4. The war on drugs was racially motivated at its inception
In the 1890s it was possible to order, from the Sears, Roebuck catalog, a syringe and a dose of cocaine for delivery through the United States Post Office to the home. The price was $1.50. While many municipalities had prohibited the use of opiates, largely in an endeavor to close the opium dens which permeated many cities, there were no restrictions on cocaine. As noted above, it was prevalent in patent medicines and tonics, used in cough medicines, elixirs, children’s medications, and was freely prescribed and dosed by physicians. In 1900, the first published reports linking cocaine to criminal behavior and activity emerged, beginning with the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, which discussed cocaine and crime in an editorial page article. The Journal opined that crime rates among southern blacks were on the increase as a result of their use of cocaine.
In 1914 a physician named Edward Huntington Williams published an article in The New York Times under the headline: “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ are a New Menace” (The New York Times, February 8, 1914). Dr. Williams expressed the belief, which he claimed to be evidentially supported but did not present the evidence, that the use of cocaine among black men in the south emboldened them to rape white women. He further expressed the opinion that it made them more inclined to violence while also sharpening their visual acuity, and thus their shooting ability. Other newspapers took up the theme, and still others blamed the problem of opium use on the Chinese immigrants in the cities, stereotyping Chinatown neighborhoods as harboring opium dens and the Chinese preying on the users through theft, kidnaping, and outright murder. In 1911 Dr. Hamilton Wright, the first United States Opium Commissioner, declared, “…it has been authoritatively stated that cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes of the south and other sections of the country”.