The Color of the Drug War
The War on Drugs never came to my college dorm. Not because of insufficient enemies in sight — for indeed there were plenty — but rather because the drug war has rarely ever made its way to the cloistered residences of mostly white, well-off private school co-eds. Too busy busting the black and brown in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, I guess, to make a stop Uptown, where the Tulane freshmen on the 8th floor of Monroe Hall were busy filling up two foot bong chambers with pot smoke, and then inhaling until our eyes rolled back in our heads.
It’s not like the drug warriors didn’t know we were there. They’ve seen the studies on college drug use; they know what’s going on in the dorms, in the frat houses, and in the cramped college apartments. The campus cops know, the Administration knows, and the city police know too. They know but they don’t care; for the white and economically-advantaged, drugs have been essentially decriminalized for a long time.
Back in high school even, weekend parties at the homes of fellow white brethren would be routinely visited by police who had received a noise complaint. Although I find it hard to believe that they could have missed either the underage drinking or the smell of pot smoke hanging in the air, never once did they search anyone, raid the house, or make a bust. They would ask us politely to turn down the music, hop in their cruisers, and head down to the ‘hood to arrest some folks who had made the mistake of doing their drugs somewhere other than our party.
Read the rest of Tim Wise’s new article, Affirmative Inaction (LiP Magazine)
September 9th, 2002 at 10:48 pm
One important factor this article misses is the choices blacks and hispanics make in how they buy and sell their drugs. Being from LA, I have had good(?) fortune to see black and hispanic dealers selling out on the street corner. I even was approached by a hispanic gentleman selling heroin, in front of a methodone clinic. As a general rule, whites tend to be more cautious and behind the scenes in their drug activity, as the article suggets, usually keeping their use in their dorm rooms and houses rather than out in public in front of the methodone clinic. The high rates of drug confictions among blacks and hispanics is at least partly caused by the the choices made by those individuals, and I suspect influneced by their culture.