<\/p>\n

The Article:<\/strong> How the Myth of the \u2018Negro Cocaine Fiend\u2019 Helped Shape American Drug Policy<\/a> by Carl L. Hart in The Nation.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> Negro Cocaine \u201cFiends\u201d Are a New Southern Menace. That was the headline of an article I came across while doing research for my PhD in 1996. It involved trying to understand the neurobiological and behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs like cocaine and nicotine. So I read everything that seemed relevant.<\/p>\n

The provocatively headlined article had appeared in The New York Times on February 8, 1914. I was surprised by the title, although I knew it was once acceptable to print such blatantly racist words in respectable papers. But what really shocked me was how similar it was to modern media coverage of illegal drugs and how, from early on, the racialized discourse on drugs served a larger political purpose.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The author, a distinguished physician, wrote: \u201c[The Negro fiend] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims.\u201d And he continued, \u201cthe deadly accuracy of the cocaine user has become axiomatic in Southern police circles\u2026. the record of the \u2018cocaine nigger\u2019 near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cocaine, in other words, made black men uniquely murderous and better marksmen. But that wasn\u2019t all. It also produced \u201ca resistance to the \u2018knock down\u2019 effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the \u2018fiend.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Preposterous? Yes, but such reporting was not the exception. Between 1898 and 1914, numerous articles appeared exaggerating the association of heinous crimes and cocaine use by blacks. In some cases, suspicion of cocaine intoxication by blacks was reason enough to justify lynchings. Eventually, it helped influence legislation.<\/p>\n

Around this time, Congress was debating whether to pass the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, one of the country\u2019s first forays into national drug legislation. This unprecedented law sought to tax and regulate the production, importation and distribution of opium and coca products. Proponents of the law saw it as a strategy to improve strained trade relations with China by demonstrating a commitment to controlling the opium trade. Opponents, mostly from Southern states, viewed it as an intrusion into states\u2019 rights and had prevented passage of previous versions.<\/p>\n

By 1914, however, the law\u2019s proponents had found an important ally in their quest to get it passed: the mythical \u201cnegro cocaine fiend,\u201d which prominent newspapers, physicians and politicians readily exploited. Indeed, at congressional hearings, \u201cexperts\u201d testified that \u201cmost of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.\u201d When the Harrison Act became law, proponents could thank the South\u2019s fear of blacks for easing its passage.<\/p>\n

With this as background, drug policy in the decades following takes on a sharper focus. Although the Harrison Act did not explicitly prohibit the use of opiates or cocaine, enforcement of the new law quickly became increasingly punitive, helping set the stage for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (alcohol prohibition) in 1919 and, ultimately, all our narcotics policy until 1970. As important, the rhetoric that laced those early conversations about drug use didn\u2019t just evaporate; it continued and evolved, reinventing itself most powerfully in the mythology of crack.<\/p>\n

From its earliest appearance in the 1980s, crack cocaine was steeped in a narrative of race and pathology. While powder cocaine came to be regarded as a symbol of luxury and associated with whites, crack was portrayed as producing uniquely addictive, unpredictable and deadly effects and associated with blacks. By this time, of course, references to race in such a context were no longer acceptable. So problems related to crack were described as being prevalent in \u201cpoor,\u201d \u201curban\u201d or \u201ctroubled\u201d neighborhoods, \u201cinner cities\u201d and \u201cghettos,\u201d terms that were codes for \u201cblacks\u201d and other undesired people.<\/p>\n

A March 7, 1987, New York Times article, \u201cNew violence seen in users of cocaine\u201d offers a potent example. It describes an incident in which \u201ca man apparently using cocaine held four people hostage for 30 hours in an East Harlem apartment.\u201d That cocaine use was never confirmed was minimized; and since East Harlem was almost exclusively black and Latino, there was no need to mention the suspect\u2019s race. The message was clear: crack makes poor people of color crazy and violent.<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. Entire specialty police units were deployed to \u201ctroubled neighborhoods,\u201d making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems; resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods\u2019 real needs, such as job creation.<\/p>\n

In 1986, Congress passed the infamous Anti-Drug Abuse Act, setting penalties that were 100 times harsher for crack than for powder cocaine convictions. We now know that an astonishing 85 percent of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were black, even though the majority of users of the drug were, and are, white. We also know that the effects of crack were greatly exaggerated; crack is no more harmful than powder cocaine. On August 3, 2010, President Obama signed legislation that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. This is an important step, but any sentencing disparity in this case makes no sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: How the Myth of the \u2018Negro Cocaine Fiend\u2019 Helped Shape American Drug Policy by Carl L. Hart in The Nation. The Text: Negro Cocaine \u201cFiends\u201d Are a New Southern Menace. That was the headline of an article I came across while doing research for my PhD in 1996. It involved trying to understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n