The War On Drugs Is A War On Minorities And The Poor

Fom an article today in Forbes:

New York City, 90 percent of the cases the Brooklyn Family Defense Project handles in which kids were removed from the home due to allegations of drug use involve marijuana:

“Lauren Shapiro, director of the Brooklyn Family Defense Project, which defends most parents facing neglect charges in Family Court in Brooklyn, said more than 90 percent of the cases alleging drug use that her lawyers handle involve marijuana, as opposed to other drugs.

Marijuana is the most common illicit drug in New York City: 730,000 people, or 12 percent of people age 12 and older, use the drug at least once annually, according to city health data.

Over all, the rate of marijuana use among whites is twice as high as among blacks and Hispanics in the city, the data show, but defense lawyers said these cases were rarely if ever filed against white parents.

In Washington D.C. 91 percent of the arrests made involving marijuana were of black people:

“More per capita marijuana arrests are made in the District than in any other jurisdiction in the country, according to a recent analysis of MPD and FBI data by Shenandoah University criminal justice professor Jon Gettman, the former director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Pot arrests have been rising steadily every year since at least 2003, mirroring a national trend that began in the 1990s. And they didn’t really work. “We doubled marijuana arrests and it had no effect on the number of users,” Gettman says.

But even with a high arrest rate, some people in D.C. can probably safely get high without worrying that the cops are coming. Those people are white people. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. In a city whose population demographics are steadily evening out, that’s odd. In fact, adjusting for population, African Americans are eight times as likely to be arrested for weed as white smokers are.

America, we need to talk. If we legalize, all these problems and social injustices and bullshit simply goes away. It's time to pony up, admit that 95 million of us have at least tried it, that it's less toxic and societally corrosive than cigarettes or alcohol, and we've spent 26 billion dollars so far this year fighting it. You know how I know the War On Drugs is not working? 'Cause I'm fucking baked like a cake right now. Ha!