Wayman Newton: Drug abuse is not a black problem

Every Friday and Saturday night from 3 to 4 a.m., I am always amazed by the hordes of students outside my window stumbling down Walnut Street under the influence of a number of substances.

Amazed might not be the way to put it. Outraged would be a better choice.

Penn spends millions of dollars a year on the University Police, the largest private police force in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. With such an able law enforcement body on campus, I do not understand why people like myself cannot get some sleep on the weekend nights.

As a nation in the middle of a war on drugs, one might expect Penn to lend its support by cracking down on campus drug usage, especially in instances in which students parade it down Walnut Street.

Not only would this illustrate the University's commitment to a drug free community, but it would also improve our national reputation as the premiere urban Ivy League university.

The truth of the matter is, Penn's inaction is merely indicative of a broader policy failure with regard to drugs. The War on Drugs is primarily targeted against the black community, and thus Penn and other predominately white institutions have no need to vigorously clamp down on drug use among students.

Since its inception under Ronald Regan in 1982, the War on Drugs has been a mechanism for Republicans to sell their reactionary agenda to the American public by creating fear in the hearts and minds of white Americans.

Through the careful use of racially coded language such "inner-city," "soft on crime," "gang violence" and "family values," Republicans have planted racial fear in whites by portraying America's drug problem solely as a black problem that is threatening the moral purity of the nation. They have been able to play on this fear and maintain their influence in American politics by drafting drug legislation that disproportionately targets blacks and routinely ignore the drug usage of many whites.

The National Institute of Drug Abuse, the federal agency that tracks narcotics usage in the United States, estimates that African Americans account for only 13 percent of all drug users in this country. However, they account for 35 percent of those who are arrested for drug possession and 55 percent of those convicted. Moreover, NIDA has also shown that even when white drug users are convicted, their sentences are likely to be shorter than those of non-whites.

Our current drug policy is to blame for this inexcusable injustice. Along with declaring a war on drugs, we have systematically created a hierarchy among drug users that is most evident in our treatment of crack users, who are primarily black, and cocaine users, who are primarily white.

Because cocaine is a "white" drug, we consider it more "refined" and not as bad as crack. As a reflection of this dichotomy, the federal mandatory minimum sentence for someone possessing five or more grams of crack cocaine is five years in prison, whereas a person must possess 500 grams of cocaine to receive the same sentence.

It is obvious that this dual system of justice convicts more blacks of drug crimes than whites and sends more blacks to prison for longer terms.

For the sake of healing the nation's drug problem and easing its racial tensions, our current drug policy must change. By pinning the drug problem solely on African Americans, we cannot tackle the drug problem holistically and we are further aiding the racial stereotype of blacks as synonymous with crime and vice.

We have limited resources at our disposal to fight the war on drugs, and by concentrating the majority of these resources on just 13 percent of drug users we are letting the overwhelming majority off the hook.

If the objective of the War on Drugs is to rid the country of illegal narcotic use, we should not make concessions to people who use drugs we consider to be more "refined" and not as bad. As long as we continue to arrest and convict black drug users and ignore the actions of their white counterparts, the war on drugs will continue to be an absolute failure, as it has been for almost 20 years.

Wayman Newton is a senior Political Science major from Birmingham, AL.

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