On Drugs and Race by Brian Edwards-Tiekert When Slick Willy Hearst and the paper companies started up the “Reefer Madness” campaign in the '20s one of the shrewdest moves they made was to adopt a new name for the well-known hemp plant. “Marijuana” was a drug that most Americans hadn’t heard of, even though most of them used “hemp” every day. It sounded sinister, alien . . . Mexican. Drugs and race have always been intertwined in American politics: just as the quest to criminalize opium capitalized on anti-Chinese sentiment at the turn of the century, Hearst & Co.’s campaign against cannabis worked through ingrained racism. The tabloids painted a clear picture: “Marijuana” was a drug banditos smoked before they went on killing sprees. Blacks smoked it in underworld voodoo jazz clubs. Santa Anna and his men were hopeless addicts when they butchered our heroes at the Alamo. Fast-forward 70 years: in media and politics ‘drugs’ rivals ‘Arab terrorists’ for the title of ‘biggest threat to civilization as we know it,’ but the role of race has flip-flopped: once upon a time the powers-that-be played the race card to institutionalize drug prohibition, today they’re playing the drug card to institutionalize racism. In the mid-eighties the media informed us that a crack 'epidemic' was sweeping our inner cities: ‘crack gangs’ were fighting over territory with machine guns, ‘crack mothers’ were selling their foodstamps to buy more drugs, ‘crack babies’ were born underweight, addicted, and—so the story went—brain-damaged (the media was quick to predict the birth of a new genetic underclass, but most studies found that ‘crack babies’ grow up perfectly normal). In television and in the movies, crack users and pushers were—and still are—predominantly black. Politicians used the crack scare to jump on the ‘tough on drugs’ bandwagon and passed laws mandating sentences for crack possession a hundred times as strict as those for cocaine possession. Aside from the obvious injustice that a street dealer caught with $50 worth crack could serve a longer sentence (five years mandatory minimum, no possibility of parole) than a wholesale supplier caught with $50,000 of cocaine (which is, by the way, what they use to make crack), the laws have a particularly racist edge when it comes to enforcement: though two thirds of crack users are white, nearly 90% of crack possession defendants in federal courts are black. Crystal Methamphetamine, by contrast, has enjoyed little to no attention from media or law enforcement. The drug (in smokeable form) is marginally more addictive than crack, induces violent behavior, and has invaded poor communities in the West the same way crack did. The difference? It’s mostly white kids buying it. The cops aren’t cracking down, and the media—aside from when it briefly flirted with the prospect of smokable crystal meth (‘ice’) becoming the next crack ten years ago—has been silent.