America’s drug war is a race war, and it always has been
It’s fair to say things are a little crazy over in America right now, what with Trump crashing the global economy by imposing tariffs seemingly made up at random. Not content with fucking up the global economy for the lols, the White House recently tweeted out a cute Studio Ghibli-style anime image of a weeping woman being deported by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). It was a tasteless reimagining of a true story: the woman in question, from the Dominican Republic, had been living in New York illegally, having previously been deported on drugs charges.
Donald Trump Jr, a man with the charisma of a black hole, reposted the image alongside the caption “It’s exactly what I voted for!”. As if there was any ambiguity he may have been a secret Bernie Bro.
Beyond the shocking reality that online trolling has become federal policy, the sadistic glee displayed in the tweet exposes an uncomfortable truth: America’s war on drugs has never been about public health – it’s always been a carefully crafted weapon in its war on minorities.
America’s first drug war
150 years ago, while America was settling the Wild West, between the cowboys and Indians were the Chinese railroad workers. At the end of a day’s gruelling labour, they’d unwind with a few tokes of the opium pipe. The Chinese were treated with great suspicion, subjected to pogroms and herded into ghettos. In 1875, San Francisco passed America’s first psychoactive prohibition banning opium dens. An act explicitly aimed at the Chinese, who were supposedly seducing white women in their warrens of sin.
The roots of America’s racial caste system run deeper, tracing back to the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. During this uprising, Black slaves and white indentured labourers united against the governor of Virginia. Not for freedom, but because they wanted Native lands and were furious the governor wouldn’t expel Indigenous peoples. The colonial elite responded by deliberately establishing a racial hierarchy that elevated poor whites, keeping them aligned with wealthy plantation owners rather than with enslaved Blacks.
The Civil War’s bloody conclusion and subsequent emancipation hardly resolved America’s racial divisions. Emancipated slaves were promised forty acres and a mule but received neither, and many went back to working the same land as sharecroppers. At the time, cocaine was cheap – cheaper than liquor – and available from any pharmacist, which left it a tempting treat for anyone toiling away in the cotton fields.
“NEGRO COCAINE FIENDS ARE A NEW SOUTHERN MENACE” screamed a New York Times headline in 1914. The paper’s lurid account claimed cocaine made Black men impervious to bullets: a sheriff emptied his revolver, but like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface, the cocaine-crazed fiend just wouldn’t go down. This racist hysteria led directly to the passage of the Harrison Act that same year, which made cocaine and various opiates prescription-only. The racial double standard was immediate and obvious. For years afterward, affluent white Americans could still easily obtain their preferred intoxicants through friendly doctors.
Even the “wrong sorts” of white people haven’t escaped America’s ever-evolving fear of foreign menace. During World War I, the country plunged into jingoistic hysteria. Who was the target this time? Those devious German beer brewers. Wartime xenophobia propelled the temperance movement into a federal lobby, culminating in the 1919 Volstead Act, which banned alcohol during the Roaring Twenties, the period now known as Prohibition.
During Prohibition, Williamson County, a hilly area in southern Illinois, was home to a number of booming underground bars and whorehouses. Local preachers rallied against these establishments, blaming the lawlessness on an influx of foreigners. After lobbying in Washington, they secured support from Prohibition Bureau chief Roy Haynes, who deputised 500 gun-wielding Klansmen, arming them to “cleanse” the coal-mining county.
Hispanics were bullied and picked on in the streets. When they fought back, their anger was inevitably blamed on the marijuana which made them go loco.
They began terrorising the Italian community, smashing up their homes and livelihoods. The situation got so bad that the Italian consulate had to intervene, and Washington dispatched the National Guard, only for the trouble to resume once the soldiers had left. After they were done with the Italians, the Klan turned their attention to the French community, burning down houses and parading suspects through the streets. Altogether, some 3,000 immigrants and their families were forced to flee. It’s ironic, then, that today a substantial portion of those same diasporas enthusiastically support MAGA policies, even though their ancestors would have been deported had Trump’s policies then been in effect.
The pattern continued with Mexican immigrants. In 1910, Mexico’s corrupt government was overthrown in a revolution, plunging the country into a bloody, decade-long civil war. Desperate refugees crossed the border seeking safety, only to face horrific treatment. Upon arrival, their clothing was “decontaminated” with Zyklon B, the same gas used in Nazi death chambers.
As the Great Depression intensified competition for scarce jobs, anti-Mexican sentiment turned violent. Hispanics were bullied and picked on in the streets. When they fought back, their anger was inevitably blamed on the marijuana which made them go loco. One newspaper article read: “When some beet field peon takes a few rares of this stuff … he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.”
Refer madness
Harry Anslinger, the tall, hulking chief of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, the predecessor to the DEA) risked budget cuts when Prohibition was repealed. Leveraging America’s fear of immigrants, Anslinger connected cannabis to the threat of foreigners flooding the country. His campaign culminated in the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, which didn’t technically criminalise cannabis but made it so prohibitively expensive through taxation that consumers were forced into illegal markets – where they could be prosecuted for tax evasion.
One group particularly drew Anslinger’s obsessive attention: jazz musicians, who were refreshingly candid about their appreciation for cannabis.
“It makes you feel good, man,” said Louis Armstrong. “It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a negro.”
The FBN kept files on the likes of Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway and mercilessly pursued others such as singer Billie Holiday. Anslinger personally assigned an agent to bust Billie, a lifelong alcoholic and heroin addict, on narcotics charges. Holiday was handcuffed to a hospital bed and interrogated by Anslinger’s goons even as she lay dying of liver failure.
A pattern was now firmly established: drug laws served as a convenient pretext to control and criminalise specific racial and ethnic groups. By the ‘80s, overt racism – a bunch of losers in white bedsheets setting fire to crosses and screaming words rhyming with “bigger” – was out of vogue, but the crack cocaine panic provided a new pretext to comb through the inner-city in search of cheap prison labour. Although Americans of all melanin tones sell and consume drugs at roughly similar rates, by 1992, 91% of federal crack convicts were Black. Black men born in the ‘80s had a one-in-three chance of serving jail time at some point in their lives.
The consequences were catastrophic. After leaving their children fatherless, the ex-cons found themselves unemployable and ineligible for loans or public housing. So where do they go? Back to selling drugs. In some states, ex-cons have also permanently lost the right to vote, effectively disenfranchising large portions of the community.
Right now, the Trump administration’s punching bag is immigrants. Drug-dealing immigrants exist, of course. For instance, two years ago the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a group called the Hondos dominating the drug trade in the Tenderloin neighbourhood of the city. Escaping rampant gangsterism and poverty at home, they lacked the paperwork or English skills for legitimate employment, so found jobs as street pushers for Mexican cartels.
American drugs for American dealers
Even if America closed all its borders and deported all non-citizens tomorrow, it would not make much difference to the drug problem. On a retail level, the Hondos pushed the established African-American dope slingers out of business in recent years. What would happen if they all got ICE’d tomorrow? Would San Francisco’s junkies quit making pin cushions out of their veins, or would a job vacancy simply arise at Narcos, Inc? Perhaps reclaiming the industry for hardworking American drug dealers is part of the plan to Make America Great Again. After all, U.S. Border Patrol data shows that the vast majority of smugglers apprehended bringing dope into the country are US citizens.
None of these realities matter to the Trump administration, whose chief priority seems to be owning the libs and making life harder for whoever they are: immigrants (both legal and otherwise), transgender individuals, and students with the wrong opinions.
For 150 years, America has used drug prohibition as a convenient pretext for controlling, incarcerating, and marginalising whichever group it deems fit. The faces change: Chinese railroad workers, Black jazz musicians, Mexican immigrants, or today’s asylum seekers, but the playbook remains the same. Drug laws are never simply about public health, they’re about who gets to be considered American and who doesn’t.
Then again, as we’ve seen with the tariffs, Trump isn’t doing anything new. He’s simply continuing America’s long tradition of weaponising drug policy against its most vulnerable communities, only with more hashtags.
