As America celebrates and commemorates Black History Month, it’s important to remember exactly how Black Americans have been disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system in our country. From the crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities to the fact that Black Americans are on average four times as likely to be wrongfully convicted of a serious crime based on statistics provided by the Innocence Project and the many ways that cannabis prohibition has directly damaged and devastated Black communities, these punishments and subsequent penalties have ranged from unjust to clearly unconstitutional.
Besides the countless examples of unjust and unnecessary sentencing and policing practices that unfairly targeted Black communities across generations, the longest lasting impact of President Richard Nixon’s trillion-dollar and multi-decade failure was the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Formed in 1973 and serving as the successor to the equally as unnecessarily authoritarian Federal Bureau of Narcotics which itself was founded by the most notorious yet influential prohibitionist of them all, Harry Anslinger, the DEA was the enforcement arm of the endless draconian policies of the Drug War that only increased in severity as both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton took office. Worse even, both George H.W. Bush and his son didn’t do much to reform these dangerous and ineffective policies either.
One of the most unexplainable and continuously disproven series of laws that the DEA have enforced for decades is the illogical Controlled Substances List. “Marihuana”, a plant with clearly proven medicinal remedies for some and legal for approved medical usage in the majority of American states, is designated as the highest and most deadly class of Schedule I. According to the Controlled Substances List, this plant is far more deadly than fentanyl, a synthetic opiate killing thousands of Americans across all socio-economic and geographic demographics every year. OxyContin, the main culprit along with Purdue Pharma in causing the catastrophic opioid epidemic that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and is still ongoing today, is a Schedule II substance and therefore considered less dangerous according to the DEA.
Throughout decades of enforcement of deeply flawed policies that resulted in the unjust incarceration of countless individuals for decades or life sentences in the most severe cases, the DEA’s actions and operations in their clearly unsuccessful attempt to rid America of drug abuse have conclusively been a failure and haven’t resulted in any sort of widespread abstinence from the drugs on the Controlled Substances List. Tragically still though, thousands went to American jails over these decades for drug-related offenses that were non-violent and even victimless in some cases.
Just last week for the start of February, nationally recognized as Black History Month which is a month to honor the innumerable contributions by Black Americans to this great nation, the DEA decided to post a dedication on their Twitter account. Not a dedication to a famous and influential Black American throughout political or legal history such as Thurgood Marshall, but rather a bizarrely timed tribute to the only American president to ever resign from the position and a supposedly prestigious award that he was gifted in the first few months of the Drug War.
“On Dec. 14, 1970, at the White House, the International Narcotic Enforcement Officers’ Association presented President Nixon with a “certificate of special honor” in recognition of the outstanding loyalty and contribution to support narcotic law enforcement.” the caption read.
If this photo of Nixon and caption were posted on the first day of any other month, then this strange tribute post would have been only considered random at best and a painfully cheesy praise of ineffective policies at worst. However, because of the posting date of February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, many cannabis and drug policy reform organizations found this post to be both astoundingly tone deaf and poorly timed.
Given that Nixon was the president who started the Drug War that rapidly spiraled into subsequent decades of mass incarceration and even stricter policies in the presidencies since his resignation, this Twitter post was heavily criticized due to those policies being so destructively discriminatory towards Black Americans.
As would later come out according to the testimony of former White House Counsel John Ehrlichman, that was the underlying goal of those laws and policies.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black,” Ehrlichman said, “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. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
While any social media post from the DEA probably wouldn’t be met with overwhelming praise, this post was particularly ill-timed. Especially after the federal government agency openly admitted themselves that the agency was created due to prejudicial laws and policing practices, the fact that the DEA posted this strange throwback photo on the first day of an important month meant to remember and celebrate the indelible and incredible contributions of Black Americans shows how out-of-the-loop and aloof that some governmental agencies can still be.
