From “Becoming Brave: Finding The Courage To Pursue Racial Justice Now” by Brenda Salter McNeil
Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial lines, people of color are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated for drug-law violations than are Whites. Higher arrest and incarceration rates for African Americans and Latinos are not reflective of a higher prevalence of drug use or sales in those communities but rather reflect a law enforcement focus on urban areas, on lower-income communities, and on communities of color, as well as inequitable treatment by the criminal justice system.
In 1994, one of President Richard Nixon’s top-aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted that this law enforcement policy was intentionally racist from the very start. Here is what Ehrlichman confessed:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or (against) black people, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. 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.”