By Scarlet Neath, Rashad James, Charlotte Resing,
Nationally, at least 12% of all police arrests are for possessing, selling, or making illicit drugs. Despite using and selling illicit drugs at similar rates as White people do, Black people are more likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and reported to law enforcement by medical professionals for substance use. Decades of criminalizing certain substances as a crime-control tactic has failed to achieve its goal of eliminating drug use and instead contributed to profound stigma and fear of punishment that prevents people from accessing treatment and support. It has also resulted in the proliferation of smaller, more potent versions of illicit drugs–like fentanyl–which have exacerbated the opioid crisis in recent years. In 2021, drug overdose deaths reached a record high of 106,699 people, and overdose from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl is now a leading cause of death for adults ages 18 to 45. Because of systemic inequities, including in health care access and the criminal legal system, Black and Native people are experiencing even higher increases in overdose rates than White people are. A public safety approach to substance use, in contrast, means ending the widespread, racist, arbitrary, and ineffective
criminalization of certain drugs. It requires fully investing instead in equitable and accessible systems of care to prevent and reduce the harms associated with substance use, including consistently offering services that recognize continued, moderated use as a common and acceptable feature of recovery. Laws prohibiting the use of certain drugs (including alcohol at one time) have been repeatedly enacted, fueled by racist narratives about the dangerous behavior of particular groups of people due to their substance use, including German, Irish, and Chinese immigrants; Black men; and communists. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 created the current framework stipulating which substances are deemed illicit under federal law. It also established categories for regulating substances based on the perception about potential for abuse and whether the substance has any medical benefits. Notably, alcohol and tobacco were excluded despite high potential for dependency. The enforcement of drug laws increased dramatically after 1971, when President Nixon declared the war on drugs,10 which an advisor later said was an effort to criminalize and vilify Black people and war protesters. After this announcement, the government embarked on a decades-long trend of prioritizing and increasing funding for enforcement that is still ongoing. For example, the U.S. government spent approximately $2.8 billion on drug enforcement in 1981, adjusted for inflation, compared to $19.3 billion in 2023. This immense federal funding has enabled wide and inequitable enforcement of drug laws by local law enforcement agencies, funneling millions of people–especially Black and Latino men–into carceral systems and saddled them with criminal records that affect their future eligibility for housing, employment, voting, and education while undermining community health In 2022, law enforcement made more than 600,000 arrests for drug possession nationally. Black people are almost twice as likely as White people to be arrested for drug offenses. The war on drugs is widely recognized as a primary contributor to mass incarceration, racial disparities in incarceration rates, and militarized policing tactics. .From 1980 to 2011, the average federal prison sentence for a drug offense increased 36%, and similarly, the state incarceration rate for drug offenses increased nearly tenfold. As of 2019, Black people were 3.6 times more likely than White people to be incarcerated in state prisons for a drug offense. In addition to being a primary driver of mass incarceration, these efforts have failed to eliminate drug use–and its associated harms–from our society. Instead, over the past several decades of heavy enforcement, illegal drug prices have declined and the annual number of overdose deaths has risen fivefold since 1999. From 2019 to 2020, the latest year of data, drug overdose rates rose 22% among White people, 39% among Native people, and 44% among Black people. These disparities are not fully explained by differences in substance use patterns. Instead, Black communities face heightened barriers to accessing care due to reasons including criminalization, mistrust of the medical system, and lack of access to certain evidence-based treatments. According to recent data, Black people who died from overdose had the lowest rate of previous substance use treatment.
West Hollywood, CA: Center for Policing Equity , 2024. 40p.
