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the country it was legal. So we were very selective with our opium laws
and we used it to harass and incarcerate Chinese immigrants. That gave
way to a new chapter in the Mexicanization of hemp, which was suddenly
renamed “marijuana” so that we could use it as what we called “Mexican
Opium” to stop and detain Mexicans in new and startling numbers.
Chapter by chapter we’ve seen drug laws in the history of this
country really be thinly veiled laws of racial control. It wasn’t until 1971
that this was declared a “war.” Richard Nixon stood in front of the
American people and declared a war on drugs. When he did that he
unleashed the dogs of war. What had been an ad hoc series of improvised
laws over time suddenly got codified into a national policy, and a national
policy on a wartime footing. What does a wartime footing imply? It
implies all of the horrors of war: the incredibly casualties, the mass scale,
and the entrenched economic and bureaucratic interests that arise that
sense of a threat. The moment you could now say this is not just a little
group here or there, but this is public enemy number one as Richard Nixon
called drug abuse. Well, you can’t declare a war on a substance like drugs
anymore than you can declare war on terror. The war on terror was a war
on people we associate with terrorist activities. The war on drugs was a
war on people we associate as being involved with drugs. That ended up
being a very specific, a very racially targeted and ultimately economically
targeted cross section of our population. Read More
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10:45 AM EST on December 7th, 2012 | One comment