"War on Drugs"

Heroin deaths have nearly tripled over the last five years, according to the DEA. It’s cheaper now, and more potent than anything law enforcement encountered two decades ago.

[...]

Republicans are, predictably, hesitant about appropriating more funding. However, by an almost unanimous vote, the Senate approved legislation earlier this month designed to fight the heroin epidemic and encourage the use of naloxone—a drug used to reverse overdoses. The House will take up the measure soon.

[...]

President Richard Nixon, according to a new article in Harper’s magazine, used drug policy as a political strategy—to neutralize his political foes, specifically “the anti-war left and black people.”

His domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, who spent 18 months in prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, outlined a scheme by which our policies to combat illicit drug abuse “could disrupt those communities.”

“We knew we couldn’t 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,” Ehrlichman reportedly told journalist Dan Baum in 1994.

“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.”

[...]

Mass incarceration, driven by laws sweeping through the states and the 1994 federal crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton, was—in part—a result of inequities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine that were codified in mandatory sentencing rules.

One was used in the “streets” and the other in the “suites.” One would get you jail time. The other would more frequently result in probation and mandatory treatment. Despite a handful of reforms advanced by the Obama administration, the disparities in policing, prosecution and sentencing continue to saturate our criminal justice system.

[...]

But the scourge is not contained to distressed urban neighborhoods. Like crystal meth, heroin and fentanyl addiction is now almost exclusive to white America and it is far from invisible.

[...]

“Between 2006 and 2013, the number of first-time heroin users nearly doubled, and about 90 percent of these first-time users were white.”

In predominantly white New Hampshire, Massachusetts, West Virginia, and Oklahoma, drug deaths associated with opioids have skyrocketed with incidences of death “reaching levels similar to the HIV epidemic at its peak.”

  Daily Beast

Interesting, isn't it, how the growing change in attitude and approach to the drug issue coincides with the change in color of its users?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.