Paper Example on Aggressive Drug War: Impact on African Americans

Introduction

The United States of America has employed an aggressive method over the past decades to deal with illegal drug distribution across the country. However, the country has invested so much money in the program sparking debates all over the country. The discussions are continuing, and the most recent one is the aggression against the African Americans in the country as they form the most significant number of people imprisoned for drug offenses (Walker et al., 2016). It shows that they are explicitly targeted on the war against illegal drug use and distribution in the United States. However, individuals holding public office do not seem bothered by the statistic. They do not have the right information on the drug trade, and they are negligent not to understand the troubles that face poor African Americans living in urban communities (Csete, 2020). It is a clear precedent on their understanding of the drug pandemic involving a lot of people as they seem to target African Americans highly.

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Many white people involved in the drug trade in the United States have not been brought to book. However, the disturbing statistic on the incarceration of African Americans does not ring bells across the political corridors as responsible officials do not believe that the system is designed to target blacks. They do think that drug enforcement laws are meant to protect minority groups from drug offenses and other related crimes like violence. It seems that the above definition is a definition of drug enforcement, yet there is clear discrimination despite the United States boasting the best equality laws all over the world (Walker et al., 2016).

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

The United States of America is part of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination treaty. However, the occurrences in the United States differs from what the agreement spells in promoting equality among all. The deal defines discrimination as the intent in action and not the impact that it has on anyone. It means that discrimination, according to the treaty, occurs when a specific group is targeted deliberately and unjustifiably even if there is not spelled out intent (Walker et al., 2016). The agreement demands that in such an occurrence, the affected party is responsible for ending the action immediately. When a member state fully complies, they are free from system racism and inequalities. However, the United States claims to be fully compliant with the treaty, yet the situation is the opposite.

The drug pandemic in the United States has been defined by race for a long time now. The public has adopted this definition and relate specific races to illegal drug trafficking. An example is Seattle, where most of the traffickers of illicit drugs are white, according to a recent study. However, the majority of the individuals incarcerated for drug offenses are black, forming about two thirds. It is as a result of the Seattle police targeting the downtown areas of the city where most African Americans reside. They, however, do not focus on the main streets areas of the town where the majority of the illegal drug traffickers are white (Csete, 2020). The emphasis on the action against illicit drugs in Seattle is crack, and they mostly ignore heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy, among others, which are trafficked mainly by whites. It is no surprise, therefore, that most drug offenders incarcerated are African Americans who mostly deal in the crack. The downtown Seattle forms a hub for poor black communities living in the urban area, and crack is famous there because it is cheap.

Seattle

There is no concrete reason why African Americans are targeted on the war against drugs. In Seattle, for example, the focus is on crack, which is mostly sold in the downtown area where the majority of the population is African Americans. It is not reflective of the rate of drug trafficking in Seattle, which occurs all over the city and not in specific areas. Crack is one of the drugs that is a risk to public health and safety and violence and not the only one. The above scenario is a common occurrence in major cities across the United States, and it shows racial bias in the war against illegal drug trafficking. It has been a common trend in the United States stemming down from the ’80s and ’90s. It has, therefore, created an image of African Americans as significant drug offenders. It is impacting society, and the police seem to be no exception as it affects their law enforcement on drug offenders.

Penalties and Fines

The federal government has continually increased the fines for drug offenses significantly in recent years. The investment in the war against drug trafficking and distribution has also been improved massively (Walker et al., 2016). Therefore, law enforcement officers aim to be tough on cracking down on drug offenders in the illegal multi-billion dollar industry. The laws implemented recommend severe punishment for drug offenses in the hope of controlling the pandemic. As the program on the enforcement against illicit drugs-related crime started, the main focus was on cocaine, again believed to be hugely distributed by African Americans and part of the Latin Americans. Powder cocaine is far much more expensive than crack, which can be smoked, but the focus of law enforcement is aggressively on crack rather than spreading the attention equally (Vo, 2020).

Crack has formed massive talking points for politicians across the country in recent years, and there is an evident ignorance on even more significant drugs. However, the biggest problem lies in the fact that drug use and distribution is related to individual races instead of dealing with the problem independently. It leads to drug enforcement initiatives targeting specific communities. The fight against crack has often been used by local politicians to gain more votes, and it is a sinister agenda (Mooney et al., 2018). Crack has become dominant but not only used in low-income communities, and the drug enforcement resources have been focused on them, and it is discriminative. Politicians, therefore, attract white votes during elections by spelling out the black community as the scapegoat of drug trafficking and distribution, especially crack.

Drug Users

The majority of Americans do not relate drug offenders to be whites, but idle African Americans in street corners (Vo, 2020). However, statistics speak differently to this testament, as it shows that white Americans use and distribute illegal drugs more than African Americans. According to statistics by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, whites are more likely to use drugs in their lifetime more than African Americans (Mooney et al., 2018). Whites are dominant in the American population, and it is a massive indicator of the prevalence of them committing drug offenses. Therefore, it is illogical to target African Americans in the fight against drug offenses who are the most convicted despite being one of the minority groups in the United States.

As African Americans form a small proportion of those who commit drug offenses, it should be reflective of the incarceration initiative, which in the current state, it is the opposite. African Americans constitute the most arrested individuals on drug offenses, and similarly, they are the most convicted. Statistics show that they are the most likely to be arrested on drug offenses more than whites in the United States (Walker et al., 2016). Several reasons contribute to this problem in America, including racial profiling, drug resource allocation, complaints, and demographics.

Conclusion

Racial profiling is the biggest problem in making arrests for drug offenses. Law enforcement officers use racial profiles to identify drug distributors, and in the description, they include the location, gender, and age. The most common profile of a drug offender for law enforcement officers is mostly an African American. It gets worse, mainly if the officer works around a community highly populated by African Americans. They make many arrests, and most of the drug offenders, therefore, turn out to be black, explaining the significant number of them in prisons across the United States. It shows that the war against drugs has become selective, mostly depending on location, class, and race. However, drug offenses are not limited to them as they occur in almost any setting in the United States. Law enforcement officers also use complaints, and they mostly come from street corners and minority neighborhoods. Fewer complaints are coming from offices and the suburbs making it difficult for law enforcement officers to make arrests in these areas. However, it is not a valid reason for the market-specific arrests and convictions occurring across the United States.

References

Csete, J. (2020). United States drug courts and opioid agonist therapy: Missing the target of overdose reduction. Forensic Science International: Mind and Law, 1, 100024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsiml.2020.100024

Mooney, A. C., Giannella, E., Glymour, M. M., Neilands, T. B., Morris, M. D., Tulsky, J., & Sudhinaraset, M. (2018). Racial/Ethnic disparities in arrests for drug possession after California Proposition 47, 2011–2016. American Journal of Public Health, 108(8), 987-993. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2018.304445

Vo, H. (2020). Being white is a get out of jail free card: An analysis on racial disparities of drug convictions in the United States. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3575257

Walker, S., Spohn, C., & DeLone, M. (2016). The color of justice: Race, ethnicity, and crime in America. Cengage Learning.