ABSTRACT
America’s drug laws have always exerted an unequal and unfair toll on racial and ethnic communities. Blacks, Latinos, and American Indians are arrested more often than Whites for the possession of illegal drugs, and courts also impose harsher sentences on minority drug offenders. In 2009, based on the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, 1.7 million adults were arrested for drug-abuse violations, and 46 percent of those arrests were for possession of marijuana. That is why when pro-marijuana advocates were able to get Proposition 19, an initiative to legalize marijuana for personal consumption by persons 21 and older, on the November 2010 ballot in California, the head of the state’s NAACP chapter endorsed it. Proposition 19 also won the endorsement of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the nation’s first Black U.S. surgeon general, who served in the Clinton administration. Legalization of some drugs, like marijuana, Clarence Lusane writes, “would resolve some of the biggest problems of the current drug crisis and drug war” (1991, 214). The drug crisis and war on drugs disproportionately impact minority Americans (Alexander 2010; Lusane 1991; Provine 2007).
