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[In 2013] about 10% of the population over 12 years of age had used illegal drugs in the previous year, and that this use was more or less evenly distributed across the largest racial groups: 8.8% for Hispanics, 9.5% for whites and 10.5% percent for African Americans.
Convictions for drug crimes are another matter entirely. Thirty-three percent of those serving prison terms for drug offenses are African Americans, two-and-a-half times their proportion in the population. [...] Overall African Americans are about five times as likely to go to prison for drug possession as whites, and judging from exonerations, innocent black people are about 12 times more likely to be convicted of drug crimes than innocent white people.
[...] Sixty percent of the drug exonerations we know about occurred in Harris County, Texas, home to Houston (133/221). The defendants in these cases pled guilty to drug possession before the supposed drugs they possessed were tested in a crime lab, and were exonerated weeks, months or years later after testing was done and no illegal drugs were found. Why did these defendants plead guilty even though they possessed no controlled substances? Some may have had powders or pills that they thought contained illegal drugs but did not. As far as we can tell, however, most pled guilty to get out of jail.
[...] Most, if not all of these innocent black defendants in Harris County pled guilty rather than go to trial because it was their best option, given that they had been arrested and charged, and were held in jail. But why were so many innocent black defendants arrested for drug possession when there is no reason to believe that African Americans are more likely than whites to use illegal drugs?
Two-thirds of the arrests in the Harris County guilty-plea exoneration cases (89/133) were based on cheap and notoriously inaccurate "presumptive" field tests for drugs, usually on substances found in searches following traffic stops. Anybody who is subjected to that process is at risk of false arrest and conviction. Across the country, African Americans drivers are about as likely to be stopped as white drivers, but after that, they are three times as likely to be searched. As a result, they bear much of the brunt of drug-law enforcement—including false drug possession convictions, which may number in the thousands if not tens of thousands a year.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race_and_Wrongful_Convictions.pdf
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:01PM
If black folks want to get punished more, they can use black drugs or get punished less by using white drugs its a free country and if dumb people intentionally choose to suffer I don't see it as my place to prevent them from getting what they clearly enjoy. On a large scale its an injustice that black soul food cooking drugs is punished, but on a small scale its just stupidity and they deserve what they get.
The key is that "black drugs" are cheaper for the dose and can be purchased in smaller lots. Both are important for poor drug users. It's straightforward economics. For example: [wikipedia.org]
In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States, landing in Miami, was coming through the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.[1] Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent.[1] Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers in Los Angeles and Oakland made a decision to convert the powder to "crack," a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop.[1] As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.[1]
Initially, crack had higher purity than street powder.[2] Around 1984, powder cocaine was available on the street at an average of 55 percent purity for $100 per gram (equivalent to $230 in 2016), and crack was sold at average purity levels of 80-plus percent for the same price.[1] In some major cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Houston and Detroit, one dosage unit of crack could be obtained for as little as $2.50 (equivalent to $5.76 in 2016).[1]