Argumentative Essay: The War On Drugs

First let me start off by saying that this video was extremely eye opening. It put into perspective just how serious this “war” on drugs is. It’s not necessarily a war on the drugs themselves, but it has cascaded onto the people who consume and sell them as well. I always had my beliefs that our drug laws had their defects, but after hearing what the people who were interviewed had to say, it reinforced and expanded my belief that something needs to be done about this in order to stop the racial profiling and corruption that come with these laws, as well as the efforts to get rid of the lower class. Poverty is a very hard thing to cope with. You work a low paying job and every day is a struggle for you and your loved ones in order to survive.

It’s obvious that there is more drug activity in low-income neighborhoods due to minimal alternatives to resort to for money. The police take advantage of this because they get paid for arrests. David Simon made a great point when saying, “the cop that makes the cheap drug arrest is going to get paid. He will get the hours of overtime for taking the drugs down to ECU, for processing the prisoner, and for writing up the paper work. This is going to happen in excess of up to 60 times a month. We are paying them for stats.” Then he compared that officer to an officer solving a murder, rape, or burglary saying, “If he’s lucky he makes one arrest a month. When you compare an officer with 60 arrests to an officer with one arrest who do you think is going to be named Sargent?” Police forces are intentionally patrolling and giving civilians a hard time by profiling and using “probable cause” to search them. I recall an officer in the movie specifically saying that he does profile people, which is illegal, and there was footage in the movie of him doing it. Drug laws are destructive for not only the people they target, but for those who enforce them as well. You wonder why people loose faith in the cops and the laws they are trying to implement.
Racial stereotyping has dated back to the 1800’s when drugs such as opium, cocaine, and heroin were legal to consume.

It was legal to consume, but then people started to associate it with blacks and violent acts saying, “Most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” (TheNation). This later correlated with crack cocaine and regular powder cocaine. “While powder cocaine came to be regarded as a symbol of luxury and associated with whites, crack was portrayed as producing uniquely addictive, unpredictable and deadly effects and associated with blacks.” (TheNation). Crack is a derivative from cocaine, so they are basically the same thing. In the judicial system crack has a 100-1 disparity against powder cocaine when it came to punishment. Meaning that if you get caught with cocaine, whatever the punishment is for you offense, you can multiply it by 100 and that’s what the punishment would be if you got caught with crack. There was a quick glance to a prisoner in the movie and he said that he got caught with a small rock of crack and is now serving 57 years in jail. He said, “I want to know why I’m being charged like I murdered someone”. The allotted amount of time a prisoner has to serve is