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Comment by pakled_engineer | Hacker News Reader

A steady influx of cocaine, which became too expensive when said shady agencies stopped what they were doing and local dealers decided to boil the expensive coke into crack so it became more affordable to addicts. Now there was a $5 per point addictive drug flooding poor areas with zero law enforcement to control it.

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.

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Yes.

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.

Whites were doing less drugs per drug user, as my comment above said.

No, drug usage rates among whites are not and were not substantially lower than drug usage rates for other races. (In some years, they were actually higher, though not substantially so). In fact, in the 1980s, white people were also 45% more likely to sell drugs as well[0].

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...

>Hindelang, Hirshi, and Weiss (1981) compare police records on arrests to self-reports for a sample of individuals and find these to be similar, with the exception of self-reports for young black men, which appear to understate the amount of crime committed.

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.

> You 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.

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.

You're using 12th grade numbers. That's more than enough to account for any difference.

>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.

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