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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/GYo9CwH7
Pubdate: Sat, 26 Mar 2016
Source: Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
Copyright: 2016 The Times-Picayune
Contact:
Website: http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Jarvis DeBerry
THE WAR ON DRUGS: NOT JUST EFFECTIVELY RACIST BUT DELIBERATELY SO
In a series of speeches in 1971 President Richard Nixon called drug
abuse "America's public enemy number one in the United States." In
remarks from the White House on June 17, 1971, Nixon said, "In order
to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new,
all-out offensive." This, as best anybody can tell, is the opening
salvo in America's War on Drugs.
You'd think that if something really were public enemy number one
that people would know to be afraid of it without prompting.
But not in this case. Opinion polls from the 1970s indicate that drug
abuse was either low, super low or not even on the totem pole of
Americans' worries. In "Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in
Contemporary American Politics," Katherine Beckett writes that "the
percentage of poll respondents identifying drug abuse as the nation's
most important problem had dropped from 20% in 1973 to 2% in 1974 and
hovered between 0% and 2% until 1982."
[Remainder snipped]
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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