I've run across various arguments that drugs were made illegal in order to discriminate against minorities, e.g. laws against opium meant to discriminate against Chinese laborers, laws against cocaine and heroin meant to discriminate against black people, laws against marijuana meant to discriminate against Latinos, etc. In other words, the government couldn't make it legal to simply pick on a given ethnic group directly, so they initiated anti-drug laws to give them leverage over a given population.
For one example of this argument, see the documentary film "The House I Live In," which features a historian (Richard Miller) arguing that US drug policy has its roots in racial discrimination.
I don't doubt that there is some validity to the narrative that drug laws are used to discriminate, but I'm curious about whether racial factors were the primary motivator behind formulating US drug laws, or whether US drug laws happened to be a convenient tool for racists who worked in local law enforcement. Thanks.
This is not so much an answer as it is a way of thinking about the problem.
First: people generally want to see racism, particularly on the institutional scale, as the result of conscious evil, but racism isn't the product of some shadowy cabal that meets in a smoke-filled room. Nor do people who institute racist policies have to be themselves consciously racist. For example, mandatory minimum sentences on crack vs. powder cocaine are clearly racist, i.e. they inflict far harsher penalties on people of color than they do on white people for more or less the same drug. But the fact that crack was popular in black communities whereas powder cocaine is more popular among more affluent (and therefore whiter) communities is the product of racism in America, as are the communities themselves. In other words, when making really strict laws on crack, there needn't have been a group of old white men rubbing their hands together about how they were going to get the blacks. Instead, the focus on crack was the product of systematic racism that linked crack cocaine with poverty and crime, and poverty and crime with black people, which were in turn the product of systematic racism. The resulting focus on black communities in the war on drugs reinforced the underlying racialized preconceptions that generated the crack-powder punishment imbalance in the first place. So US drug policy clearly has its roots in racial discrimination. In other words, racism is not really the Klan, it is the cultural and societal structures that allow the Klan to exist.
Second: there is good evidence that the war on drugs was a political solution to an invented problem; Reagan's emphasis on drugs came before the crack epidemic of the '80s. The war on drugs certainly benefited the careers of many politicians. We can argue back and forth as to whether this means that Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, etc. were out to "get" black people, but that honestly doesn't seem to be a particularly interesting question. What we do have to recognize is that Reagan and the others were able to convince people of the necessity of the war on drugs because of a preexisting foundation of racialized thought. To the majority of Americans, a war on crack meant a war on those people in a restricted geographic area they didn't know, whereas a war on pot or powder cocaine meant a war on Bob next door and his hippie stoner daughter. Again, this segregation of American communities on racial lines was itself the product of both historical and contemporary racism. Systemic and institutional racism put the brunt of the drug war on minorities. Whether or not this makes "racial factors" a "primary" motivator in the drug war, they were certainly necessary conditions for its implementation.
Further reading, and my main source for this post: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
I also have a follow up question; In american history we were taught that prohibition was also a way to strike at minorities and poor union workers. How true is that?