RACE AND THE ENFORCEMENT OF DRUG DELIVERY LAWS IN ...

majority of Seattle’s cocaine users are black. Although the higher levels of black
involvement with cocaine reported in the treatment data partially results from
referrals from the criminal justice system, 49.3 percent of the Seattle residents
who primarily abused cocaine and were not referred to treatment programs by
criminal justice agencies in 2006 were black. Because powder cocaine and crack
cocaine are combined in these data, it is not possible to determine if this pattern
is primarily due to high rates of crack cocaine use (as opposed to powder
cocaine) among blacks.
There is reason to suspect that this is the case, however. TARGET admission data
for the year 2000 indicate that a majority (65.3 percent) of those who were
admitted to publicly funded drug treatment programs and primarily or
secondarily abused injected cocaine were white. Whites were also a plurality of
those who abused snorted cocaine (48.5 percent versus 24.1 percent for blacks).
However, the majority (51.2 percent) of those who abused smoked cocaine were
black; just over a third (35.7 percent) of those who abused smoked cocaine were
white. Thus it appears that in Seattle, a slight majority of the low-income persons
who abuse smoked cocaine (crack cocaine) are black, while a majority/plurality
of those who inject or snort cocaine are white. 71 In short, TARGET data suggest
that although a majority of Seattle residents who abuse serious drugs are white,
rates of crack cocaine use are comparatively high among blacks.
MORTALITY DATA
Mortality data also capture information about a particular subset of drug users:
those who die of drug-related causes. The data shown below include only drugrelated
deaths involving persons living in one of the 37 zip codes that fall
exclusively within Seattle. 72 The data cover the period from July 2005 through
June 2007. Because multiple drugs are detected in some cases, the number of
drugs detected (341) exceeds the number of Seattle residents (244) who died as a
result of drug-related causes. Figure 6 shows the racial composition of Seattle
residents whose deaths in July 2005–June 2007 were attributed to drugs. The
majority (82.2 percent) of the Seattle residents who died of drug–related causes
that had any type of opiate, cocaine, sedatives and/or methamphetamine in their
71
Data provided by Fritz Wrede, Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse of Washington’s Department
of Social and Health Services.
72 These data were provided by Caleb Banta-Green, Research Scientist, Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Institute, University of Washington. There are another four zip codes that exceed the city
boundary. Because residents of these four areas could not be clearly established as Seattle
residents, they were excluded from the data provided.
35