Why is it, then, that crack cocaine is a high-penalty drug, and hallucinogens are low-penalty drugs?
(I leave this as an exercise to the reader.)
People also forget why those dealers were in the business in the first place.
(Hint: the US government played a large role in explicitly financing the drug trade that resulted in a stead inflow of crack, predominantly to black communities[0]. Crack cocaine would not have been anywhere nearly as lucrative a business otherwise[1].)
[0] https://oig.justice.gov/special/9712/
[1] Which isn't to say that it's particularly lucrative either way, as has been demonstrated numerous times by economists - it just happens to be one of the few options available for many people who are trying to scrape together a living under those circumstances.
I remember big protests with black community leaders accusing the police of racism for not arresting crack dealers as their neighborhoods had become so dangerous police totally avoided them. They demanded new laws. Their newly elected reps ran on a platform of new tougher laws. The heavy hand of government then solved this by creating mandatory minimum sentencing and other laws that were blanket applied regardless of individual situation and created mass incarceration.
Now, let's think why white neighborhoods were not struggling with the same problems of violent crime due to the drug trade. We know that the answer is not
(a) white people weren't doing drugs
(b) white people were doing drugs that were less addictive
because in reality, white people had (and still have) roughly the same total rates of drug use as everyone else. And in this case, white people were largely using the same drug (cocaine, in powered form) as black people (cocaine, in freebase form).
I'm not saying that black people at the time weren't concerned with violent crime and calling for solutions to it. In fact, I'm usually the person who points this out whenever discussions about 80s and 90s drug law sentencing come up on HN. What I am saying instead is that it's silly to ignore the reason that black communities were concerned with problems that white communities never had to face in the first place.
The difference in the effects of drug trade on black communities and on white communities in the 1980s are emphatically not due to fundamental differences of the drugs themselves, or due to differences in the prevalence of drug trade and drug usage.
[0] http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339610?seq=1#page_scan_t...
If the fraction of drug users are equal, but blacks lie about whether they're drug users more often, then your statistics will show that whites use more.
The reported difference between blacks and whites is less than the known difference in honesty between them with regard to drug questions.
You also don't seem to have responded to my point at all, which is that blacks have a higher rate of reported usage within the last week. This is before taking the self-reported nature into account. See the source originally cited, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf
>Among black drug users, 54% reported using drugs at least monthly and 32% reported using them weekly. Such frequent drug use was less common among white drug users. Among white users, 39% reported using drugs monthly and 20% reported using them weekly.
I'll let you do the math to determine how this affects usage rates.
That's completely counter to the results of both the MTF and NSDUH. Since 1975, with the exception of Native Americans, whites consistently have slightly higher usage rates of drugs than any other racial demographic, although the overall drug usage rates are roughly comparable. For example:
> For a number of years, 12th-grade African-American students reported lifetime, annual, 30-day, and daily prevalence rates for nearly all drugs that were lower—sometimes dramatically so—than those for White or Hispanic 12th graders. That is less true [in 2014], with rates of drug use among African Americans more similar to the other groups[0]
The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
[0] http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/mtf-vol1_2014...
[1] Yes, begging the question, not raising the question.
>The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.
If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more.
>Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.
I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one from SSC that I linked to:
>Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113)
This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in 1984.
Powder cocaine is literally the same drug as crack cocaine, yet the sentencing disparities since the 1980s have been completely out of sync. They've slightly converged in the last ~5 years (crack cocaine sentences have been reduced), but let's not pretend that the sentencing laws[0] have not been radically influenced by perceptions of associations of drugs with race.
> People aren't out robbing houses to get their next _____ fix
LSD is not physically addictive, but in general, I'll encourage you to question this line of thinking. Looking at whether people are "out robbing houses" glosses over the question of why people would commit robbery in order to purchase drugs, and the racial and socioeconomic issues that are inextricably linked to that.
Put another way: who's not committing robbery in order to purchase the drugs that they use, and why aren't they? Is it because their drug (e.g. powdered cocaine) is fundamentally less addictive? Or is it because they are already in a position in society that allows them other opportunities to finance their drug use? Is it a statement about the drug itself, or simply a statement about the social structures that already exist?
[0] If you want a really wonderful example of this, look at the reason that possession of <27g of marijuana was the only drug that was exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws' mandatory minimum sentencing. It was, quite literally, that kids in predominantly white and wealthy suburbs were being sentenced to prison time, and the parents wanted the judges to have discretionary power when sentencing them.
Highly incorrect.
Smoking an equivalent amount of cocaine-base (crack) vs snorting cocaine-HCL (powder) is a completely different experience due to purity, ROA, and absorption (surface area of lungs vs nasal passage is 50x), etc.
Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
This boils down to "the means of ingestion of a drug has a significant effect on the effects of the drug". Anybody who has ever both smoked a joint and consumed THC edibles knows firsthand that this is the case. Insufflation and ingestion are different from inhalation, so yes, the experience, onset, reinforcement mechanisms would be different. That does not change the fact that they are fundamentally the same drug.
> Not to mention that is not an ionic bond, it is covalent. Different molecule.
It's not the form it's transported in that's relevant; it's the form that reaches the CNS that matters[0]. In this case, the pharmacokinetics of the two drugs are the same once they hit the bloodstream.
If that doesn't convince you, the consider that the effects of injecting crack cocaine[1] and powder cocaine are literally chemically identical.
[0] Actually, it's the pharmacokinetic process of the drug that's relevant, since two different molecules can be metabolized identically. (And not all drugs affect the CNS, but that's a side point).
[1] Less common, because smoking is logistically easier, and also results in a sharper onset since it saves half the round trip to the lungs. But it does happen.
Highly incorrect.
The amount of the drug and concentration of the drug and the salt or ester of the drug can impact the pharmacokinetics of the drug.
It was used to be thought that morphine and heroin was the same exact thing because the H was converted to morphine quickly. Except H ends up having different metabolites and ratios - not the mention the effects are not the same / even when accounted for the dose and ROA.
Also, to the main point, if one produces 10x the effect of the other, the point is the same...
Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine. The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
Can, but in the case of crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine, they demonstrably do not[0][1].
> Crack is severely more punished over cocaine because it severely impacts user behavior - much more so than cocaine
It really does not. It can be (but is not always) more habit-forming to smoke a drug than to insufflate it, but this is true of all substances. And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
> The campaign to punish crack possession was also largely due to blacks demanding it to be made as so.
No. There was support from within the black community, but to say it is "largely" due to this is overstating the case.
And getting back to the original point, that doesn't actually contradict the original statement, because the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
"However, evidence exists showing a greater abuse liability, greater propensity for dependence, and more severe consequences when cocaine is smoked (cocaine-base) or injected intravenously (cocaine hydrochloride) compared with intranasal use (cocaine hydrochloride).)."
The fact that the effects are different, even with the "same drug".
> the reason that black communities felt the impact of violent drug crime and white communities didn't is itself a direct effect of the racial power structures involved.
Except no matter where you go in the world, no matter its racial break-down, and no matter what it's history is, the pattern is the same: blacks disproportionately commit violent acts. And when those places are near 100% black, it gets even worse.
> And intravenous or subcutaneous use of crack cocaine and powder cocaine are literally, 100% identical.
We are comparing powder cocaine insufflated with crack smoked and how that impacted black communities.
I wish you'd come out and stated that this was your thesis from the very beginning. I now regret having wasted my time with this conversation.
Because black communities in the 1980s pushed for a crackdown (pun intended) on the crack industry, while no-one really cares all that much about the hallucinogen industries.
Because people are much more likely to kill, rob, rape, and do other heinous crimes from crack use than occasional LSD use.
When crack-cocaine hit the black communities, it absolutely destroyed them far much more than any previous drugs did.