President Reagan formally declared war on drugs, he started by asking his wife to recount her visits to antimarijuana parents' groups across the nation. Leading Democrats such as Senator Joseph Biden criticized Reagan for not seeking even harsher mandatory-minimum penalties, while Rep. Congress enacted the law with minimal dissent, despite the racial and spatial inequities of its to-1 crack to powder cocaine sentencing disparity, with grams of cocaine triggering the same penalty as only 5 grams of crack.

In American political culture, with the exception of the shocking death of African American college basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose, white middle-class youth disproportionately figured as the most sympathetic victims of cocaine traffickers. Leaders of local affiliates throughout the nation attended the gathering, with its striking logo of a fraying American flag to symbolize the youth drug epidemic, just a week after President Ronald Reagan officially launched his administration's war on drugs and embraced the nfp priorities of marijuana interdiction and prevention.

From the narcotics crisis of the s through the crack epidemic of the s, the political and cultural construction of the white middle-class victim operated alongside the racialized threats of the urban pusher, foreign trafficker, and predatory ghetto addict to sustain the war on drugs and expand the American carceral state. An impossible criminal, Barry spoke to the nation from a West Palm Beach rehabilitation center, joined by his conscientious parents and surrounded by other white middle-class casualties of the crack invasion.

The divergent paths of Frog and Barry captured the ways enforcement of the Anti—Drug Abuse Act of continued the discriminatory racial and spatial policies of the American war on drugs writ large. In an aclu investigation revealed that African Americans represented more than 80 percent of crack cocaine defendants even though whites made up almost two-thirds of the market.

The selective criminalization of marijuana has remained at the center of U. The contours of the war on drugs may be shifting yet again, but the criminalization of blackness and decriminalization of whiteness remains deeply entrenched in American political culture, as does the long-standing divergence between a public health strategy in the white middle-class suburbs and a crime-control agenda in urban minority neighborhoods.

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. Lassiter is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. View large Download slide. Who's to Blame for the Influx of Illegal Narcotics?

Race in the War on Drugs Chicago, Michael Javen Fortner demonstrates that black middle-class organizations in communities such as Harlem also deployed pusher-victim binaries in pursuit of punitive enforcement policies; but with few exceptions national political and cultural discourses have reserved victim status in the war on drugs for white youth. Final Report Washington, , esp. See also John C. Heroin and the American City Philadelphia, , 51— Points to Be Emphasized folder, Illinois, Chicago, box , ibid.

Narcotics Control Act, chap.

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See also other letters and petitions in box 36, ibid. Kenneth Hahn statement, March 31, , folder 6, box , series 6.

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Goodwin Knight speech, Dec. Dodd press release, Sept. Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act, 80 Stat.

Thomas Gitchoff, Kids, Cops, and Kilos: Mikuriya, and Gordon S. On the spatial concentration of heroin markets, see Schneider, Smack. A Signal of Misunderstanding: Williams Papers Reagan Library. Alexander, New Jim Crow , Carlton Turner statement, Nov. The Chemical Society , ex. Dale Bell, wqed Pittsburgh pbs , Nov. Community Answers , ex.

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