THAT WHITE KIDS USE AND DEAL DRUGS IS NEWS ONLY TO THE IGNORANT

THE FRONT-PAGE headline read "Good Kids Went Bad." The photos beside
it--high school yearbook portraits--confirmed the meaning of the code
words: the youths in question were clean-cut and white.

The Washington Post's Aug. 12 article on a murder that led police to
the discovery of one of Northern Virginia's largest-ever drug
operations--allegedly run by recent graduates of Chantilly and
Centreville high schools in Fairfax County--described the suspected
ringleaders as the kind of young people who had "played Little League
and soccer in parks, went to church and sold Christmas trees at the
mall parking lot."

A Prince William County cop told the Post that "in many ways these
kids are mirror images of the detectives working the case, except they
have chosen to go the wrong way." And the principal at Chantilly High
said: "There is great cause for concern when a tragedy of this scope
can happen in a safe neighborhood like Centreville or Chantilly."

An unspoken sentiment permeates the article, and it goes something
like, "Oh my God, what are nice white kids doing selling dope and
killing people out here in the suburbs?"

On one level, at least, the answer to that question is obvious:
There's an insatiable demand in America's Pleasantvilles for the
products drug dealers offer, so the narcotics trade thrives in suburbs
that the cops, courts and media don't ordinarily view as the
battlefields on which the drug war is to be fought.

"American society doesn't want to face the fact that white kids deal
and use drugs," one insightful dealer told the Post. "[But] the fact
is that we do sell drugs to their kids, in their rich neighborhoods
and in their rich schools."

Even though federal studies have shown that white people are more
likely than African-Americans to use illegal drugs, an African-
American man is 13 times more likely than his white counterpart to
wind up in state prison during his lifetime for a drug offense.

Nationwide, 58 percent of people in state prisons for drug offenses
are African-American; together, African-Americans and Hispanics make
up 78 percent.

And in seven states--including Virginia--African-Americans alone
represent at least 80 percent of prisoners convicted of drug offenses,
Human Rights Watch reported last year.

It's not just that African-Americans stand a greater chance of being
picked up by the cops on drug charges. African-Americans convicted of
drug felonies in state courts are 11/2 times more likely than white
offenders to get jail time, Justice Department statistics show.

The drug war's racial disparities perhaps become most apparent when
one examines figures on convictions for possession and trafficking of
crack cocaine, which carry stiffer penalties than the same offenses
involving powder cocaine (the form of the narcotic preferred by more
affluent drug users).

A federal sentencing commission found in the mid-1990s that although
African-Americans represented only one-third of crack users, they made
up 84 percent of those convicted in federal courts of crack
possession. In addition, 88 percent of those sentenced for crack
trafficking by federal courts were African-American.

"The racially disproportionate nature of the war on drugs is not just
devastating to black Americans," Human Rights Watch said in its report
on the drug war last year. "It contradicts faith in the principles of
justice and equal protection of the laws that should be the bedrock of
any constitutional democracy; it exposes and deepens the racial fault
lines that continue to weaken the country and belies its promise as a
land of equal opportunity; and it undermines faith among all races in
the fairness and efficacy of the criminal justice system."

The rights group may make some good points, but don't expect either of
the major parties to expend much political capital trying to end the
institutionalized racism that suffuses the drug war.

After all, since the mid-1980s, politicians of both parties at the
local, state and federal levels have tried to outdo their rivals in
filling up prisons--with a grossly disproportionate number of jail-
cell dwellers hailing from communities of color.

One result of this incarceration mania is that 1.46 million black men
out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right
to vote due to felony convictions.

Of course, this suits Republicans just fine, since they have
historically written off the African-American vote.

But the disenfranchisement of so many potential African-American
voters--mostly from lower socioeconomic strata--also causes fewer
headaches for the centrists who run the Democratic Party. With the
reduced electoral weight of lower-income African-Americans, Democratic
leaders don't have to worry as much about a powerful bloc of voters
who might pull the party more to the left.

That means the Democratic Party can devote more energy and resources
to pandering to "swing voters"--those comfortable (and generally
white) suburbanites who live in the "safe neighborhoods" and raise the
"good kids."