Annoying Racism and the War on Drugs

by: Matt Stoller

Wed Dec 26, 2007 at 11:27


My last post sparked a fair bit of argument as to the nature of drug dealers.  Here's one comment by Anthony de Jesus.

People who resort to dealing drugs tend to be scum.  It's not like such people are going to become upstanding citizens with legitimate business concerns if drugs were made legal; they are most likely going to go on the other criminal endeavors.  If they were capable of doing something else, they would have done it in the first place.
Matt Stoller :: Annoying Racism and the War on Drugs
I'm always puzzled by this attitude.  Though I don't have stats, my guess is that most people who 'deal' drugs are people who have a little bit of extra pot and sell it to friends.  Obviously the big wholesalers aren't like that, and there are people that make a lot of money, and there's coke and meth and heroine, etc.  But by and large drug dealing is probably a lot like scalping an extra Super Bowl ticket; most of the people that do it are one-time amateurs and most of the volume is wholesaled by pros.  Or maybe it's like ordering a pizza, as in one person buys it and the rest throw in a few bucks to cover the costs.  That's still drug dealing and is criminal behavior according to our moronic war on drugs. 

At least at elite colleges, many of the people who do this go on to good careers at investment banks, law firms, tech companies, etc.  This has been going on for decades, with generations of people who would never be considered scum eventually running society, though they did 'deal' drugs when they were young.  And they had plenty of other options.

It's worth remembering that Nixon created the modern war on drugs as part of his successful campaign to win white racist votes during the civil rights backlash.  Scum, given that context, sounds mighty racist to me.

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Annoying Racism and the War on Drugs | 17 comments
"At least at elite colleges" (0.00 / 0)
See, Matt, this is where you go wrong. With that one little clause you show that you aren't talking about the real dimensions of the problem.  You didn't even qualify with just "colleges" but rather "elite colleges."  You do realize that most drug dealers don't go to elite colleges, right?  Your personal experience of smoking some pot in college does not reflect the realities of the drug trade in this country. 
Most drug dealers don't go to elite colleges (4.00 / 1)
but the people who run our society do.  And many of them used and sold drugs when they were there, and not just marijuana, either.

As shocking as it is, many of them continue to do "hard" drugs like cocaine even while they work on Wall Street or prestigious law firms.

The "real dimensions of the problem" are that these things are not at all unique to urban black communities, those just happen to be the places with the fewest alternatives, the most difficulty getting treatment, and the only place where there's a serious attempt at enforcement.

I support John McCain because children are too healthy anyway.

[ Parent ]
ok (0.00 / 0)
Actually, I was talking about elite colleges because that is where many Congressman and Presidents go and it most obviously demonstrates that when someone says 'scum' they don't mean Yale grads who got high in college.

But I assure you that I don't mean to leave out much of the collegiate system, with the massive exception of community colleges.  And I don't mean to leave out high schools and work places, which have equally harmless and irrelevant drug dealers.  Around 50% of high school seniors have tried pot.

The 'magnitude' of the problem is that lots of 18 year olds get high.  It's not a big deal, except if you want to find a sneaky way to undermine youth culture and destroy various communities.

[ Parent ]
scum in Congress (0.00 / 0)
You may not consider drug dealers at elite colleges scum, but others may. Just because someone goes on to become a congressperson doesn't mean he is not scum. One could easily argue there are more scum in congress than on your average urban street corner.
[ Parent ]
You're missing the point here... (4.00 / 4)
You can equivocate and say that street dealers and coke-dealing elites are both 'scum', but if that is the case, then the elites should have no right to pass laws that punish poor people for doing the same things that the elites do.

Moreover, Stoller's point seems to be that these 'scum' types are NOT permanent drug dealers, and calling them scum is generally quite childish.

One of my law school classmates used to sell a LOT of pot in undergrad [or so he says], but he stopped selling once it conflicted with his career goals. That 'scum' is a hard working, (presently) law-abiding student, who will almost certainly become a productive member of society.

I'd argue that NEITHER the rich or poor are inherently 'scummy' for their involvement with drugs, rather, what is REALLY scummy, is the hypocrisy of these drug-using elites who punish others for conduct that they personally engage in.

It's like Larry Craig denouncing homosexuality.

[ Parent ]
It's funny (0.00 / 0)
I was just thinking "It's too bad that post got derailed by a flame war about drugs, I wish Matt would post a thread so we could talk about the other issues he mentioned."

This is clearly just to spite me.

I support John McCain because children are too healthy anyway.

Or Maybe Just To Get It Out Of Our Systems! (0.00 / 0)
One can always hope.

I had/have quite a lot to say on this subject.  But I agree that there was a lot more there to dicsuss.

I also think that the way that thread went was, in a way, illustrative of the point Matt was making: If we had a sensible, well-articulated progressive position, and political program on how to deal with drugs as a substitute for the war on drugs, would any of that discussion have taken place?

Likewise, the lack of conversation on the other topics showed how relatively little thinking has advanced on those fronts.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
The other thing (0.00 / 0)
that always escapes me is, what happened to the lessons learned from prohibition?  I remember being taught in seventh-grade civics class that it was conventional wisdom that prohibiting alcohol was the catalyst for the creation of the underground network of distribution that led directly to the mobs.  Can someone explain how that lesson shouldn't be applied to the current situation with drugs?  Or, has that lesson since been rescinded?
lots of lessons have been rescinded (0.00 / 0)
which is why we let housing lenders police themselves.
[ Parent ]
Aside from the 'scum' issue which... (4.00 / 2)

.............I'm sure we all know is code for young black urban male; folks here do realize that that segment of the 'market' is what fuels the obscene 'prison system' which in CA is now bigger than the University system.

An early version of 'disaster capitalism' it criminalizes through the handy issue of 'drug use' a huge chunk of said 'young black urban male' and then generates massive profits for the private sector to supply the infrastructure to lock these 'scum' up.

All this talk about 'elite colleges' and Senators and 'law firms' and such misses the main issue. This is institutionalized racism for profit; no different than growing cotton in the South was.

Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.

Exactly (4.00 / 3)
Here's the recent case study of Cook Co. Illinois, along with some more national data:

African-Americans in Cook County were imprisoned for drug offenses at 58 times the rate of white people -- the seventh-worst racial disparity among large counties nationwide, according to a new report.

The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank advocating alternatives to prison for social problems, was set to release a study Tuesday detailing the different treatment white and black drug offenders receive under the criminal justice system. The institute found that nationwide, African-Americans are imprisoned for drugs at 10 times the rate of white people. ...

More from another article reviewing the Justice Policy Institute study:

... Citing one federal survey, the report noted, "In 2002, there were approximately 14 million white Americans who had used drugs in the previous month, compared to about 2.6 million African Americans who had done so. In other words, there were five times as many whites using drugs as African Americans. However, our analyses indicate African Americans were admitted to prison for drug offenses at nearly 10 times the rate of whites."

Black youth are also selectively prosecuted.

"According to the Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, African American adolescents have slightly lower illicit drug use than their white counterparts - whether for illicit drug use generally or for use of a wide variety of specific drugs, including crack cocaine...However, in 2003, African Americans youth were arrested for drug abuse violations at nearly twice the rate of whites." ...

It's a fear and demonization of poverty, mixed up with unforgivable racism, that leads to these disparities. The so-called 'scum' live in places that have often been gutted of their economic base, seen the tax base that's used to pay for education destroyed by the hollowing out of inner cities, and given little more government attention than what comes at the end of a nightstick.

Meth, otoh, is one of the worst of the hard drugs. A faster way to kill yourself than coke, insidious and destructive, poisonously toxic and ... endemic in poverty-stricken communities in rural, White America. These places that have been economically blasted to bits by factory farming and the same sort of not-remotely-benign neglect that's the lot of the inner city, are at least not heavily stigmatized with the wholesale jailing of their young, male populations. But neither can they get effective rehabilitation, of either individual's lives or their community's economies.

The economically depressed communities in this country are poorly served by the punitive attitude directed towards their impoverished populations' desire to seek escape from their circumstances. One set of communities is neglected, the other neglected and scapegoated. And all those wasted and damaged lives are a shame that reflects more on this country than on those individuals who felt, often with a great deal of cause, that they had no way out.

Meanwhile, the middle and upper classes do their own drugs and treat their wayward children as, well, wayward children who need some guidance or rehabilitation but still have a future ahead of them. And that works pretty well, indicating that it's the self-evidently sensible approach. But the politics of selfishness and inciting racist fears of the poor, as though all the poor were brown or something, keeps that good sense from becoming public policy. Keeps everyone pushing 'harsh medicine' and 'tough love' as the moral option, when their own actions within their families and towards their peers indicate that they don't believe in it.

The browning of the face of poverty fully accomplished by Reagan has taken so many issues off the table, and so embedded racism in the political debate, that hardly anyone even sees it anymore and it's hard to effectively fight either racism or poverty.

The outcomes of our drug policies are obviously, blatantly racist. The destruction wreaked on communities by bad corporate and economic policies, however, has been to some extent color blind. Except to the degree with which the public defenders of those policies have substituted race for class in people's minds, and practically made whiteness synonymous with middle classness, even when the White people in question are dirt poor.

[ Parent ]
we don't give a shit about the drug trade (0.00 / 0)
The Mexican attorney general's office said the blue and white Gulfstream II crashed on Monday in a remote jungle area on the Yucatan Peninsula. Authorities seized 132 bags of cocaine weighing four tons. Two men were arrested and jailed on drug trafficking charges in Merida, officials said. They declined to identify the men, however.

The aircraft was sold on Aug. 30 to Donna Blue Aircraft, owned by two Brazilians: Malago and his partner Eduardo Dias Guimaraes. In separate telephone interviews from different parts of Brazil, both men said they'd sold the aircraft to two Florida men on Sept. 16. "We are not the owners of the plane," said Guimaraes, reached in Goiania in central Brazil.
link

It's quite clear that it is our own CIA that's doing this.

see here and here.

No matter where you follow the crumb trail it leads to our own government. Yet no one cares.

The drug trade is big business and a boon for the gov't (0.00 / 0)
"Scum" drug dealers are just strawmen in this argument.  The drug war involves purchase of high tech, expensive weaponry and instruments from defense contractors, who in turn donate millions to politicians.  Non-violent drug offenders fill our prisons, which are increasingly being privatized by companies who in turn donate to politicians.  The scum involved in this system is far more disgusting than people selling drugs to make a little money.

The drug war is good business for politically connected companies.  That's why it's very hard to stop, not because of "scum" drug dealers.

The reality is that most drug dealers, at least for pot, are how Matt described them.  In terms of hard drugs being dealt in the inner city, drug dealers turn to the trade to make money because of few other options available.

Drug lords who make millions off of people's misery?  I agree, they're scum.  But so are those in government and in business who see drugs not as a problem, but as an investment opportunity, and a way to raise funds.

It's also a boon for agribusiness (4.00 / 2)
A company like Monsanto makes an obscene amount of money when their RoundUp pesticide is purchased in quantity for drug eradication and deployed like Agent Orange was in Vietnam, but all across Central and South America.
[ Parent ]
Entrepreneurs (4.00 / 1)
In my experience people who pursue drug-dealing, manufacturing, or related vocations as a primary source of income -- and to a large extent even those who do it for kicks -- are by-in-large entrepreneurs. Some are scumbags, but no moreso than among the general public.

It's worth noting that most of the negative behavior attributed to drug dealers (violent acquisition/defense of market-share, taking advantage of their consumers, etc) can also be true of amoral commercial entities outside of black markets. It's just a matter of what's socially sanctioned and what is not.

Also, from a rational-choice perspective, striking out with a drug-related enterprise is often the best opportunity available to low-income individuals, or even those with seemingly "better options." Whether you're talking about the inner city, the trailer park, the rural hollow, or the prep-school hookup, the margins are great, and if you've got a solid work ethic and a few connections you can pull down six figures in cash.

Depending on your social tastes and family life, the added cost of managing an all-cash income, not being able to tell many people what you do for a living, and failing to build any kind of legitimate paper-trail for yourself may or may not outweigh the increased earning potential. Certainly for people who don't put much stock in institutional certifications like a credit history, this isn't much of a drawback.

Me | My Work | Future Majority

The reason we have (0.00 / 0)
People on the streets selling drugs is that they can't get a better job. It pays very well and although it's risky what else are you going to do.

If you reduce poverty drug use will go way down. Their will always be some who try it but not nearly as much. Also if you legalized it but put enough of a tax on it that it would be uneconomical then that could do some good too. Also with that money we could focus on prevention.

I wish we could just try all the alternatives and figure out what works.

John McCain: Beacuse lobbyists should have more power

You do know I am black and live (0.00 / 0)
in a low income working class black neighborhood right? THe behavior is scummy . it doesn't mean I don't think the peo engaged in the activities are irredeemable, but I am not going to turn bad behavior into good either.
Annoying Racism and the War on Drugs | 17 comments
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