War On Drugs Essay

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt...Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind” (Alexander; 2). In their articles, Newman (10 Ways the Drug War Is Causing Massive Collateral Damage to Our Society) and Solomon and Baksh (Evaluating the Drug War on Its 40th Birthday, by the Numbers) discuss the detrimental consequences the war on drugs had on society. Specifically, the prison system’s dramatic increase in population. The mass incarceration of people of color in the United States can be traced back to numerous historical events. One of those events being president Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs, which provoked the criminalization of urban spaces by instituting drug laws. Drug legislation became the revolutionized mechanism of urban criminalization after the civil rights, which was then utilized to target primarily people of color,
However, the reality is that when Reagan declared his drug war "the enemy in this war ha[d] been racially defined [and] the drug war, not by accident, has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color"(Alexander; ). From the jump, the War on Drugs had very little to do with actual drug crime and was mainly concerned with racial politics. In the documentary, “The House I Live In” a news anchor states that “most of the victims [of drug abuse] are young blacks.” It is also important to realize that in the documentary depictions of drug abusers primarily portray people of color in low income communities. Mainstream media outlets played an active role in vilifying people of