At the dawn of the 1980s, getting high never before looked so appealing. Crack cocaine, having surged into the US, plagued America all throughout the 1980s. It was new, less expensive to produce and more effective than powder cocaine, highly addicting, and astonishingly cheap, allowing even the poor—for just about five bucks per rock—to get hooked. The result was a crisis devastating enough to be labeled as an epidemic, with the number of emergency room visits due to the drug quadrupling and the number of Americans regularly using cocaine increasing by millions. Additionally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that thirty two percent of all homicides in New York City were crack-related incidents, while, on the other end of the country in Los Angeles, the demand for cocaine was so high that drug lord Rick Ross reached peaks of making three million dollars a day. With the situation so dire, the government quickly stepped in.
President Ronald Reagan, picking up the War on Drugs that his precursor, Richard Nixon, had begun, fought against cocaine with “tough on crime” policies. Allocating $1.7 billion to fight the War on Drugs with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Reagan began his battle by setting a mandatory minimum prison sentence for the possession of cocaine: five years for five grams of crack cocaine, and five years for one hundred grams of powder cocaine. However, this minimum punishment had racial repercussions. Whereas most users of crack cocaine were African American, powder cocaine, due to it being much more expensive, was most often used by wealthy whites, meaning that many more African Americans were punished for possessing cocaine than were whites.
However, perhaps the most well-known advocate for the War against Drugs during the 1980s was none other than Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan, who led her anti-drug campaign with the phrase “Just Say No”. In addition, a program known as DARE, which many students likely still recognize today, was started in 1983 to combat the cocaine epidemic by having police officers lecture students as to why they should never take drugs. However, DARE, Nancy Reagan, and Ronald Reagan’s policies were, and still are, met with a lot of criticism, with critics arguing that help should have been offered to addicts rather than them being antagonized and punished. Not to mention, DARE has been found to have had little effect on drug use. Not only was the crisis devastating, but the initial responses from both the government and DARE arguably only made matters worse. 
I enjoyed reading this post as it gave an insightful description of the crack cocaine epidemic that was going on in the 1980s. I thought it was interesting how the government responses were largely ineffective. The DARE policy seems ridiculous especially since kids are most likely not going to listen to police officers coming to their school. Something interesting to note is that rappers today like Jay Z and Migos have rapped about crack cocaine addictions in the 1980s and have made millions doing so.
ReplyDeletehttps://uproxx.com/hiphop/snowfall-1980s-crack-epidemic/
I thought this blog post was interesting because the debate about prison sentences for drug crimes and the racial aspect of the issue is still something that people talk about today. In 2010, President Obama passed the Fair Sentencing Act which reduced the disparity between the prison sentences of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine that you mentioned from 100-1 to 18-1 in weight. This was an effort to reduce the racial disparities that had occurred in the prison system due to the crack cocaine epidemic. To this day, the Fair Sentencing Act still stands in dealings with cocaine, but it is still a compromise. In my opinion, I think the weight ratio needs to be made 1:1 in order for it to be truly fair.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/drug-law-reform/fair-sentencing-act
I really enjoyed reading this post because it highlighted the cause and effect of many drug prevention campaigns. I also was intrigued by the punishment or rehabilitation debate you mentioned, and after some research I found a very extreme drug punishment policy which was passed. The Narcotic Control Act of 1956 was an act which increased minimum sentences for drug crimes, and even allowed the death penalty to be an option for drug criminals. These extreme punishments proved to be ineffective as in 1970 a new act called the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act was put into place and eliminated the mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals.
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https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/drugpolicy/n238.xml
I really enjoyed reading this article and it brought to life the significance of Dare and the War on Drugs fought by President Reagan and his wife. I found that because Dare was unsuccessful they had tried to hide their scientific findings and not have them published.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.livescience.com/33795-effective.html