War news from the liberterrain…
Libertarians need to keep pounding on the fact that the Drug War is a government instituted race war.
Criminalizing drugs has always been a means of targeting and controlling racial, ethnic, and social minorities.
The Chinese laborers who came to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad smoked opium. Negroes in the old south sniffed cocaine when it was cheaper than alcohol. Mexicans brought their marihuana with them when they migrated into the Southwest. And, according to Smack: Heroin and the American City, heroin was "Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s."
They've all been criminalized.
The biggest racist of them all was Harry J. Anslinger.
Anslinger was Assistant Prohibition Commissioner when he saw the future in 1930: repeal of alcohol prohibition meant repeal of his job.
A career tax-sucking bureaucrat, Anslinger was desperate to find himself another cushy government ride.
What he found was marijuana. His strategy was to get the government to criminalize the Devil Weed and his tactic was blatant fear-mongering racism.
He toured the country preaching social Armageddon wherever he could raise a white audience.
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others." - Testimony to US Congress supporting Marihuana Tax Act, 1937.
Other documented Anslinger racist quotes are:
"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice."
"Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men."
"Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female students (white) smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result pregnancy."
White America pressured the government into outlawing this "most dangerous and deadly drug known to man" and Anslinger's bureau-buddies got him appointed America's first Drug Czar.
The racism continues today.
"While drug use is consistent across all racial groups," says the Drug Policy Alliance, "Blacks constitute 13 percent of all drug users, but 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of persons convicted, and 74 percent of people sent to prison. Nationally, Latinos comprise almost half of those arrested for marijuana offenses."
The racist drug war must end!
Book Reference: The New Jim Crow.
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