Rare News Desk
Arguments for ending the federal war on drugs often focus on everything from the high financial costs to police militarization, something on full display during the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. But another damaging aspect is significant racial disparities in how these laws are applied and who gets punished, as a recent study conducted by the Brookings Institution demonstrates:
Videos by Rare
Whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students. I find a higher percentage of whites than blacks report ever consuming illegal drugs.
Despite the higher percentage of drug dealing among whites and virtually the same drug usage rate for whites and blacks, blacks tend to be arrested more.
“The black share of people arrested for drug offenses has ranged from 23 percent (in 1980) to 41 percent (in 1991). Blacks remain far more likely than whites to be arrested for selling drugs (3.6 times more likely) or possessing drugs (2.5 times more likely),” the study reads.
These statistics echo what politicians like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) have pointed out about drug arrests, the war on drugs and racial outcomes.
Speaking to the Iowa Republican State Convention in June, Paul said, “[T]he prisons are full of black and brown kids because they don’t get a good attorney, they live in poverty, it’s easier to arrest them than to go to the suburbs. There’s a lot of reasons, but I can tell you, if you go to the African-American community and ask them if they think the law is fair, they’ll tell you no.”
Paul noted that three out of every four Americans in prison for marijuana offenses is either black or brown — even as whites use the drug at a comparable rate, a rate the Brookings Institution study supports.
A chairman for the St. Petersburg NAACP put it this way: “If all you do is fish in a black pond, you are going to get black fish.”
