The racial impact of the drug war

Tom, you’re exactly right. The drug war has a disproportionately negative impact on the black community for many reasons. Blacks do not consume illegal drugs out of proportion to their population but they tend to live in communities that are ravaged by drug war-related crime. Their youth, many of whom live in cities whose economies have been destroyed by the corporate state, get sucked into the drug trade after dropping out of the pathetic government schools. Criminal courts often resemble Jim Crow-era buses with whites up front and blacks in the back waiting to be charged with drug-related crimes. It’s nauseating and I have seen it for 25 years unlike the beltway libertarians who work in a lavish office building.

Many years ago Cato published my paper on the drug war which lays out many of these facts. It is, I believe one of their most widely read papers ever and it still comes up on Google when you search for “drug legalization.”

After my efforts to work with them to start a national organization to end the drug war fizzled, I came over to the Mises Institute group because the late great Roy Childs said they were “hard-core,” willing to stand up for libertarian principle. They have proven that time and again while Cato slips and slides away into irrelevance.

By the way, someone told me they called my paper “Thinking About Drug Legalization” so as not to offend their contributors.

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8:08 am on January 14, 2008