War on Drugs

Some could say the war on drugs started back in 1937 with the Marijuana Tax Act, but the term was coined by Richard M. Nixon in 1971. This act had criminalized marijuana claiming that the drug can throw someone into insanity. Harry Anslinger was the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics whose sole mission was to eliminate all the drugs in the United States. He has also claimed that African Americans and Latino Americans were most of, many of users.

More than a decade later in the mid-1950’s, we being to see the start of mandatory minimums. “Democratic leaders in Congress collaborated with GOP administrations to craft mandatory-minimum sentencing laws that passed with near unanimity in 1956, 1970, and 1986…” (Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs”, 127). The Boggs Act of 1951 was the first instance of mandatory minimum sentencing. This act laid out minimum sentences for first, second, and third-time offenders. This was also the first time that marijuana and narcotics were considered at the same time when writing the law. Then in 1956, the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 was signed and doubled mandatory minimums while getting rid of the third offense. This act had a maximum sentence of life in prison or sometime even he death penalty if you were caught distributing drugs to minors.

During the 50’s the theme of the war on drugs was that marijuana was a gateway drug for heroin which led to such drastic measures. A decade later, people began to say that marijuana is now a gateway drug for LSD. This led to the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966 which now gave the option to hospitalize addicts for possession but still held full criminal sanctions to those who sold. During this time, there was a dramatic increase in marijuana use by white youth in colleges. This led to a separate class of criminals that jurors were uneasy to prosecute; the middle-class white college student who smokes to relax from school and work. The contrast of marijuana uses between different races led to the political system reducing sentences for marijuana and increasing mandatory minimums for the dope peddlers. In 1972, the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement was established to apprehend heroin traffickers more efficiently. Shortly a year later, the Drug Enforcement Administration was established to unify command for the war on drugs.

The 1980’s is where we begin to see these new agencies in action with the help of some new laws. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 gave the newly formed DEA funding while creating more mandatory minimums. “By 1990 drug offenses were 34.2 percent of new admissions to California prisons and 25 percent of detainees in the Los Angeles County Jail, which contained the world’s largest urban prison population.” (Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,”164). This was all fueled by a “crack epidemic” happening during the mid-1980’s. Due to the militarization of police, thanks to the War on Crime, raids and police brutality shocked the city of L.A. Using tanks and militarized weapons, police would conduct raids in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. One raid was heartbreaking due to the number of people who were left homeless after helicopters and over 80 policemen came into the apartment buildings in southwest Los Angeles. The show of force that the police displayed blurred the lines between thug and cop. “The police smashed furniture, punched holes in walls, destroyed family photos, ripped down cabinet doors, slashed sofas, shattered mirrors, hammered toilets to porcelain shards, doused clothing with bleach and emptied refrigerators. Some officers left their own graffiti: “LAPD Rules.” “Rollin’ 30s Die.” (Mitchell, “The Raid That Still Haunts L.A.”, 1). Raids like this continued and shook the city and those who were directly impacted. To this day, police continue with raids, however they are more controlled and “less” dangerous. "In hindsight, it is clear that the state appropriated real anxieties from black urban areas (such as Harlem and South Los Angeles) that were experiencing rapid economic decline and used these concerns to rationalize its war(s) on drugs." (Murch, "Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs," 163).