To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler Read Free Book Online

turn evolved during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond into the drug war politics of mass incarceration of people of color. “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it,” Alexander writes. Felony convictions, she reminds us, open the door for all manner of legal discrimination: denial of the right to vote, serve on a jury, or access public education benefits; subjection to employment and housing discrimination. “Quite belatedly,” Alexander writes, “I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner similar to Jim Crow.” That emergence came through the drug war.
    President Ronald Reagan declared his War on Drugs in February 1982, a time when drug use in the United States was in decline, prisons seemed to be on their way out, Miami was awash in cocaine money and blood, and Central America was in the throes of left-wing revolutions. The drug war would radically alter all of that. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails on drug charges increased by 1,100 percent. By 2010 there were 2 million people in prisons and jails across the country. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation in the world. In 2009, Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project wrote, “The number of people incarcerated for a drug offense is now greater than the number incarcerated for all [other]offenses in 1980.” And how is this a racialized form of social control? Again, according to the Sentencing Project, African Americans alone make up 14 percent of regular drug users and 56 percent of persons in state prison for drug offenses; African Americans serve almost as much time in federal prison for drug offenses (58.7 months) as whites do for violent offenses (61.7 months). More African Americans are behind bars now than were enslaved in 1850. In addition to racial profiling on the street, for twenty years possession of five grams of crack carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence; there was a 100:1 crack-to-powder-cocaine sentencing disparity, meaning that it took possession of 100 grams of white powder cocaine to require the same mandatory minimum sentence as possession of one gram of crack. (This law was revised on August 3, 2010, to require possession of 28 grams of crack to trigger the mandatory five-year sentence.)
    The use of prohibition for racialized social control is the genesis of the modern drug-prohibition era. The first drug-prohibition law ever passed was an 1875 city ordinance in San Francisco banning opium, and with it, criminalizing working-class Chinese immigrants and attacking their local economy. The law came after more than two decades of discriminatory laws passed in California against Chinese workers, and six years before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The drug war has its deepest roots in racism.
    In 1900, people in the United States could purchase opium, morphine, heroin, marijuana, and cocaine over the counter at drugstores or direct from producers through mail-order catalogues. Within twenty years that would change. Even though upper-class whites consumed opiates, cocaine, and marijuana, the prohibitionist fervor linked each drug with working-class people of color: opiates with Chinese, cocaine with African Americans, and marijuana with Mexicans. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines writes in The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics , “The fantasy of cocainised blacks from plantations and construction sites going on sexual rampages among white women soon raised a racist panic. A writer in the Medical Record , for example, warned that ‘hitherto inoffensive, law-abiding negroes’ were transformed by cocaine into a ‘constant menace’ whose ‘sexual desires are increased and perverted.’”
    The 1914 Harrison Act required registration, taxation, and medical