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Comment by frandroid | Hacker News Reader

The drug war is a race war. It has little to do with drugs. They're not going after white coke/pot users/dealers very much, are they?

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Race has nothing to do with it. Lots of meth labs getting busted in rural America are run by white dealers.

You really can't say it has "nothing to do with it." Just look at the sentencing guidelines between crack and coke. Listen to the original hearings from when pot was made illegal. Look at the proportion of people in prison for pot (hint: It doesn't reflect the racial make-up of users). Yes — in some parts of the country the disparity is based more on class than race. But that's definitely not the whole story.

White people get arrested sometimes. That doesn't mean that the war on drugs doesn't have a race discrepancy problem[1].

[1] http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/crime09.htm

You guys are killing me. I'm Mexican-American. I grew up an an urban U.S. city where many of my neighborhood pals ended up 'locked up or covered up'.

I have a pretty good understanding of race and the 'war on drugs.'

Race isn't everything, but it's ridiculous to pretend that race hasn't substantially influenced the drug war. Even aside from the highly unbalanced prosecution and conviction of drug offenders depending on race, race colors everything in the drug war: look at the history of marijuana [0], for instance, or crack cocaine sentencing practices.

[0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/07/14/201981025/the...

Just because some meth labs run by white guys get busted, doesn't mean that there isn't a racial element to the drug war. One does not follow from the other. Convictions for possession, for instance, are massively biased compared to the usage by group.

Why the 88, by the way? I hope it isn't to do with that angry Chaplin lookalike. Is just when combined with silver and a comment saying that race has nothing to do with the drug war in the US, I can't help but get suspicious. Apologies for the godwinning if it is just the year you were born, or something.

If your constituents are racists, you have to find policies that support those views by proxy -- the war on drugs, immigration control, abortion rights, and so on. Over time, people end up remembering the propaganda and forget the real reasons these ideas gained so much support in the beginning.

Meth didn't exist when the war on drugs started, it is an after the fact explanation. You've been taught that the war on drugs is equal opportunity. Propaganda is built on lies and dis-information. The individuals crafting policies who actually believe that propaganda eventually craft disaster and failure, like a geneticist who doesn't believe in evolution.

The majority of your 'white coke' or powder cocaine busts are of Hispanic dealers (that's how it gets into the country and distributed to the big cities). Crack busts on the other hand were almost exclusively Africa-American dealers. They'd make crack out of powder cocaine once it got to their neighborhoods.

You parsed my admittedly poorly-written sentence wrong. I meant white dealers and users of pot and coke.

It's more of a money thing. In the US, law enforcement agencies are allowed to keep and liquidate assets seized during drug raids. This generates a lot of money for the agencies, many of which have small budgets otherwise.

As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).

I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.

It became somewhat about money, but that's a fairly recent development in policing in general -- it's not much different from allowing the executive branch to keep all or part of other various fines.

But there's nowhere near as much money coming from seizure as is coming from the government to fund the manpower and equipment used to do the seizing.

The enforcement divisions of the DOJ seize less than 2B annually. (That's FBI/DEA/ATF/etc combined.) Their combined budget is ~27B.

Seizure (and prosecution in general) is more a problem due to perverse incentive schemes: Police are incentivized to seize money not so much to have the money directly, but to have those seizures show up on their performance reviews. Not unlike prosecutors trying to rack up convictions or traffic cops trying to fill ticket quotas.

The Drug War is much more about race.

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