Up from Drug Slavery?: Drugs and Race in Contemporary America

Abstract

In this chapter I would like to explore the various ways in which contemporary America responds to the intertwining issue of drugs and race. In particular I want to show how our “progressive” and “empowering” positions on drugs, by remaining firmly rooted in an antidrug position, are forced into standpoints that are not only racist, but are also disempowering. If we are to change what drugs and race mean in our culture, we shall have to abandon the truths that we hold onto about drugs and race. As long as we keep drugs and race together in one pathological mix, they will continue to explain each other and we will continue to generate an increase in the percentage of black and Latino males incarcerated for drug-related crimes. I would propose that our current psychological truths, like our enforcement laws and cures, are not explaining race and drug use, or helping to unravel it, but are producing and exacerbating these problems. I will argue that it is the preservation of our current ideas about drugs that is regressive—and racist—and that only by forgetting these current “truths” can we begin to see the emergence of less harmful ways of thinking about drugs and race: only an anti-antidrug position will allow us the space in which to achieve such goals.

Casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot.

—Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings, September 5, 1990