You probably associate the so-called "War on Drugs" with the Reagans. Or maybe, more correctly, with the Nixon administration. But the government's anti-drug policies started decades before that.
And, as we discuss in this week's episode, those policies were often motivated by things other than public health and safety. Instead, they targeted - and continue to target - immigrants and communities of color.
This episode digs into the history of America's War on Drugs, featuring guests Jason Ruiz and Yasser Arafat Payne.
Listen:
Transcript
Note:The following transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors
Hannah McCarthy: If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use disorder, resources are available to help and are on our website. Please reach out if you need it. Nick, you were a child of the 80s, right?
Nick Capodice: I was indeed.
Hannah McCarthy: Do you remember this?
Archive: Who taught you how to do this stuff?
Archive: You are right. I learned it by watching you.
Archive: This stuff hurts. Stop you from living up to your potential. It holds you back.
Archive: This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs.
Nick Capodice: Oh, do I ever? Hannah? Anti-drug czars. They were everywhere when I was a kid. I think that the. I learned it from watching you. Dad line was like the most reenacted piece of dialog in the second grade.
Hannah McCarthy: That particular PSA came out about two years before another notable moment when President George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack during a prime time address from the Oval Office.
Archive: This this is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It's as innocent looking as candy.
Hannah McCarthy: These moments in pop culture and politics are touchstones in the so-called war on drugs. That's an expression that took hold more than half a century ago when President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse, quote, public enemy number one. Here he is at a press conference in 1971.
Archive: America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive.
Hannah McCarthy: Since then, it's estimated the federal government's policies around drug enforcement have cost taxpayers over $1 trillion.
Archive: And when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.
Archive: We can lift a whole generation away from the grip of a terrible menace.
Archive: The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness. When you catch a drug dealer, you got to you got to put them away for a long time.
Hannah McCarthy: Regardless of the amount of money spent in America's, quote, war on drugs since the year 2000. Over a million Americans have died from drug overdoses in recent years. The majority of those deaths have been attributed to opioids. When someone struggles with substance use disorder, it affects not only them, but their family and their entire community at the same time. Our country has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and a disproportionate amount of those incarcerations are people of color who are serving time for drug-related offenses. And while we equate the so-called war on drugs with Nixon and his administration and his policies, it has been around for much longer than that. And it has consistently targeted particular communities with policy, policing, and punishment.
Jason Ruiz: America's various wars on drugs have always been racialized. That is War on Drugs 101.
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: And today we're talking about America's war on drugs. And this topic spans politics, the criminal legal system, and health care. We can't cover it all in one episode. So what we're going to do is go through the history of the government's anti-drug policies and how they targeted communities of color. Our first guest is Jason Ruiz.
Jason Ruiz: An associate professor and the chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Hannah McCarthy: Jason is the author of the forthcoming book Narco Media Latinidad: Popular Culture and America's War on Drugs. He posits that pop culture from movies to TV to advertising, sway public perception and also affect anti-drug legislation and policy.
Jason Ruiz: So the fact that Black and brown communities are hyper-policed is not disconnected from the kind of cultural perceptions of Jason Ruiz: Black people, of Latinx people, as more naturally connected to the drug trade. I think that comes from the cultural conditioning that happens in pop culture. I think it comes from seeing so many representations of Jason Ruiz: Black and brown people as the people who sell you drugs, who get you hooked on drugs, who will kill you for your drugs or will kill you to get drugs.
Archive: Some say the greatest threat to America is drug cartels represent a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.
Jason Ruiz: Colombians are one of the categories of bad guys that is really prevalent since sort of emergence of the dominance of the Colombian cartels. And they're presented all over pop culture as a particularly dangerous ethnic group.
Nick Capodice: So how does this all connect to the war on drugs of the Nixon era?
Jason Ruiz: Some folks say that Nixon's war on drugs stems from the counterculture and from, uh, from the sort of shift from conformist culture or consensus culture at midcentury into a counterculture that is dangerous to the Nixon administration. Some people say that it's meant to stop the Black Panthers and African Americans from mobilizing or organizing, or it's a way to criminalize Black and brown communities. Um. Whatever you want to think about Nixon's motivations, it's clear that drugs were at the forefront of a national conversation in the 1970s.
Hannah McCarthy: We should also mention that the counterculture Nixon targeted included feminists, gay rights activists and civil rights activists. Nixon viewed the counterculture as challenging traditional American values and his vision of law and order. Specifically, Nixon believed that the antiwar movement associated with the counterculture posed a significant threat to his efforts to extend the Vietnam War, a war that he saw as politically beneficial.
Nick Capodice: Is it a fact or is it a theory that Nixon's war on drugs was motivated by his politics and not public safety?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, one of Nixon's closest advisors, John Ehrlichman, who later served time in prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, actually confirmed Nixon's real intentions. In a 2016 interview he gave to Harper's magazine. He said, quote, We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
Nick Capodice: Wow. What does he mean by disrupt those communities?
Hannah McCarthy: Well, he made that pretty clear as well. He went on to say, quote, We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Nick Capodice: Wow. He just came out and said it.
Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, and here's the thing, Nick. Nixon's anti-drug enforcement policies and the way they targeted specific communities. As I've said, that was not new in America when it comes to drug politics. Our government has a history of creating legislation that criminalizes substance use in ways that have led to greater prosecution and incarceration of nonwhite Americans in particular.
Nick Capodice: All right. Well, let's get into it.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay. Again, I want to stress drugs when misused generally are not good for you. We don't want to give the impression that we are endorsing substance misuse in this episode. I'm just running through the history here. But drug consumption has been common since time immemorial. And in colonial America, tobacco and alcohol were the most widely consumed substances. They weren't the only drugs people were using.
Yasser Payne: Folks always had been doing drugs, including opium, cocaine.
Hannah McCarthy: That's Yasser Arafat Payne. He's an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice and Africana Studies at the University of Delaware.
Yasser Payne: All kinds of other concoctions. Right. And that's what they used to call them and market them and sell them concoctions. In fact, the biggest drug-using market, you know, during the period of slavery and thereafter until it became legal at the federal level, were white women.
Nick Capodice: So people white people were openly and freely using drugs in early America.
Hannah McCarthy: They were morphine and opioid was everywhere. For example, the American government began giving morphine injections and opium pills to soldiers during the Civil War. Morphine was a new and effective painkiller at the time, and it was seen as a way to help soldiers cope with the pain of their injuries, including amputations. However, morphine is also addictive, and many soldiers became addicted to the drug after taking it for pain relief. This led to a major problem with addiction among veterans after the war. Doctors were handing it out for all kinds of aches and pains, including menstrual cramps. And when a person got addicted to it but could no longer get it from a doctor, they would seek similar drugs elsewhere. In some cities, that included smoking opium in places called opium dens.
Nick Capodice: I have indeed heard of opium dens, but I don't know the history of them or why they were outlawed.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, it wasn't out of concern for Civil War veterans or other people who had been prescribed opioids and had developed a dependance on them. The first drug statute in the United States was passed in San Francisco in 1875. It put prohibitions on opium dens, which in San Francisco had an outsized presence in Chinese neighborhoods, meaning that this policy specifically targeted Chinese immigrants, as well as the increasing number of white tourists who were visiting these dens. And the first federal anti-drug law, which passed in 1909, was also about opium. That one was called the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act. And we should note that this federal law was part of a decades-long pattern of political discrimination against Chinese immigrants. During that time.
Nick Capodice: Like, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which largely froze Chinese immigration into the US until about 1965.
Hannah McCarthy: Jason Ruiz points out that Chinese immigrants were depicted as particularly dangerous. They were stereotyped as bringing opium, prostitution and crime to America. And these depictions were amplified in pop culture.
Jason Ruiz: There are dime-store novels. There are there's sheet music. There are early pinball machines, all that depict Chinese opium dens. If we look at the history of the war on drugs and race, we can see the Chinese being scapegoated at one point in the history of the war on drugs.
Hannah McCarthy: To be clear, opium existed in America long before the wave of Chinese immigrants in the mid-19th century. For example, Thomas Jefferson grew his own poppies for opium, for use in laudanum, which is a painkiller.
Nick Capodice: So did these early laws have any impact on the opium trade? Did it keep people from using the drug?
Hannah McCarthy: Not at all. It actually had the opposite effect. Instead of stopping the trade, it simply drove it underground and into the hands of traffickers.
Jason Ruiz: Everything is supply and demand. Everyone who's taken the first day of Economics 101 knows that economies are guided by supply and demand. We have focused in our war on drugs, in eradicating the supply more than we have attempted to eradicate the demand for drugs.
Hannah McCarthy: And this brings us to another notable moment in America's war on drugs, what Jason Ruiz calls the quote, cocaine craze.
Jason Ruiz: Cocaine was presented as this kind of panacea, as a new wonder drug, the early ingredient in Coca-Cola.
Nick Capodice: Right. This was the time when cocaine was seen as a sort of miracle drug that could cure everything depression, indigestion, low energy pain. And if I recall, people originally thought it was non-addictive, right?
Hannah McCarthy: They did indeed. There were even cocaine toothache drops that depicted children playing on its packaging. Folks were led to believe that cocaine was an instant cure for teething babies. But that perception began to change in the early 20th century. Why? Well, not unlike what happened with opium. There was a shift in the public's perception of cocaine around this time. And much of the research about the negative side effects of cocaine focused on race.
Jason Ruiz: Cocaine was considered a positive factor and a positive force in American society until the medical community, journalists, politicians started depicting African Americans as particularly susceptible to cocaine abuse and cocaine is having a particularly dangerous effect on the Black body. For example, there was very mainstream reporting and very mainstream medical. I'm putting scare quotes around science depicting hyper-virile Black men who are on cocaine in the early 20th century, a very mainstream kind of representation that cocaine gave Black people, in particular kind of superpowers. Kind of more dangerous, and that the racialized status quo might be imperiled if Black people had this kind of strength that cocaine would give them, believe it or not.
Hannah McCarthy: Media such as the New York Times published stories based on this fallacy. Here's Yasser Payne again.
Yasser Payne: This grand promotion of we have to bring under control and all of these Black men who are getting high on cocaine because when they get high on cocaine, then they have this kind of superhuman strength and so forth and so on. Right. All of this is being ginned up.
Hannah McCarthy: These arguments led to yet another racialized policy on drug enforcement, the Harrison Act. Advocates for it promoted racially biased narratives falsely associating drug use by Black men with the murder of white people.
Yasser Payne: So by 1914, you now have the Harrison Act, which now makes it illegal to sell or use drugs, particularly those outside of a doctor's office. That's the first instance that led to the hyper-incarceration of Black men as a function of drugs.
Nick Capodice: So with the Harrison Act, cocaine becomes illegal in 1914. But I know. Cocaine is around today. Illegal, yes. But it was not permanently eradicated by this law.
Jason Ruiz: Cocaine actually mostly disappears from the United States. It's very, very rare until the 1970s when cocaine is kind of reintroduced, when cocaine started to reemerge on the American scene in the 1970s. It was often celebrated in the press. It was often identified as something new and interesting and elite. You have The New York Times identifying cocaine as an elite Hollywood Party drug as something to experiment with Studio 54, all of that, the disco era.
Nick Capodice: So was the government going out and raiding all these discotheques to tamp down on rampant cocaine use? I mean, after all, cocaine is a dangerous drug.
Hannah McCarthy: Well, no, they weren't.
Jason Ruiz: Oddly enough, the federal government is really not worried about cocaine at all in the 1970s when it's considered very elite, when it's considered expensive.
Hannah McCarthy: In other words, if you weren't a drug trafficker importing boatloads of the stuff, then you weren't going to have a Swat team at your front door. Interestingly, at this point, there is a bit of a lull in the government's crackdown on drugs.
Nick Capodice: Why the lull?
Hannah McCarthy: Because political winds shift. In 1977, Jimmy Carter ran for president on a platform of decriminalizing marijuana. This was a controversial stance at the time, as marijuana had been classified as a schedule one drug by the Nixon administration, which meant that it was in the same category as drugs like LSD and heroin.
Archive: I support a change in the law to end federal criminal penalties for possession of up to one ounce of marijuana. Leaving the states free to adopt whatever laws they wish concerning marijuana. Decriminalization is not legalization. I do not condone any drug abuse and we will do everything possible to reduce the serious threat to our society.
Hannah McCarthy: During his presidency, Carter did not succeed in decriminalizing marijuana, but he did take steps to reduce the penalties for its possession. Then political winds shifted again with the next election and the next president, Ronald Reagan. His political platform was very different from Carter's and ushered in a new phrase that would become a pretty familiar conservative catchphrase Family values.
Archive: And now let me turn to three other matters vital to family values and the quality of family life. The first is an untold American success story. Recently, we released our annual survey of what graduating high school seniors have to say about drugs. Cocaine use is declining and marijuana use was the lowest since surveying began. You can be proud that our students are just saying no to drugs.
Hannah McCarthy: In the meantime, because of its renewed popularity as a party drug, in the 1970s, more and more cocaine had been arriving in the United States, flooding the market. And now we've got a supply and demand problem again. Cocaine became a lot cheaper and yes, demand dropped, which meant cocaine suppliers had to find customers for it. And they did that by creating a new way of marketing and selling it. Drug traffickers began mixing cocaine or cutting it with baking soda to create a new rock-like form of the drug called crack cocaine.
Jason Ruiz: The substance remained the same even when it starts being marketed as crack.
Hannah McCarthy: Cocaine and crack are pharmacologically almost the exact same thing, but they are ingested differently and the drug is cheaper than cocaine. In the 1980s, people began associating crack use with Black communities. Why is that? But this is a perfect example of the power of news media. In 1981, the first year of the Reagan administration, only 3% of Americans thought that cutting the drug supply was the number one way to prevent crime. But 22% thought that fixing unemployment would reduce crime.
Nick Capodice: And fixing high unemployment is no easy feat.
Hannah McCarthy: It is not. The Reagan administration thought that they needed to shift the narrative if they were to keep a Republican majority because of their tough-on-crime campaign. They wanted to escalate the war on drugs. To do that, they needed more funding from Congress and they needed public support.
Nick Capodice: Because public support for an issue means it will increase the likelihood of a lawmaker and a president getting reelected.
Hannah McCarthy: That was the hope. But there was a problem. Illegal drug use in the 80s was down, but cocaine and crack use was up and the Black community was the perfect scapegoat. So the Reagan administration focused efforts on lobbying the media to demonize crack cocaine. Dea agents even began giving presentations to news outlets.
Archive: People don't realize that it's not just in the ghettos anymore.
Archive: The families.
Archive: Why do you think they took you away from Mommy? I was.
Archive: From losing fathers and mothers and children.
Hannah McCarthy: So the crack story snowballed and law enforcement and policymakers, they gave this issue a name. The crack epidemic.
Jason Ruiz: Ideas about who is the user of the drug shifted very dramatically. And then suddenly cocaine is very dangerous. It's hyper-policed.
Nick Capodice: What does Jason mean by hyper-policed?
Hannah McCarthy: We'll get to that right after the break.
Nick Capodice: But first, just a reminder to our listeners that this show is listener supported. You'll hear some ads from time to time, but Civics 101 takes tremendous resources to make. And the most reliable, most rewarding support we get is from you, our listener. So if you like what we do, if you like the show on its mission, consider making a donation in any amount at our website, civics101podcast.org.
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Hannah McCarthy: We're back. You're listening to Civics 101 and this is our episode on the history and evolution of the American War on Drugs.
Nick Capodice: And right before the break, we were talking about the 1980s when America was experiencing what was being called the crack epidemic and that the drug called crack cocaine, a cheaper alternative to cocaine, was being hyper-policed. So what does that mean exactly?
Hannah McCarthy: Hyper-policing means, in essence, the excessive use of police surveillance and force in a community. It can manifest in a number of ways, including increased stop and frisks, mass arrests and the use of military-grade weapons and equipment. Now, do you remember how President Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, said essentially that the war on drugs was a front to disrupt the Black community and antiwar protesters? I do. So hyper policing is a tool to do that. Here's Yasser Arafat Payne again. And he's explained to us that the war on drugs is part of a long-term pattern of policies designed to maintain white power structures in the United States.
Yasser Payne: So our economy is organized by race with Black Americans at the bottom and whiteness at the top. All right. You need an economic outgroup, right, for the currency to have value. Therefore, you need a poor group. Right. And that poor group has largely, you know, not exclusively, but largely been Black Americans, descendant of the slave south. So from slavery to the present, right. It was slavery. You had convict leasing, you had the Jim Crow and you had redlining. Right. You had a bunch of other all kinds of nefarious activities taking place to consistently, constantly undermine Black Americans so they can remain in a bottom caste group. You sabotage your schools, you make sure their men are unemployed. You you know, you do any and every nefarious thing. Then you create these dominant narratives that they're lazy or don't want to work hard, or you create other dominant narratives. You know, we live in a land of opportunity. All you have to do is work. You know, anyone can, you know, I guess strike it big or do well, right? All of this is not true. The war on drugs is and or, you know, was in terms of class period. It was just the latest of strategies implemented to undermine. Right. Black Americans primarily other folk though too though. But right. So that they can remain not only and keep in mind, not only are they doing this to ensure bottom caste ness for the benefit of the economy and or white America, but they're doing this right because they are profiteers. They are exploiting the poverty lacks of money is made from or people, right. They're horrors, so to speak. The structural violence inflicted upon them, so to speak, is a multi-billion dollar, arguably multi-trillion dollar affair. Right. So the war on drugs was just that. It was a great plan hatched up from their perspective. Right. Playing right hatched up to ensure, once again the destabilization of this community.
Hannah McCarthy: There are so many big ideas here about race, class and how our economy works. It's important to understand the war on drugs in this context because of its outcomes for Black and Latino people. This is Jason Ruiz.
Jason Ruiz: Yeah, the story of our war on drugs is very clearly connected to our problem with mass incarceration and the fact that the United States has an incarceration rate that is the highest in the so-called developed world. We have locked up a lot of people in this country for drugs, and there's a lot of people sitting in a prison cell right now in the United States because of drugs. It's because for decades, our main strategy in combating drugs was punitive and carceral, meaning that we have categorized certain people as the problems of our collective national addiction to drugs. And we have decided that the easiest thing to do or the most effective thing to do is to lock people up on drug offenses. And it doesn't work. It's very easy to get put in prison for drugs in this country, but it's very difficult to get treatment for drug addiction. So the carceral approach has proven again and again that it doesn't work. It's also not to beat a dead horse racialized, and it's connected to what, you know, people call the new Jim Crow, the idea that Black people in particular, but that includes it has to include Latinx and other groups are locked up. At such an alarming rate right now has everything to do with our punitive and carceral approach that we've taken to the war on drugs.
Hannah McCarthy: And that takes us back to the hyper-policing of crack cocaine that began in the 1980s. In the popular imagination, Ronald Reagan and his wife, the first lady, Nancy Reagan, get much of the credit for launching the modern-era war on drugs because of their ubiquitous Just Say No public service campaign, which launched in 1982.
Archive: Nancy was and still is, the motivational force behind the Just Say No Movement. It all started in elementary school in Oakland, California, during the summer of 1984. She was talking to a class about drug abuse, and out of her discussion with the youngsters came the idea of just say no clubs. And from that very day, the idea snowballed.
Nick Capodice: I remember this campaign very well. Nancy Reagan was the campaign's primary spokesperson, right? She made TV appearances. She traveled around. She talked to kids at schools, all about the dangers of drug use. Right.
Hannah McCarthy: And then we also have the legislation, two policies passed during the Reagan administration, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The first bill increased penalties for drug offenses, while the second created the Office of National Drug Control Policy and provided funding for drug treatment and prevention programs. So both laws now targeted not only the drug dealer, but also the drug consumer.
Yasser Payne: And it's centered around powdered cocaine and crack cocaine. So five grams grams of crack, you know, can give you five years and 500g of powdered cocaine can give you five years. Right. Unfair disproportionately implements it and is largely targeted. And or these laws are created. Right. To hyper incarcerate Black men.
Nick Capodice: And the sentencing that Yasser was talking about, are these mandatory minimum sentences.
Hannah McCarthy: They are.
Yasser Payne: And it forces them to stick to the letter of the law or certain sentencing guidelines. Judges can consider a lot of characteristics, but the mandatory minimums are put into place so that people do, you know, a certain period of time they really got strict with some of these laws.
Jason Ruiz: The prison disparities, the sentencing disparities between cocaine possession and crack possession become 100 to 1 in the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: To people with the same amount of cocaine could receive vastly different sentences depending on whether the cocaine is in crack form or powder form.
Jason Ruiz: Minimum mandatory sentences become huge around crack cocaine. It's not until 2010, with the Fair Sentencing Act that we we lower the disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine. And even then, it's 18 to 1.
Hannah McCarthy: The US prison population increased dramatically after the Reagan era war on drugs was declared, a population going from 500,000 to more than 2.2 million people today.
Nick Capodice: That is a huge increase.
Hannah McCarthy: It is. And drug convictions account for a significant portion of this increase. Today, 1 in 5 incarcerated people is locked up for a drug offense. And it's worth pointing out that 38% of the US prison population is Black, despite Black people making up only about 14% of the overall population of the US. And the rates of incarceration for drug-related offenses are racially disproportionate, particularly when compared to the statistics on drug use.
Yasser Payne: The US government knew then in the 1980s that white people actually use more drugs than and it doesn't matter what the drug is marijuana, the methamphetamine. Right. And and or in this instance, even crack cocaine. So keep in mind, during the 1980s and 1990s, white folk accounted for 60% of all crack cocaine users. Black folk accounted for approximately 30% of crack cocaine users. But all of the attention in news and DA right was focused on Black America. Now, you did have a crack cocaine heroin drug epidemic in poor, large Black America. Right. That that was true. But the problem was even bigger in white America. Right. And for the most part, white folk sell and use all drugs more than Black Americans. But the laws were differentially applied. And the narrative was, I would say, deceptively discussed on media.
Nick Capodice: One of the things I'm wondering about Hannah, it's something we talked a little bit about earlier, the flood of drugs like cocaine into the United States. That's the supply part of the equation, right? And as we heard earlier, while the government could do so much more on the demand side creating policies around substance use, there is frequently action when it comes to the supply side. So how is the US dealt with these places where the drugs are coming from in the first place?
Jason Ruiz: The case of Colombia is really a good example of the fact that our war on drugs has spilled over into international politics and has given us an excuse to intervene in countries that are already politically very fragile. For example, Colombia has been going through a civil war, arguably for, you know, more than 60 years. It's the arguable part is arguable whether or not the nation still engaged in a civil war. But the US has invested billions of dollars into militarizing the eradication of coca fields in Colombia. That is an indisputable fact of US history from the 1990s to the present. It's because our war on drugs has focused on interdiction and crop eradication over treatment. That to me is one of the biggest scandals and stories of the war on drugs is that it's very hard for the average American to get free or very cheap drug treatment. But we've invested billions, trillions of dollars and eradicating crops in worldwide especially, and including in Colombia.
Hannah McCarthy: According to Jason. This investment has been a failure. The market for illegal drugs has continued to flourish because it adapts when necessary. And Jason also emphasized and I think it's really important to pause on this that for the most part, the policies and laws attached to the war on drugs don't prioritize treatment for those coping with substance use or the families affected by substance use disorder.
Jason Ruiz: Part of the reason why think we don't focus enough on the demand side and the war on drugs is because of all of these moral quagmires that we get into when we really explore the question of who a drug user is and why drugs are important to them but can relate to, you know, to my cousins that I babysat, you know, have died in the last few years over this. And it's heartbreaking.
Nick Capodice: Now, Hannah, I don't think we can end this episode without talking at least a little bit about the opioid crisis we're grappling with today in the US and how it stands apart from the so-called war on drugs.
Hannah McCarthy: In recent years, opioid addiction has increasingly come to be seen as a public health issue. It has started to elicit more cultural and political compassion for its victims. States and communities have created drug courts and funding for treatment facilities. Police officers now carry lifesaving overdose medications, and substance use disorder is now widely recognized as a disease. There's plenty of research that shows this disparity in the way that the opioid crisis has been treated is because opioids are perceived to have affected mostly white people.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and if we just think about the names like the crack epidemic versus the opioid crisis, as it's called by some, one is a thing that is happening to us and we have to control. And the other is the thing where we have to jump in and help.
Hannah McCarthy: There is a significant difference between the rhetoric and enforcement around crack cocaine and opioids. As we heard, crack prompted lawmakers to enact strict laws which led to hyper-policing and harsh prison sentences for users. And in the case of opioid use, the manufacturers, large pharmaceutical companies have faced legal consequences.
Nick Capodice: Right. I read recently that certain pharmaceutical companies have been fined billions of dollars for their role in the opioid epidemic, but no executives so far have been sentenced to jail time.
Jason Ruiz: Everyone who dies from an overdose or from addiction-related problems is a human being that had hopes and dreams and did not have to die in in a potentially ugly way. So, yeah, I mean, it's such a hard part of talking about all this stuff. And I personally believe it's why we have such a messed up attitude about fighting drugs in the way that we do because we don't really want to know what people are going through. We just want to stop them from using the drug. People need therapy and they need sometimes methadone or they need replacements to get them off of drugs. And we don't want to do the harder stuff. We just want to we just want to get the drug off the street or out of the pharmacy.
Hannah McCarthy: According to the CDC, more than 106,000 Americans died as a result of drug overdoses in 2021. That is the most recent complete year of data available. And this includes deaths from opioids and the numbers. They're getting worse and worse. In 2015, there were about 52,000 deaths, so we've doubled that number in just six years.
Jason Ruiz: That's part of the reason why so many people have said, why are we still even using the word war on drugs? Why is it still a thing? Because we've lost the importation of cocaine today in the United States is higher than it was in the 90s or the 80s. When we think that cocaine peaked, there's more coca being produced in Colombia than there was 30 years ago. So we've lost the war on drugs, but we just don't admit defeat easily in this country.
Archive: This episode of Civics 101 was produced by Jacqui Fulton with help from Christina Phillips, me, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. It was edited by executive producer Rebecca Lavoie. Music by Ayo. Arthur Benson. Blue Dot Sessions, Nangdo, Sunset Beach Falcon Drives and Chris Zabriskie. If you love Civics 101, please share the podcast with your friends. You can find us on all the audio apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can find us at civics101podcast.org. There you can also sign up for our newsletter or make a donation to support our work. Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.