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So you mean that targeting the dealers and traffickers of drugs in minority communities was somehow racially driven? Do you think if a white guy in ATL was running New Jack City the cops would give them a pass?

Just hazarding a guess here but the original anti-drug operations cracking down on drugs were largely being run in poor city neighborhoods with dealers standing on the corners, crack houses in the projects, etc. Doesn't mean it didn't fit in the parameters of the bill or the good intentions of cracking down on drug use, abuse, and sales but you also weren't seeing a bunch of sting operations nabbing upper middle class white people for snorting coke in NYC and smoking weed in the suburbs. Prison population numbers pretty well indicate that more black people ended up incarcerated under those drug laws than white people and I've known enough drug users on either side of the color line to know that if it makes you feel good, you're prone to use it regardless of the color of your skin.

I'm not going to assume that the busts were racially motivated (maybe they were but I haven't done enough research to know) but I think poor black communities represented a much easier target for busts and the resulting publicity than setting up sting operations in whit communities.

Same thing happening now with white meth busts: poorer communities are just easier to nab people even though opiate addiction is a huge issue in the suburbs right now

This post was edited on 3/18/18 at 11:41 am