By Salim Muwakkil

The war on drugs has wreaked such a wide swath of social destruction, one hardly knows where to begin a critique. The failings of a policy purportedly designed to halt drug use have been nothing short of spectacular. Instead of creating a drug-free society, this high-cost combat strategy has unleashed an assault on American liberty, fueled a gun-riddled underground economy, corrupted law enforcement and transformed the "land of the free" into the world largest jailer. It has helped produce global cartels of illicit drug dealers, fueled domestic racial animosities, and diverted untold resources from more productive social investments.

So, criticism of this disastrous policy can be launched from many fronts. I'll focus on the racial front. Some of the drug war's most extensive collateral damage is happening in the black community. The incarceration epidemic that has been triggered by this irrational war has hit the black community in a wildly disproportionate fashion. Of the nearly two million people currently imprisoned, about half of them are African American, a group that comprises only 12 percent of the population.

Just think: nearly one in three of every black male in his 20s is under the control of the criminal justice system in some way; one of every eight black males in the 25-34 age group is locked up on any given day; and, according to the Sentencing Project, a think-tank that focuses on criminal justice reform, 29 percent of black males born today can expect to spend time in a state or federal prison if current trends continue.

A high proportion of these inmates are imprisoned for charges related to drug commerce or use. They generally are under-educated residents of inner-city communities that are bereft of commercial life except in the underground economy. For many of these youth, drug commerce is manifestly their only viable source of employment and thus they are tracked into criminal marginality.

This is an extremely debilitating process; in fact, in my opinion, it is a social emergency, when you consider the generational effects of such high rates of incarceration. But there is little public awareness of this enormous domestic problem; most Americans find nothing unusual about the high incarceration rates for African Americans. In this country, we've learned to link complexion to crime through a long process of socialization.

The association of clusters of black men with criminality is a cultural custom as old as America itself. The fear of slave revolts prompted officials in early America to ban all gatherings of black men; the "slave codes" forbade black men from congregating for purposes other than laboring for whites. After slavery ended, the codes enforced similar prohibitions on newly freed African-Americans. Early America had an enormous economic stake in enforcing racial hierarchy, so it was essential to eliminate any threat to that color-coding. Because rebellious black men represented the most salient potential threat, they faced draconian legal restrictions and repressive social constraints. They also were frequent victims of vigilante justice, as thousands of African-American men were lynched between the late 1880s and the late 1930s, many for the unfounded charges of rape.

In retrospect, it's very clear that lynching was driven more by racial hatred and anxieties than by a search for justice. However, the conventional wisdom of the era automatically assumed the guilt of the murdered black men. The link between criminality and complexion is rooted deeply in American culture. In fact, whenever policy makers have sought to demonize drug use, they would often attempt to associate it with matters of race.

Historian David Musto has chronicled the process well in his 1999 book, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. He writes that opium, once deemed a medical miracle due to its use as a powerful anesthetic during the Civil War, fell into disrepute because of its relationship with Chinese immigrants during the late 19th century. Cocaine, touted as a medical cure-all for problems as varied as allergies and alcoholism, became associated with perceived black violence against whites in the period directly following the Civil War. Stories abounded about the drug's alleged propensity to lead black men to rape white women, as well as making them impervious to smaller caliber firearms. In an official report submitted to Congress in 1910, an expert identified as Dr. Hamilton Wright wrote that "cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the south and other sections of the country."

Some analysts argue that the threat of "cocainized Negroes" spurred the development of higher-caliber handguns.

The history of marijuana policy also owes much to racial demonology. One leader of an anti-immigration coalition charged, "Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of pure narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarettes to school children." After famed anti-drug crusader Harry Anslinger fanned the flames of racism by adding colorful stories of Harlem smoking dens, the public was ready to outlaw marijuana. It's clear that marijuana use was criminalized because of its class-race associations.

In the 1960s, when marijuana use was rampant among middle-class colleges students and white "hippies," and legions of them were being arrested, suddenly there were reassessments of public policies about cannabis. Commissions created by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson questioned the prevailing assumptions of marijuana's harmful affects.

By the 1970s, legislation distinguishing it from other drugs was passed and penalties for possession were lowered. The Carter Administration endorsed decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. In the 1930s reefer smokers were thought to be sinister Mexican banditos and rapacious Negroes, and the drug was demonized; in the 1970s, when government considered easing up on penalties for possession, grass-smokers were thought to be creative (white) hippie types just groovin' on the vibe, man.

In addition to our historical predilection to give drugs an insidious racial connection, there are the nation's traditional habits of law enforcement. The first organized forces of policing in this country were the slave patrols; thus, US law enforcement has always had a dual purpose: one, maintaining the domestic social order and, two, enforcing the racial hierarchy.

It is that second function that currently devastates the African American community, although you'd never know it by the amount of media concern it generates. For example, there was little media mention of the study Human Rights Watch published that detailed wide disparities in the treatment of black and white drug offenders within the criminal justice system. The May 2000 study, titled "Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs," found that there are five times more white drug users than black users, but African Americans are imprisoned at many times the rate of whites. The greatest disparity is right here in Illinois, where blacks are put in prison at 57 times the rate of whites for selling or using drugs, and where African Americans make up 90 percent of the inmates imprisoned for drugs.

This is raw apartheid, yet there are few voices raised in outrage. And although you here are an interested audience, I'm willing to bet that many of you have never heard of this startling study. More amazingly, too few black politicians or leaders have made much noise about the realities outlined in the study. Although African-Americans are bearing the highest toll of the ridiculous drug war, few black leaders are speaking out against it. In my opinion, the reason for their lack of interest in questioning the very assumptions of the drug war is the clerical influence.

Most black leaders are also "reverends" of one type or another, and thus their notions of Christian rectitude manage to get all tied up with their judgments on political and secular matters, and we get this mish-mash of political wishy-washiness. But we can't just blame the black ones; politicians spanning the entire color spectrum are terrified of being called soft on drugs. There are some exceptions, like Gary Johnson, the maverick Republi-can governor of New Mexico, but by-and-large politicians still run from rationality when it comes to the drug war.

For a while, in fact, black politicians like Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel were among the largest stumbling blocks in the way of a rational drug policy. Rangel and his ilk are the primary reason why sentences for crack cocaine are so much higher than they are for the powdered stuff, although there's no pharmacological difference. The penalty is five years in federal prison for five grams. For the powder, the penalty is not triggered until sale of one hundred times that amount, or five hundred grams.

The racial disparity in the prosecution and sentencing of federal crack offenders is dramatic: African-Americans constitute 85 percent of defendants each year.

Rangel and company initially pushed for stricter anti-crack laws because the lower-priced crack was a more of a problem in the black community than among whites. Like much in the disastrous drug war, the cure is worse than the disease. As I often note, policies of prohibition create drive-by shootings whether they are carried out in the 1920s by the Tommie-gun carrying thugs of Al Capone or by the Uzi-totin' thugs of today's gangstas.

In our struggle to reduce the harm of drug prohibitionist policies, we should keep the racial dimension in mind. How that works out in practice is difficult to say, but part of it requires projecting a broader definition of who a drug user is. As I noted, we made the most progress on marijuana decriminalization when the pubic image of the weed smoker was least racialized. We have to acknowledge the acute racial anxieties of many Americans by convincing more productive white Americans to come out of the closet about their marijuana use. When Carl Sagan died and knowledge of his life-long love for marijuana was publicized, it helped many people see that some of their most admired figures are pot smokers and they are prolific and creative.

I'm afraid that public policies on drug use will not change until we detach the bogeyman of racial demonization. That's a tall order, especially considering the corrections industrial complex that has sprung up around the incarceration epidemic. There are many more financial interests vested in the continuation of prohibitionist policies. The incentives of capitalism and racism are two venerable American traditions that have to be challenged if we are to really win the war against the war on drugs. Let's get this party started.