This past week, the Metro section of the Washington Post contained an interesting, although slightly uneducated, editorial by a staff columnist named Courtland Milloy. The article, creatively entitled “A Law That Tears Black Families Apart”, discussed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and, as most articles on the topic do, it suggested that the resulting laws (specifically, the fact that possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine carries a mandatory 5 year prison sentence…the same as possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine) were inherently racist.
Milloy compared the mandatory prison terms, which admittedly do disproportionately impact African Americans, to the Black Codes of the late 1800s (laws that allowed for “arbitrary imprisonment to limit the movement of newly freed slaves”). Additionally, Milloy offered a quote by Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, which argued that “If you want to know why black children are overrepresented in foster care at four times the rate of the national population, then look no further than the mass incarceration of black people”.
But, what if you did look further than just that?
Incarceration rates are one aspect of the problem, but they are just one of the many challenges facing an African American community that is also subject to ridiculously high rates of single-parent families, a lack of emphasis on educational achievement, and a significant exposure to violent crime. To say that incarceration rates are the single factor behind the problem displays a lack of depth in understanding the problem. Much the same way that it shows a similar lack of understanding to suggest that the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was racist.
The New York Times best-selling book “Freakonomics” explores the ADA Act of 1986 in significant detail, and what it illustrates is that the motivation behind its enactment was not in any way racist. Instead, it was designed to address the massive public health and safety concerns that arose from the creation of crack cocaine.
Prior to the invention of crack, cocaine had made few, if any, inroads into poorer, predominately African American neighborhoods because it was too expensive. But crack allowed dealers to develop a product that required much less pure cocaine input, and therefore allowed a drug that could be sold at market for only a few dollars per hit. Also, a second benefit of this new drug was that it reached neural pathways within seconds, and was therefore highly addictive. These two factors made crack highly marketable in poorer communities, and the impact of this was by no means small.
Prior to the 1960s, there had been ample evidence to suggest that the African American community had been making real societal progress, eliminating disparities that had existed largely due to previous race-based policies. With the help of civil rights legislation, “the black-white income gap was shrinking…so was the gap between black children’s test sores and those of white children…(and) perhaps the most heartening gain had been in infant mortality.” Within just seven years of hospital desegregation, “the black infant mortality rate had been cut in half.” According to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the two authors of Freakonomics, “by the 1980s, virtually every facet of life was improving for black Americans, and the progress showed no sign of stopping…Then came crack cocaine.”
As crack began to take hold of poorer African American communities, those previous signs of societal progress began to reverse themselves. Infant mortality began a steep rise once again, along with the rate of low-birthweight babies and the rates of “parent abandonment”. “The gap between black and white schoolchildren widened. The number of blacks sent to prison tripled…(and) within a five-year period, the homicide rate among young urban blacks quadrupled”.
Crack cocaine’s success also provided a consistent revenue stream for street gangs that had previously not been able to support large memberships. With a new, reliable source of income to support their activities, these gangs grew in both numbers and in violence.
In the words of Levitt and Dubner, “Black Americans were more hurt by crack cocaine than by any other single cause since Jim Crow”.
And so, the ADA Act of 1986 was enacted not to punish African American communities, but rather to protect them and to try to bring back the positive trends of societal progress that had been erased by the crack cocaine phenomenon. But, instead of uniting behind the need to reduce the use and impact of crack, African American communities have united behind the idea that anti-crack legislation has been disproportionately directed at their communities.
Well, guess what? That’s probably because the impact of crack itself has been disproportionately directed at those communities.
Crack cocaine warranted a different treatment than powder cocaine because its societal impact was so far and away greater. Simply put, there was a much more dire need to curb the influence of crack than of its powder form. To have created equal laws for the two drugs would have been to pass uniformed legislation that was designed solely to punish the use of drugs, which isn’t what the government was after at all. It was concerned with their use, but much more with their overall impact.
What the ADA Act of 1986 represented was a precise isolation of enforcement against the most serious drugs in terms of aggregate effect. And, inevitably, this mentality also meant that enforcement was bound to be more visible in black communities. But, this didn’t have to do with racism so much as it had to do with the fact that evidence pointed to those communities as being the most riddled by the crack problem. In a society where there is a finite amount of funds, and therefore a limited number of problems that can be focused on at any given time, the fact of the matter is that law enforcement directed its attention to the focal point of the problem. That focal point just happened to be black.
Granted, the success of harsh anti-drug policies is far from clear. And, in many ways, America’s war on drugs has done more harm than good. It has created a heavy taxpayer burden by raising incarceration rates, and it has largely empowered violent groups such as gangs and drug cartels (look no further than neighboring Mexico for evidence of what happens when these groups get money and power). So, to have a debate about America’s current drug policies is entirely justified and in many ways necessary; but to suggest that their purpose is discriminatory is ridiculous and naïve.
If the African American community wants to make true societal gains, then it needs to claim responsibility and to set aside blame. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 is not the cause for there being so many African American foster children. It may or may not have helped alleviate the prominence of drug addiction the way that it had intended to, but its intent was correct and well placed. If anything, it was a piece of legislation that was driven by concern for the African American community much more so than disdain for it.
