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According to syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr, and the Department of Health and Human Services, “9.5 percent of blacks (about 3.6 million people) and 8.2 percent of whites (about 16 million people) reported using some form of illicit drug in the previous month. Yet, though there are more than four times as many white drug users as black ones, blacks represent better than half those in state prison on drug charges.”
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The same source says, “though two-thirds of crack users are white or Latino, 82 percent of those sentenced in federal court for crack crimes are black. In some states, black men are jailed on drug charges at a rate of 50 times higher than whites.” And
- Pitts concludes with this statement, “You would think that would be a no-brainer. We have spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions of lives and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world to fight drug use (war on drugs).”
Unless you understand that this war on drugs is a counterinsurgency war against the African community in the U.S., then yes this question is a “no-brainer.” This question of drugs has even led the California Conference of the NAACP to call for the decriminalization of marijuana due to the super imprisonment rate of Africans charged with possession of a joint.
Therefore if you understand the war against the black community, then this drug question is not a “no-brainer.” It is a question that will take leadership and organization to define and defeat.
We’ll run some more facts by you in the next week or two, so stay tuned. But if you can’t wait, contact InPDUM at info@inpdum.org and let’s build the African National Prison Organization.
And as we write this the state of Texas is less than two hours away from legally executing/murdering Derrick Jackson, an African, and the state’s 15th execution of the year. His execution did not even make the newspapers, it’s so routine.
