As America celebrates and commemorates Black Historical past Month, it’s vital to recollect precisely how Black Individuals have been disproportionately impacted by the felony justice system in our nation. From the crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities to the truth that Black Americans are on average four times as likely to be wrongfully convicted of a serious crime based mostly on statistics offered by the Innocence Mission and the various ways in which hashish prohibition has straight broken and devastated Black communities, these punishments and subsequent penalties have ranged from unjust to obviously unconstitutional.
Moreover the numerous examples of unjust and pointless sentencing and policing practices that unfairly focused Black communities throughout generations, the longest enduring influence of President Richard Nixon’s trillion-dollar and multi-decade failure was the creation of the Drug Enforcement Company. Fashioned in 1973 and serving because the successor to the equally as unnecessarily authoritarian Federal Bureau of Narcotics which itself was based by essentially the most infamous but influential prohibitionist of all of them, Harry Anslinger, the DEA was the enforcement arm of the infinite draconian insurance policies of the Drug Battle that solely elevated in severity as each Ronald Reagan and Invoice Clinton took workplace. Worse even, each George H.W. Bush and his son didn’t do a lot to reform these harmful and ineffective insurance policies both.
One of the vital unexplainable and repeatedly disproven sequence of legal guidelines that the DEA have enforced for many years is the illogical Controlled Substances List. “Marihuana”, a plant with clearly confirmed medicinal treatments for some and authorized for accredited medical utilization within the majority of American states, is designated as the very best and most dangerous class of Schedule I. In keeping with the Managed Substances Listing, this plant is much extra lethal than fentanyl, an artificial opiate killing hundreds of Individuals throughout all socio-economic and geographic demographics yearly. OxyContin, the primary wrongdoer together with Purdue Pharma in inflicting the catastrophic opioid epidemic that has taken tons of of hundreds of lives and remains to be ongoing right now, is a Schedule II substance and due to this fact thought-about much less harmful in response to the DEA.
All through many years of enforcement of deeply flawed insurance policies that resulted within the unjust incarceration of numerous people for many years or life sentences in essentially the most extreme instances, the DEA’s actions and operations of their clearly unsuccessful try to rid America of drug abuse have conclusively been a failure and haven’t resulted in any form of widespread abstinence from the medicine on the Managed Substances Listing. Tragically nonetheless although, hundreds went to American jails over these many years for drug-related offenses that had been non-violent and even victimless in some instances.
Simply final week for the beginning of February, nationally acknowledged as Black Historical past Month which is a month to honor the innumerable contributions by Black Individuals to this nice nation, the DEA decided to post a dedication on their Twitter account. Not a dedication to a well-known and influential Black American all through political or authorized historical past reminiscent of Thurgood Marshall, however reasonably a bizarrely timed tribute to the one American president to ever resign from the place and a supposedly prestigious award that he was gifted within the first few months of the Drug Battle.
“On Dec. 14, 1970, on the White Home, the Worldwide Narcotic Enforcement Officers’ Affiliation introduced President Nixon with a “certificates of particular honor” in recognition of the excellent loyalty and contribution to help narcotic regulation enforcement.” the caption learn.
If this picture of Nixon and caption had been posted on the primary day of another month, then this unusual tribute publish would have been solely thought-about random at finest and a painfully tacky reward of ineffective insurance policies at worst. Nevertheless, due to the posting date of February 1st, the primary day of Black Historical past Month, many hashish and drug coverage reform organizations discovered this publish to be each astoundingly tone deaf and poorly timed.
On condition that Nixon was the president who began the Drug War that rapidly spiraled into subsequent decades of mass incarceration and even stricter policies in the presidencies since his resignation, this Twitter publish was closely criticized resulting from these insurance policies being so destructively discriminatory in direction of Black Individuals.
As would later come out in response to the testimony of former White Home Counsel John Ehrlichman, that was the underlying aim of these legal guidelines and insurance policies.
“We knew we couldn’t make it unlawful to be both in opposition to the struggle or black,” Ehrlichman stated, “however by getting the general public to affiliate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, after which criminalizing each closely, we might disrupt these communities. We might arrest their leaders, raid their houses, break up their conferences, and vilify them night time after night time on the night information. Did we all know we had been mendacity in regards to the medicine? In fact we did.”
Whereas any social media publish from the DEA in all probability wouldn’t be met with overwhelming reward, this publish was significantly ill-timed. Particularly after the federal government agency openly admitted themselves that the agency was created due to prejudicial laws and policing practices, the truth that the DEA posted this unusual throwback picture on the primary day of an vital month meant to recollect and have a good time the indelible and unbelievable contributions of Black Individuals reveals how out-of-the-loop and aloof that some governmental companies can nonetheless be.