'RACIST' WAR ON DRUGS

Thank you for writing about the Human Rights Watch report on the war on
drugs. The racial disparities in sentencing brought to light by the report
are not surprising when one realizes that the war on drugs has from it
inception been a means of suppressing minorities in the USA ("Study:" War
on drugs is stacked against blacks," News, Thursday).

Drugs associated with particular ethnic groups were outlawed in a conscious
effort to control those groups. Hamilton Wright, who helped promote the
first federal drug laws in the early part of the 20th century, used this
reasoning to support cocaine prohibition: Cocaine is often the direct
incentive to the crime of rape by blacks, he said (The New York Times,
March 11, 1911). Other like Wright used similar language when they talked
about opium use by Chinese or marijuana use by Mexicans.

The prohibition of alcohol, the psychotropic drug of choice for the white
majority, was quickly seen for the disastrous failure it was and
repealed. Consideration for minority rights never has been a major issue
for our politicians, so the prohibition of other drugs is still believed to
be a viable policy option instead of an impossible and racist farce.

Greg Goldmakher Dallas, Texas