War on Drugs

Race, Caste, Classism and the U.S. War on Drugs

By Andre Little
With a thorough analysis of history it should be duly noted, remembered, and deeply reflected
upon, that when discussing the issue of the so-called "War on Drugs" or drug policies in general,
logic and reason tells us that such policies serve social and political agendas reaching far
beyond the surface notion of health and safety of the general public. In simpler terms, the
history of U.S. drug policies did not arise out of an earnest desire to protect Americans from
addiction. The fact that the country is still fighting a "War on Drugs," which was not a military
action as such and has lasted at least 50 years is proof positive that this policy was not declared
within a well intended vacuum of social welfare for a nation, nor its citizens.

If we closely examine the history and context of the "War on Drugs" we will find therein lies
subtle but significantly obvious motivations of race, class, and to an extent cultural control of
the American populous. Deep altruistic concerns, campaigns, executive orders or political
actions directly aimed at stopping the flow of harmful intoxicants, the rehabilitation of addicts
or the preservation of lives from the pitfalls of overdose have never emerged as a priority
among any Presidential candidate in the history of our political system, although the rhetoric of
fighting the War on Drugs has echoed from many POTUS podiums for several decades.
Furthermore, if we take into consideration the general topic of mood altering substances and
politics, it is difficult to ignore that medicinal plants, drugs, their uses, and their users,
notwithstanding, have been used as a tool of manipulation and control by the state and men of
commercial industry as much as, or in more impactful ways than by individuals themselves.

Modern racism within the context of drugs and U.S. mass incarceration has resulted in what
many consider a type of classism, or caste system with punitive outcomes tied directly to
corporate profits that are a far cry beyond the social politics of a colonial era Tea Party in
Boston, Alcohol Prohibition of the roaring 20s, and even tobacco and sugar plantations of
Pre-Emancipation slavery. Current data states:
With less than 5% of the worlds population but nearly 25% of its incarcerated
population, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world
largely due to the war on drugs. Misguided drug laws and draconian sentencing
requirements have produced profoundly unequal outcomes for communities of color.
Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial and ethnic lines,



blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be criminalized for drug law violations than
whites.(1.)

Saki Knafo in 2013 adds; "White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used
most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine, marijuana and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely
to go to prison for drug offenses."(2.)

So the larger issue at hand, besides the drugs and drug use itself within the context of "War on
Drugs" is in fact that of race, class, and mass control of American culture. But from where did
such policies emerge? What in fact is the real motivation behind drug-related mass
incarceration of Americans of color?

Chinese Opium Dens

The first nation-wide ban against drug usage in the U.S., began with the city of San Franciscos
anti-opium law of 1875 which specifically targeted Chinese American immigrants. At the time,
one could purchase and use opium, morphine, and heroin legally without a prescription.
However this particular civic ordinance banned what was an inherited, or English influenced,
cultural custom of the smoking of opium in smoking houses or dens. The DEA Museum found
that In order to fund their ever-increasing desire for Chinese produced tea, Britain, through
their control of the East India Company, began smuggling Indian opium to China. This resulted
in a soaring addiction rate among the Chinese and led to the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s.
Subsequent Chinese immigration to work on the railroads and the gold rush brought opium
smoking to America.(3.)

Opium smoking was popular among Chinese laborers many of whom were landless peasants
who came into the country to work on the transcontinental railroads, in the textile industry, or
any job that would afford them a wage to pay off their borrowed debt to get to the U.S. By
1864, "the Year of Opium" in San Francisco, huge shipments were arriving regularly, and the
City's first three big drug busts occurred: On January 16th and April 22nd, shipments from the
ships Derby and Pallas were seized, and on June 19th a shipment of eggs turned out to have
something other than white and yolk in the shells.(4.)

Around the 1873-1879, during the Long Depression, when prices of goods sharply fell at an
alarming rate, the ensuing financial panic resulted in losses in the real estate and railroad
markets, causing the labor market dramatically shift into surplus. Chinese laborers, who were
already an enduring peasant class that could survive and work longer hours for much less pay
than the average white American laborer, posed as an apparent social threat to the working
class industrial sector of San Francisco. This in addition to the previous racism against the

2


Chinese in the Gold Rush Era, in about 1850, when California enacted the Foreign Miners Tax,
wherein each immigrant gold miner had to pay $20, per month to participate in mining. San
Franciscos opium den ordinance of 1875 was yet another attempt to target, restrict, and
imprison the competitive labor market that Chinese immigrants represented. A racist fear was
created that outlawed the smoking of opium and was directed at the Chinese because opium
smoking was a peculiarly Chinese habit. It was believed that Chinese men were luring white
women to have sex in opium dens. Later in 1909, the federal government would pass the
Opium Exclusion Act through Congress, which nationally reinforced racism against Chinese
American immigrants. This federal law would mark the very beginning of the nations long
history of War on Drugs.(5.)

The Cocaine Nigger

1914 saw the emergence of targeted racism to yet another American underclass through drug
affiliated slander that would last at least 100 years, when an article entitled Negro Cocaine
Fiends Are A New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Among Lower Class Blacks Because
They Have Taken to Sniffing Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition, appears in the New York
Times. The article describes accounts of a hitherto inoffensive negro in Asheville, N.C., of
whom the police chief was well acquainted was running amuck in a cocaine frenzy, had
attempted to stab an storekeeper, and was...engaged in beating up the various members of
his own household. Dr. Williams elaborates that the crazed negro drew a long knife, grappled
with the officer, and slashed him viciously across the shoulderThe chief drew his revolver,
placed the muzzle over the negros heart and fired, ...But the shot did not even stagger the
man. The report goes on to dramatize that cocaine also makes negros better marksman, that
the record of the cocaine nigger near Asheville, who dropped five men dead in their tracks,
using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing.(6.)

Such accounts of the cocaine nigger is reported to have sparked so much fear in the hearts of
law abiding citizens that it would not only influence the passing of the Harrison Narcotics Act,
but also amplified a pretext for lynchings. Carl L. Hart says, Between 1898 and 1914,
numerous articles appeared exaggerating the association of heinous crimes and cocaine use by
blacks. In some cases, suspicion of cocaine intoxication by blacks was reason enough to justify
lynchings. Eventually, it helped influence legislation.(7.)

The Harrison Act of 1914 was the beginning of a federal regulation of commercial distribution
of opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine and other over-the-counter opiates. Black people, along
with the Chinese, in this case were regarded as a likely scapegoats to aid in passage of such a
law. Ironically, in the 1880s -1903 cocaine was widely available commercially at a price of 25
cents per gram. Blue collar laborers, African Americans included, were encouraged to use the

3


drug to improve their productivity and to ward off the extremes of heat and cold. With the an
estimated 200,000 cases of addiction in 1902 the tide began to turn when Georgia banned the
use of cocaine that same year. The U.S. Food and Drug administration would require labelling of
narcotics in food products in 1906. The Harrison Act required special licensing for the
administering of narcotics. And in 1922, the Jones-Miller Narcotic Drug Import and Export Act
would increase criminal sanctions on possessors of such drugs with 10 year to life sentencing on
the presumption that users were in fact distributors, unless the accused defendants could
prove otherwise. Some might argue that the industrial pharmaceutical industry had a large part
to play in such federal sanctions.

The Mexican Marihuana Menace

Marijuana, now legal in 26 states plus the District of Columbia, and recreationally authorized in
8 of those states, is fast becoming an acceptable over-the-counter pain remedy in perhaps the
fastest growing industry in the U.S. However, as widely commercially acceptable as cannabis is
becoming today, history points to some significant prejudice associated with this drug and/or
medicine.

The New York Times recently acknowledged that The federal law that makes possession of
marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria
during the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and
African-Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted
history lives on in current federal policy, which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is
almost impervious to reason.(8.)

Cannabis or marijuana (its Mexican name), which ironically has long been in use medicinally
since 2737 B.C., was introduced to the U.S. in 1545. As a hemp product, mostly for rope and
textile products, it provided much needed revenue as an export to Europe for Jamestown
colonists in their early days of agribusiness. New World farmers continued to grow hemp into
the 1890s when it had replaced cotton as the largest cash crop coming out of the southern
states. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution would spark an influx of immigrants across the border,
and they would bring with them the recreational and medicinal traditions of cannabis use. As a
result, many crops would be grown along the Texas border, and would quickly be associated
with smoking by Mexicans as a marihuana menace.(9.)

In the 1920s anti-marijuana campaigns began to spread nationally, based on the premise that
the drug was dangerous and caused insanity. In 1927 the New York times reported, "A widow
and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to
doctors, who say that there is no hope of saving the children's lives and that the mother will be

4


insane for the rest of her life." In 1930, Harry Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, with help from Dupont Pharmaceuticals concerned about medicinal competition and
William Randolph Hearst with his timber investments for newspaper production and
anti-Mexican sentiments alarmed the country,

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 use. This
marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any
others... primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races...Marijuana is
an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death....Reefer makes
darkies think theyre as good as white men...Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist
brainwashing...You smoke a joint and youre likely to kill your brother...Marijuana is the most
violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.

As a result African Americans would be criminalized and thousands of Mexicans would be

deported. In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act was established, and marijuana would become
illegal.(10.)(11.)

Nixons Drug War

In 1969, President Nixon would identify drug abuse as "a serious national threat." And in 1970
the Controlled Substances Act, signed into law by Nixon would reframe drugs within
classifications or schedules 1-5. The term War on Drugs would officially begin when Nixon,
in 1971 in a special address to Congress would state 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.(12.)

Since then, while the country has seen dramatic federal, state, and regional tactics aimed at
combating drug-related crime and incarcerating violators, stopping or minimizing the
importation of production of illicit substances or reducing the effects of drug abuse has been a
war the United States continues to lose. In fact, looking at todays data as a whole, it seems the
so-called War on drugs was not a battle meant to be won, but one in which state, federal, and
corporate profits could be made, while tax dollars could be siphoned from the pockets of
tax-paying citizens toward further enforcement by militarized police departments and the
expansion of the prison industrial complex.

In a 1994 interview of John Ehrlichman, former counsel and Assistant to the President for
Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon, Dan Baum of Harpers Magazine uncovered
what seems to be a virtual pandoras box in terms of race, politics, and the intentions behind

5


U.S. federal policy on drugs use. While interviewing Ehrlichman for his book Smoke and
Mirrors, Baum asks the Watergate co-conspirator a series of wonky questions that he
impatiently waved away. 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 Im saying? We knew we couldnt 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. 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.(13.)

Exposed in 2016, this scathing remark by one of the authors of the War on Drugs does not sit
in historical isolation as it is currently hot news all over the internet. This evidence is backed by
yet another Watergate co-conspirator and former Nixon Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman who is
quoted from his diary that [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the facts that
the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system of recognizing this while
not appearing to.(14.)

In a recent interview with Christian Parenti, Suzi Weissman asks, Is the War on Drugs a
euphemism for repression of the rebellious and poor? The author quotes Haldeman and adds
implicitly that the War on Drugs was but a link in a longer chain of restraint by policy elites,
those who control the large foundations, who sit in government, who control the large
universities, the police forces. He goes on to say that the 1960s was largely considered a time
of domestic insurgency initiated by radical movements and urban uprisings, that the police
were were messing things up through either too much repression (in 1968 when the Chicago
cops' actions provoked a crisis on the floor of the democratic convention), or too little (the
beginning of the Watts rebellion in 1965, when the police forces didn't have the equipment
necessary to communicate with each other). This crisis in American policing is finally dealt with
at a national level starting in 1967, with President Johnsons Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets
Act of 1968. Parenti continues, And what that federal crime bill does is create the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration--this massive bureaucracy which for the next ten years
redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local law enforcement to give the cops all of the
things that we associate with the infrastructure of modern policing. That's when they first get
computers, helicopters, swat teams, body armor, shoulder radios. That's when cops for the first
time have to learn how to read--many of them before that weren't required to know how to
read--...(15.)

6


And so it seems that what we know as Nixons War on Drugs was simply a response by
powerful elites to simultaneously control the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the
1960s. As a result the nation would experience the development of militarized law
enforcement and a prison industrial complex that would grow because of drug related arrests
of black, brown and poor people and become large scale industries that we see today. Paul
Bermanzohn reports that, Following in his predecessor's footsteps, Reagan outdid Nixon in his
get-tough-on-crime policies and oversaw the steepest rise in incarceration rates. Bill Clinton
signed into law an omnibus crime bill in 1994, increasing capital offenses and the federal three
strikes provision mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two
or more prior convictions, including drug crimes. He poured over $30 billion into militarizing the
nations police. His group, the Democratic Leadership Council, brought much of the Democratic
Party to embrace coded racial politics in order to win over white voters.(16.)

Domestic
Our current president, whose campaign was backed by the GEO group, the world's leading
provider of correctional, detention, and community reentry services and the second largest
private prison company in the U.S., Donald Trump has recently initiated a crackdown on
immigration, which has excited many investors in the private prison industry, as he is
continuing the tradition of extending the long chain of control by elites and oligarchs onto
people of color, immigrants, the poor, and other social minorities.

This current data, observed in a continuum with the long U.S. history of the War on Drugs
reframes much of the political rhetoric we have heard from campaigns, polls, congressional
speeches, and mainstream media. In fact, many researchers and writers who have deeply
observed the social causes and effects of U.S. drug policies are beginning to see the bigger
picture of the what is known as war itself through the lens of wealth investment
management, compound profit, war finance capitalism and control of lesser citizens by
corporate elites. Much of this analysis of American politics is being addressed in terms of a
caste system and/or white supremacy. In a 2010 internet post entitled The New Jim Crow:
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste, Michelle Alexander,
says Racial caste is alive and well in America. Most people dont like it when I say this. It
makes them angry. In the era of colorblindness theres a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the
myth that we as a nation have moved beyond race. Here are a few facts that run counter to
that triumphant racial narrative. She goes on to provide the following data:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today in prison or jail, on
probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

7


*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon
disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified,
prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born
during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to
the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban
areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These
men are part of a growing undercaste not class, caste permanently relegated, by law, to a
second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries,
and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public
benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow
era.(17.)

On the recent surge in nation-wide acceptance of medical and recreational marijuana

legalization, Michelle Alexander adds, Here are white men poised to run big marijuana
businesses, dreaming of cashing in bigbig money, big businesses selling weedafter 40 years
of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures
destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing? Alexander
said she is thrilled that Colorado and Washington have legalized pot and that Washington
D.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she said shes noticed
"warning signs" of a troubling trend emerging in the pot legalization movement: Whitesmen
in particularare the face of the movement, and the emerging pot industry. (A recent In These
Times article titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization, summarizes this
trend.)
Alexander said for 40 years poor communities of color have experienced the wrath of the war
on drugs.
Black men and boys have been the target of the war on drugs racist policiesstopped,
frisked and disturbedoften before theyre old enough to vote, she said. Those youths are
arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses that would go ignored in middle-class white
neighborhoods.
We arrest these kids at young ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages,
and then release them into a parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights
supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their
lives, she said. They can be discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing,
access to education, public benefits. They're locked into a permanent second-class status for
life. And weve done this in precisely the communities that were most in need of our
support.(18.)

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International Effects

Perhaps many of us have heard of the drama surrounding the Iran-Contra scandal during the
Reagan presidential era. Apparently through the oversight and under the direction of the U.S.
National Security Council, covert transactions of arms and drugs were being transferred in
violation of public policy. President Reagan, in an effort to quell the growth and spread of
Marxist Communism in Nicaragua, was intent on supplying military aid to rebel groups in the
region, in this case the Contras, to overthrow the Sandinistas. Public outcry in the U.S.
prompted Congress to ban this activity by the executive powers. In 1985, Robert McFarland
began selling arms to Iran in an effort to release hostages from Shiite terrorists in Lebanon. His
successor John Poindexter and NSC staff member Oliver North would continue this strategy,
and against national Congressional policy, would secretly take portions of the 40 plus million
dollars and use it to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. In 1986, when a Southern Air Transport
C-123 plane crashed in Nicaragua, the operation was exposed.

What did not make the news at the time of this scandal, was that in exchange for already illegal
funding and arms shipments into Central America, CIA contracted pilots, such as William Robert
"Tosh" Plumlee, were returning to U.S. soil with large shipments of cocaine. In a 2006 article,
long time CIA covert arms trafficker Plumlee says all the pilots involved in the CIA's
guns-for-drugs exchange were given special numbers to push on their aircraft's transponder,
codes that would give them the greenlight as they entered U.S. airspace; a U.S. Customs
balloon on the Mexican border functioned as the traffic cop. "Someone was sanctioned to clear
us across that border," he says. "It takes quite a coordination to do that." There were times, he
says, when the balloon was conveniently brought to earthjust as Plumlee or some other CIA
pilot neared the borderand other times when they'd simply broadcast the specified numbers
on their transponders. "We don't see anybody within 50 miles of us," Plumlee says. "I say that's
CIA."

The interviewer goes into further detail: At some point in all the excitement, however, it
became apparent to Plumlee that the drugs he and other pilots were transporting into the U.S.
weren't actually being seized by the DEA. Nor was anyone in a hurry to close down the Mexican
airstrips used for running drugs and guns. And no one seemed eager to use Plumlee's
intelligence to throw a net over the cartels. Plumlee's suspicionsand those of other pilots
involved in the Reagan administration's war in Central Americahelped to spark one of the
darkest and least-known chapters of the Iran-Contra scandal. Dozens of pilots, including
Plumlee, would eventually testify in top-secret hearings on Capitol Hill that they flew massive
amounts of cocaine into the U.S., and that those flights often arrived at U.S. military bases. "At
the time, there was open war between the CIA and the DEA," he says. "They weren't sharing
any information." Pilots who broke the code of silence were set up as drug smugglers whose

9


claims that they worked for the CIA would be treated as liesstupid lies. "A lot of guys were
picking up documents to protect their asses," Plumlee says. "People were being indicted."
In 1983, Plumlee contacted staffers for U.S. Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado) and told them
everything he knew about the phony drug-interdiction program and how it had been used by
the CIA as cover for the agency's secretand illegalshipment of arms for the Nicaraguan
Contras. "I didn't do that for publicity, but to protect myself," he says. "This was before the
factbefore the Iran-Contra hearings."
Once the scandal broke, Hart passed Plumlee to John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator
investigating accusations that the CIA was involved in drug smuggling. Kerry took Plumlee's
testimony under oathand then sealed it. Plumlee's testimony will remain classified until 2020,
although his name is still listed on the Kerry commission's official list of witnesses, available on
microfiche at public libraries.(27.)

This testimony confirms the findings of now deceased San Jose Mercury News investigative
journalist Gary Webb, who in 1996 produced a report titled Dark Alliance in which he alleged
that one Contra associated drug conduit had funneled shipments into Los Angeles. And
although, at the time this raised much anger and concern around the Black community while
also sparking Congressional hearings and being one of the first major news events to hit the
internet, Webb was mocked, shamed and largely discredited by the mainstream media. What
seems to be more than obvious now is that the power elites behind government agencies and
news outlets, definitely had something to hide.

Ryan Devereaux discovered, The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct
link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated Californias most
vulnerable African American neighborhoods. Devereaux goes on to describe a document;
Culled from the agencys in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a
previously unreleased six-page article titled Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the
Drug Conspiracy Story, adding the following Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of
Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as a ground base of already productive
relations with journalists, the CIAs Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest
newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the
reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter. The article later details; In Managing a
Nightmare, Dujmovic minced no words in describing the potentially devastating effect of the
series on the agencys image.

The charges could hardly be worse. A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to
believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in
Americas cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the
internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to

10


destroy the black community and keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of
CIAreminiscent of the 1970sabound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The
Congress gets involved.(28.)(29.)

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