Critical Race Theory

I. Introduction

The modern War on Drugs has existed since 1982, when President Ronald Reagan announced in his weekly radio address that he “promised a ‘planned, concerted campaign’ against all drugs-‘hard, soft or otherwise.”¹ Although Reagan promised a war on all drugs the resonance of his drug war policies have targeted cocaine: specifically crack cocaine. America’s war against cocaine started sixty-eight years earlier with the passage of the Harrison Act. Hence, President Reagan was breathing new life into an antiquated political concern. If, in the eighties, Reagan was “promising a planned and concerted campaign” against drugs then who was the new enemy? There were many possible candidates: South American Drug Lords, Mexican Marijuana Farmers, Far Eastern Opium Traders and many other possible high end dealers, distributors and transporters. In spite of these candidates the impact of America’s drug war legislation has been felt by the minorities that built this country: African descendants among others. As such, the remaining question is why? Why have African descendants and other minorities been disparately impacted by drug war legislation when they haven’t constituted a majority of the users, sellers, or distributors in American drug markets. This article explores that question and concludes that the enfranchised-elite Legislators that founded America established two levels of punishment, one for whites and the other for nonwhites; therefore, current drug war legislation is one of the unconscious effects of that dichotomy. Thus, America’s enfranchised-elite Legislators unconsciously wage war on non-whites through the medium of the Drug War. Accordingly, the Drug War is the latest form of oppressive legislation employed to disenfranchise, imprison, and control America’s minority (specifically African Descendant) population.

II. History of American Cocaine Legislation: The Continuance of Unjust Codification

America’s War on Drugs has existed for nearly a century. In 1914 Representative Francis Burton Harrison introduced the Harrison Act, which was the first federal legislation that banned the distribution of cocaine and heroin. However, this act was not characterized as a tool used to carry out a War, but the Harrison Act was the first of many federal laws restricting and prohibiting America’s drug industry.

Despite the fact that Representative Francis Burton Harrison was really adhering to the mandates of the 1912 Hague Convention, and not calling for a war on illicit narcotics; he nurtured and promulgated certain ideological and subconscious seeds that associate non-whites with crime and drugs in his reasoning for the Act. Harrison exclaimed that, “[Coca leaves are used in] Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and all those things sold to Negroes all over the South.”² Also, in a report submitted to Congress in support of the Act, Dr. Hamilton Wright admonished Congress “of cocaine’s encouragement among the humbler ranks of the Negro population in the south and concluded that…cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other sections of the country.”³ Representative Harrison’s and Dr. Wright’s reasoning are typical of Legislative logic that is founded in the relation of crime and drugs to race, and it was this logic that led President Reagan to characterize “the drug threat as the consequence of a ‘dark, evil enemy within.”⁴ .

¹ Kenneth B. Nunn, Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why The War On Drugs’ Was A ‘War on Blacks’, 6 J. Gender Race & Just. 381, 383 (2002).
² Jason A. Gillmer, United States v. Clary: Equal Protection and the Crack Statute, 45 Am. U. L. Rev. 497, 515 (1995). (citing David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control 244 (1973). (quoting Importation and Use of Opium: Hearings before the House Comm. On Ways and Means , 61st Cong. Sess. (1911))
³ Id.
⁴Kenneth B. Nunn, Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the War on Drugs’ Was A ‘War on Blacks’, 6 J. Gender Race & Just. 381, 445 (2002). Citing Eva Bertram et al., Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial 112 (Univ. of Cal. Press 1996).