11.3 Harmful Drug Use: Exploring Unequal Outcomes
Kelly Szott and Kimberly Puttman
Now that we have clarified how our understandings of drug use and harmful drug use are socially constructed, we can explore how differences in social location can influence when drug use is considered problematic and how outcomes may differ. For this section, we will specifically consider geographic location and race and ethnicity to look at the inequality in outcomes.
The War On Drugs – Criminalizing Drug Use
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSozqaVcOU8
The War on Drugs is an effort in the United States since the 1970s to combat illegal drug use by greatly increasing penalties, enforcement, and incarceration for drug offenders (Britannica 2023b). The War on Drugs was partially in response to a significant global economic recession in the early 1980s. Angela Davis, who we met in Chapter 1, describes it this way:
By 1994, the deindustrialization of the US economy produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe Willam Trotter, that “the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s.” Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of black people to seek other—sometimes “illegal”—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the early 1980s and 1990s (Davis 2021).
The massive expenditures on the curtailment of the drug epidemic also shifted our views on drug use. The United States became much more punitive towards drugs. The courts treated harmful drug use as a criminal justice issue rather than as a substance dependence issue. The War on Drugs created tougher sanctions on drug use in America. The Drug Enforcement Agency was created in 1973 to provide another arm of the government to tackle the specific issue of drugs. By the 1980s, lengthy sentences for drug possession were also in place. One to five-year sentences for possession were increased to more than 25 years.
The War on Drugs and its associated policies also drove massive increases in prison populations. Between 1980 and 2010, the US prison population quintupled. The population only began to decline slightly in the early 2010s. As of 2019, the United States still imprisoned more than 2 million people in prisons and jails. Mass incarceration refers to the overwhelming size and scale of the US prison population. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, but how did this come to be the case?
The War on Drugs is one of the major drivers of the prison population in the United States. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, dedicating increased federal funding and resources to quelling the supply of drugs in the United States.