NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED: …Today’s disastrously punitive criminal justice system is actually rooted in the postwar social and economic demise of urban black communities. It is, in part, the unintended consequence of African-Americans’ own hard-fought battle against the crime and violence inside their own communities. To ignore that history is to disregard the agency of black people and minimize their grievances, and to risk making the same mistake again.
The draconian Rockefeller drug laws, for example, the model for much of our current drug policies, were promoted and supported by an African-American leadership trying to save black lives. During the 1960s, concentrated poverty began to foster a host of social problems like drug addiction and crime that degraded the social and civic health of black neighborhoods. After the Harlem riots of 1964 (which erupted following the shooting of a 15-year-old black male by a white cop), polls showed that many African-Americans in New York City still considered crime a top problem facing blacks in the city, while few worried about civil rights and police brutality.
By the late ’60s, drug users were mugging residents and burglarizing homes, stores and churches. Loitering alcoholics, addicts and out-of-work young black males frightened the elderly and scared children. Not surprisingly, working-class and middle-class African-Americans organized and fought back. In 1968, Roy Wilkins, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, “It is too early to raise a victory cry, but a reaction is setting in that could make the demand for order far louder than the emotional call to race — right or wrong.” … (more)
EDITOR: Tragically, the circumstances were exploited either through ignorance but often by those seeking political and monetary gain who created myths about the extreme dangers of marijuana which are still believed by a significant portion of the population, but fortunately no longer by the majority. The federal government has yet to re-classify marijuana so that it no longer is treated in the same way as heroin and cocaine. This in turn has thwarted all efforts to do research.
