Drug-related policing is one part of a larger systemic problem.
In all of these cases, the war on drugs gave police a justification to enact lethal violence on Black people. And on a macro level, the way the U.S. polices drugs disproportionately affects people of color, particularly Black and Latinx people, thus putting them at greater risk for police violence across the country. The war on drugs has an undeniable role in fueling racist police brutality.
But the entire criminal justice system—from stop-and-frisks, to disproportionate arrest rates, to mandatory minimums, to the bail system, to inequity in even the legal cannabis industry—creates conditions that consistently put people of color in danger. Ending the war on drugs won’t end racism, and police brutality has existed since long before the drug war. But examining how fighting the drug war became such a common justification for police surveillance and racist violence is a necessary component in combating racist police brutality and creating the systemic change we all hope to see.First, it’s important to understand the context that all of these issues are playing out in.
But “the drug war has given way” to bolstering police resources and expanding state powers of surveillance and violence, she says. And what we're seeing now is those powers being used to quell disruption, like at the current anti-racism protests. For instance, police budgets ballooned after Nixon’s original declaration of a “war on drugs” in 1973 and especially after Reagan’s focus on it in the 1980s. According to, state and local spending on police more than doubled between 1992 and 2008.
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