Then came the recession of the 1870s. The Chinese were now viewed as competitors for the dwindling number of jobs available. In 1875 San Francisco became the first city to outlaw opium smoking with legislation clearly aimed at the Chinese, who smoked the narcotic, as opposed to the main group of users, white men and women, who took opium in liquid form. This was the era when the use of opium-based patent medicines was pervasive. Women used them in “tonics” to alleviate pain in childbirth, and also to “soothe” their nerves. Unlike the “yellow dope fiends,” however, the white users were politely termed “habitués.” In 1887 the US Congress weighed in with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which among other things, allowing Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported.
Similarly racist attitudes accompanied the rise of cocaine use. Cocaine had been mass marketed in the United States in the late 1880s by the Parke-Davis Company (which many decades later had contracts to provide the CIA with drugs in the MK-ULTRA program). The company also sold a precursor to crack, marketing cocaine-laden cigarettes in the 1890s. In that same decade the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. But by the turn of the century the attitude of the medical and legal establishment to cocaine was beginning to change. In 1900 the Journal of the American Medical Association printed an editorial alerting its leaders to a new peril: “Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice – that of ‘cocaine sniffing’ or the ‘coke habit.’ ”
President Theodore Roosevelt responded to the new scare by creating the nation’s first drug czar, Dr. Hamilton Wright. Wright was a fanatic racist, announcing that “[i]t is been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the South and other regions.” One of Wright’s favored authorities was Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania. Koch testified before Congress in 1914 in support of the Harrison Bill, shortly to pass into law as the first criminalization of drug use. Said Koch: “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” At the same hearing, Wright alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and prompted them to rebel against white authority. These hysterical charges were trumpeted by the press, in particular the New York Times, which on February 8, 1914, ran an article by Edward Hunting Williams reporting how Southern sheriffs had upped the caliber of their weapons from .32 to .38 in order to bring down black men under the influence of cocaine. The Times’s headline for the article read, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower-Class Blacks.” Amid these salvoes, the Harrison Act passed into law.
In 1930 a new department of the federal government, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, was formed under the leadership of Harry Anslinger to carry on the war against drug users. Anslinger, another racist, was an adroit publicist and became the prime shaper of American attitudes to drug addiction, hammering home his view that this was not a treatable addiction but one that could only be suppressed by harsh criminal sanctions. Anslinger’s first major campaign was to criminalize the drug commonly known at the time as hemp. But Anslinger renamed it “marijuana” to associate it with Mexican laborers who, like the Chinese before them, were unwelcome competitors for scarce jobs in the Depression. Anslinger claimed that marijuana “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack. During this period, addicts have perpetrated some of the most bizarre and fantastic offenses and sex crimes known to police annals.”
Anslinger linked marijuana with jazz and persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong was also arrested on drug charges, and Anslinger made sure his name was smeared in the press. In Congress he testified that “[c]oloreds with big lips lure white women with jazz and marijuana.”
By the 1950s, amid the full blast of the Cold War, Anslinger was working with the CIA to charge that the new-born People’s Republic of China was attempting to undermine America by selling opium to US crime syndicates. (This took a good deal of chutzpa on the part of the CIA, whose planes, as we show in a later chapter, were then flying opium from Chiang Kai-shek’s bases in Burma to Thailand and the Philippines for processing and export to the US.) Anslinger convinced the US Senate to approve a resolution stating that “subversion through drug addiction is an established aim of Communist China.”
In 1951 Anslinger worked with Democrat Hale Boggs to marshall through Congress the first minimum mandatory sentences for drug possession: two years for the first conviction of possession of a Schedule 1 drug (marijuana, cocaine), five to ten years for a second offense, and ten to twenty years for a third conviction.) In 1956 Anslinger once again enlisted the help of Boggs to pass a law allowing the death penalty to be imposed on anyone selling heroin to a minor, the first linking of drugs with Death Row.
This was Anslinger’s last hurrah. Along John Kennedy’s New Frontier cantered sociologists attacking Anslinger’s punitive philosophy. The tempo of the times changed, and federal money began to target treatment and prevention as much as enforcement and prison. But the interim did not last long. With the waning of the war in Southeast Asia millions of addicted GIs came home to meet the fury of Nixon’s War on Drugs program. Nixon picked up Anslinger’s techniques of threat inflation, declaring in Los Angeles that “as I look over the problems of this country I see that one stands out particularly: the problem of narcotics.”
Nixon pledged to launch a war on drugs, to return to the punitive approach and not let any quaint notions of civil liberties and constitutional rights stand in the way. After a Nixon briefing in 1969, his top aide, H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary: “Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
But for all his bluster, Nixon was a mere prelude to the full fury of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, when the War on Drugs became explicitly a war on blacks. The first move of the Reagan administration was to expand the forfeiture laws passed during the Carter administration. In 1981 Reagan’s drug policy advisers outlined a plan they thought would be little more than good PR, a public display of the required toughness. They proposed allowing the Justice Department to seize real property and so-called “substitute property” (that is, legally acquired assets equal in value to illegal monetary gains). They also proposed that the federal government seize attorneys’ fees that they suspected might have been funded by drug proceeds. They even proposed to allow attorneys to be summoned by federal prosecutors before grand juries to testify about the source of their clients’ money. The Reagan plan was to permit forfeitures on the basis of a “probable cause showing” before a federal judge. This meant that seizures could be made against people neither charged nor convicted, but only suspected, of drug crimes.
Contrary to the administration’s expectations this plan sailed through Congress, eagerly supported by two Democratic Party liberals, Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Joe Biden, the latter being the artificer, in the Carter era, of a revision to the RICO act, a huge extension of the federal conspiracy laws. Over the next few years the press would occasionally report on some exceptionally bizarre applications of the new forfeiture laws, such as the confiscation of a $2.5 million yacht in a drug bust that netted only a handful of marijuana stems and seeds. But typically the press ignored the essential pattern of humdrum seizures, which more often focused on such ordinary assets as houses and cars. In Orange County, California, fifty-seven cars were seized in drug-related cases in 1989: “Even if only a small amount of drugs is found inside,” an Orange County narcotics detective explained, “the law permits seized vehicles to be sold by law enforcement agencies to finance anti-drug law enforcement programs.”
In fact, the forfeiture program became a tremendous revenue stream for the polic
e. From 1982 to 1991 the US Department of Justice seized more than $2.5 billion in assets. The Justice Department confiscated $500 million in property in 1991 alone, and 80 percent of these seizures were from people who were never charged with a crime.
On June 17, 1986 University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died, reportedly from an overdose of cocaine. As Dan Baum put it in his excellent Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, “In life, Len Bias was a terrific basketball player. In death he became the Archduke Ferdinand of the Total War on Drugs.” It was falsely reported that Bias had smoked crack cocaine the night before his death. (He had in fact used powder cocaine and, according to the coroner, there was no clear link between this use and the failure of his heart.)
Bias had signed with the Boston Celtics and amid Boston’s rage and grief, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a representative from Massachusetts, rushed into action. In early July he convened a meeting of the Democratic Party leadership: “Write me some goddam legislation,” he ordered. “All anybody in Boston is talking about is Len Bias. They want blood. If we move fast enough we can get out in front of the White House.” The White House was itself moving fast. Among other things the DEA had been instructed to allow ABC News to accompany it on raids against crack houses. “Crack is the hottest combat-reporting story to come along since the end of the Vietnam War,” the head of the the New York office of the DEA exulted.
All this fed into congressional frenzy to write tougher laws. House majority leader Jim Wright called drug abuse “a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing and killing our young.” Not to be outdone, South Carolina Republican Thomas Arnett proclaimed that “drugs are a threat worse than nuclear warfare or any chemical warfare waged on any battlefield.” The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act was duly passed. It contained twenty-nine new minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that time in the history of the Republic there had been only fifty-six mandatory minimum sentences. The new law had a death penalty provision for drug “king pins” and prohibited parole for even minor possession offenses. But the chief target of the bill was crack cocaine. Congress established a 100-to-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine. Under this provision possession of 5 grams of crack carries a minimum five-year federal prison sentence. The same mandatory minimum is not reached for any amount of powder cocaine under 500 grams. This sentencing disproportion was based on faulty testimony that crack was fifty times as addictive as powder cocaine. Congress then doubled this ratio as a so-called “violence penalty.” There is no inherent difference in the drugs, as Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffery conceded. The federal Sentencing Commission, established by Congress to review sentencing guidelines, found that so-called “crack violence” is attributable to the drug trade and has more to do with the setting in which crack is sold: crack is sold on the street, while powder cocaine is vended by house calls. As Nixon and Haldeman would have approvingly noted about the new drug law, it was transparently aimed at blacks, reminiscent of the early targeting of Chinese smoking opium rather than ladies sipping their laudanum-laced tonics.
In 1995 the US Sentencing Commission reviewed eight years of application of this provision and found it to be undeniably racist in practice: 84 percent of those arrested for crack possession were black, while only 10 percent were white and 5 percent Hispanic. The disparity for crack-trafficking prosecutions was even wider: 88 percent blacks, 7 percent Hispanics, 4 percent whites. By comparison, defendants arrested for powder cocaine possession were 58 percent white, 26 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic.
In Los Angeles all twenty-four federal defendants in crack cases in 1991 were black. The Sentencing Commission recommended to Congress and the Clinton administration that the ratio should be one-to-one between sentences for offenses involving crack and powder cocaine, arguing that federal law allows for other factors to be considered by judges in lengthening sentences (such as whether violence was associated with the offense). But for the first time in its history the Congress rejected the Sentencing Commission’s recommendation and retained the 100-to-1 ratio. Clinton likewise declined the advice of his drug czar and his attorney general, and signed the bill.
One need only look at the racial make-up of federal prisons to appreciate the consequences of the 1986 drug law. In 1983 the total number of prisoners in federal, state and local prisons and jails was 660,800. Of those, 57,975 – 8.8 percent – were incarcerated for drug-related offenses. In 1993 the total prison population was 1,408,000, of whom 353,564 – 25.1 percent – were inside for drug offenses. The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.–based watchdog group, found that the increase was far from racially balanced. Between 1986 and 1991 the incarceration rate for white males convicted on drug crimes increased by 106 percent. But the number of black males in prison for kindred offenses soared by a factor of 429 percent, and the rate for black women went up by an incredible 828 percent.
The queen of the drug war, Nancy Reagan, said amid one of her innumerable sermons on the issue, “If you’re a casual drug user, you’re an accomplice to murder.” In tune with this line of thinking, Congress moved in 1988 to expand the crimes for which the federal death penalty could be imposed. These included drug-related murders, and murders committed by drug gangs, which would allow any gang member to face the death penalty if one member of the gang was linked to a drug killing. The new penalties were inscribed in an update of the Continuing Criminal Enterprises Act. The figures arising from implementation of the act suggest that “black paranoia” has in fact a sound basis in reality.
Convictions under the act between 1989 and 1996 were 70 percent white and 24 percent black – but 90 percent of the times the federal prosecutors sought the death penalty it was against non-whites: of these, 78 percent were black and the rest Hispanic. From 1930 to 1972 (when the US Supreme Court found the federal death penalty unconstitutional) 85 percent of those given death sentences were white. When it was reapplied in 1984, with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the numbers for black death penalty convictions soared. Whether the offense is drug-related or not, a black is far more likely to end up on Death Row. Of those on Death Row, both federal and state, 50 percent are black. Blacks constitute 16 percent of the population. Since 1976 40 percent of the nation’s homicide victims have been black, but 90 percent of death sentences handed down for homicide involved white victims.
In the drug war, Los Angeles was Ground Zero. On the streets of Los Angeles, gang-related killings were a constant presence to the residents of the mostly poor areas in which they occurred, as gangs fought out turf battles for distribution rights to the crack supplied by Rick Ross and his associates in an operation connived at by the CIA. As long as it was confined to black areas of Los Angeles, little official attention was paid to this slaughter – an average of one murder per day from 1988 through 1990. However, in December 1987 a gang mistakenly killed 27-year-old Karen Toshima outside a cinema complex in Westwood, near the UCLA campus, prompting outrage from the city’s government: “The continued protection of gang activity under the guise of upholding our constitution is causing a deadly blight on our city,” cried Los Angeles City Attorney Kenneth Hahn.
LAPD Chief Darryl Gates promptly rolled out his campaign to pacify inner-city Los Angeles, Operation Hammer. Even before this campaign the LAPD was not known for its sensitivity to black people. In the 1970s there had been more than 300 killings of non-whites by the LAPD, and Gate’s own racism was notorious. Responding to complaints about a string of choke-hold deaths, Gates blamed them on the physiology of blacks: “We may be finding that in some blacks, when [the choke-hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people.”
Operation Hammer was a counterinsurgency program that sometimes resembled the Phoenix program in Vietnam. There were hundreds of commando-style raids on “gang houses.” More than 50,000 suspected gang members were swept up for interrogation based o
n factors such as style of dress and whether the suspect was a young black male on the street past curfew. Of those caught up in such Hammer sweeps, 90 percent were later released without charge, but their names were held in a computer database of gang members that was later shown to have included twice as many names as there were black youths in Los Angeles. Gates sealed off large areas of South Central as “narcotics enforcement zones.” There was a strict curfew, constant police presence and on-the-spot strip searches for those caught outside after curfew.
In this war there were many innocent casualties. In 1989 the LAPD shotgunned to death an 81-year-old man they wrongly believed to be a crack dealer. Witnesses claimed that the old man had his hands up when he was blown away. In 1989, 75 percent of all cases in the Los Angeles criminal courts were drug-related.
It would be difficult to find any documentary evidence that this war on drugs had anything other than a deleterious effect. By 1990 black youth unemployment in the greater Los Angeles area was 45 percent. Nearly half of all black males under the age of twenty-five had been in the criminal justice system. Life expectancy for blacks was falling for the first time in this century, and infant mortality in the city was rising. Some 40 percent of black children were born into poverty.
Among those white people concerned by the awful conditions of life in the inner cities was government psychiatrist Fred Goodwin. In 1992 he was director of the umbrella agency ADAMHA, the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration. Goodwin was an eager crusader for a national biomedical program to control violence, the core notion being the search for a “violence” gene. In the quest for this supposed biological basis for social crisis in the poverty-stricken and crimeridden ghettoes Goodwin was replicating all the Malthusian obsessions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century white American intellectuals and politicians. Many of supposedly enlightened people like Woodrow Wilson believed that sterilization was the best way to maintain the cleanliness in the national gene pool. It was too late to stop the arrival of Africans, but these Malthusians inspired the race exclusion laws of 1923, designed to keep out genetically dubious Slavs, Jews, Italians and other rabble – legislation admired by the Nazis.
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