This month marks 100 years since historian, educator, and journalist Dr. Carter G. Woodson and other scholars of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History launched and publicized Negro History Week. 50 years later, the United States first officially recognized its successor, the February-long celebration we now know as Black History Month. For those working in the field of substance use, these milestones present an opportunity to reflect on the long history of anti-Black drug criminalization in this nation, the Black leaders who challenged the brutality of the so-called War on Drugs, and the significance of this history in a growingly uncertain future.
A Century of Criminalization and Its Consequences
In February 1970, six years before President Gerald Ford formally recognized Black History Month, members of Kent State’s Black United Students capped off months of pushing for a month-long celebration with their first official Black History Month observance on campus. Later that same year, Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a piece of legislation that remains the cornerstone of U.S. federal drug policy to this day. The law established “schedules” into which all regulated substances were to be categorized and upon which the legality of possession and manufacture of those drugs would be based. Now considered a defining element of the War on Drugs, the CSA was enacted with the stated goals of “prevention of drug abuse and drug dependence” and “treatment and rehabilitation of drug abusers and drug dependent persons.” Its legacy, however, has been a dramatic expansion of the U.S. prison system—with the overall imprisonment rate increasing seven‑fold between 1973 and 2009, and people convicted or suspected of drug offenses making up nearly 1 in 5 incarcerated individuals by 2025. Yet research shows no link between higher drug imprisonment and reduced illicit drug use.
For Black Americans, the “War on Drugs” has been devastating. The Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of the late 1980s, most famous for establishing mandatory minimum sentencing as well as a 100:1 sentencing ratio for crack vs. powder cocaine, badly exacerbated racial disparities in U.S. incarceration rates. In 1986, federal drug sentences for Black individuals were on average 11% longer than for whites. By 1990, the difference was a staggering 49%. The incarceration rate for Black women increased an unimaginable 800% (compared to the 400% increase for all women) from 1986 to 2006. As of 2018, Black people remain over 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession—despite the nationwide wave of legislation decriminalizing cannabis—and the list of statistical disparities in arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment is too long to recount here. The War on Drugs came right on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, the era of Black power, and a period of heightened social unrest and political violence across America. The War on Drugs is better viewed as a strategic response to these political threats than a benevolent, but misguided, attempt to curb harmful drug use. Former Nixon aide Harry Anslinger best summed up the retaliatory nature of the drug war in a 1994 interview: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
Navigating Distrust and Resting the War on Black People
Just as long-lasting as the sentences for drug possession, sale, and distribution are the stigmatizing attitudes toward drugs and people who use them among Americans of all races. These attitudes didn’t stop harm reduction practitioner and advocate Imani Woods from theorizing a better way to promote harm reduction among Black communities in a 1998 book chapter entitled “Bringing harm reduction to the Black community: There’s a fire in my house and you’re telling me to rearrange my furniture?” Woods’ approach contextualizes Black distrust of harm reduction interventions within a long history of genocidal abuse, neglect, and intentional malpractice perpetrated by American public health institutions. Woods advocates for a culturally responsive approach led by Black people and sensitive to the real drug-related harms many have experienced. She also highlighted the underappreciated work of Black addiction treatment specialists, harm reduction pioneers, social scientists, and even political figures like Kurt Schmoke and Jocelyn Elders.
Neither Woods nor any of the figures she mentioned—perhaps due to the very nature of their attitudes around drug use and harm reduction—typically appear in regurgitated lists of prominent figures in Black history that make the rounds every February. But, despite this obscurity, Imani Woods and so many other Black strugglers who fall below the threshold of household name recognition laid the groundwork for our critical resistance to this “War on Drugs” which, as Woods echoes from members of her own community, has been nothing short of a war on Black people.
Looking to the Past to Inform the Present
In our current moment, we are witnessing the brazen censorship of Black historical information across the nation while all indicators point to the continued acceleration of the drug war both within and outside the borders of the United States. These kinds of attacks are nothing new, which means we must rely on the past more heavily even as the powers that be obscure it. We must deepen our relationship with Black history, which means appreciating the multitude of unrecognized Black individuals absent from the “best of” lists, not just to give them the credit they are due, but to follow their guidance through our present problems. This Black History Month, I am in awe of the tremendous gift that is getting to know the lives of so many who have stood up against the centuries-long assault on Black life. I am determined to make use of this gift while we still have it.
For a brief timeline of racist drug policy in the U.S., click here. From BeHERE’s “Analyzing the U.S. War on Drugs & Racist Drug Policies” training.