I hear all the time about the Reagan administration putting crack into black communities, then making crack have a higher mandatory minimum than cocaine, a more white used drug, and this system is all to imprison black people.
I know why Nixon started the drug war, and I know Nixon and Reagan's attitudes on race, but what is our proof and sources we can cite to make the "crack in black communities" claim?
There have been a lot of questions regarding this topic over the years. Here are a few that might satiate your interest while others more capable than I am answer your question. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the evidence, the idea that Reagan or the CIA intentionally funneled crack into black communities to destroy them from within is a conspiracy theory. The plausibility of this conspiracy, of course, rests upon some of the elements you highlighted. Correlation does not equal causation, however.
It's funny that I'm making excuses for Reagan for the second time this week. I never... ever... thought I'd be defending Ronald Reagan, but I think this is a good example of society retroactively throwing Reagan under the bus for the Reagan era rather than specific policy actions.
Since the putting crack into Black communities thing has been pretty well covered by the previous responses (including mine), I'd like to just talk about the mid-80s history of mandatory minimums. As OP noted, you needed only 5 grams of crack to land you in deep water with the feds, but 500 grams of cocaine hydrochloride. This is the famous 100-to-1 ratio that raises so many eyebrows. This was (at the time) considered to about 250 doses of crack in but like, 12,000 lines of powered cocaine.
Alright, Reagan! Reagan was not a fan of drugs, regardless of the race of the people doing them. By the 1982 he was ramping up the rhetoric about drugs. You can see this in speeches, for example, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/19821100282a.htm. In 1984, Reagan released the National Strategy for the Prevention of Drug Abuse and Drug Trafficking. You can read that here: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/101857NCJRS.pdf . That's a soup-to-nuts blueprint for a ramping up the war on drugs. It talks about enforcement, education, working with countries where source product comes from, etc. It also nods to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, encouraging stricter penalties for offenders. Also worth noting in 1984 Act created the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC). The idea here was to reduce disparities in sentencing, but the mechanism for that was mandatory minimums. The point here is that drug enforcement was in the air in the early 80s and a tool in the form of a big 'ol hammer just appeared with the USSC.
Anyway, what you will not find in these early 1980s documents is any reference to crack or different penalties for crack.
So what's up with crack? Crack hit essentially in 1985 to much media fanfare, particularly after some celebrities died in 85/86. There's an older book that covers this called Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy by Reeves and Campbell. The media coverage was very sensationalistic. And I mean, people were dying so it's not like it was a made up thing. But as Reeves and Campbell argue, the media circus is what really refocused it as a crime problem rather than a social problem.
Now we're into 1986. An election year! A whole bunch of house bills relating to drugs were crammed into a massive omnibus bill called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. While the crack fiasco is the most lasting legacy, it included things like education programs, treatment programs, AIDS research -- a bunch of things that most people today would thing are good.
But the piece of the omnibus puzzle we're interested in is the piece initially titled the "Narcotics Penalties and Enforcement Act of 1986." This leveraged the USSC to create mandatory minimums for specified amounts of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, cocaine base, LSD, PCP, weed. Notably, it treated "cocaine" differently from "cocaine base." "Crack" appears nowhere in the legislation. So concentrated cocaine (be it crack, base, or cocaine paste) was treated differently, as was heroin and fentanyl.
If you want to get into the history of the drafting of that, you can consult House Report 99-845. When trying to determine who was a "major dealer," they figured if you had 100 grams of crack or 5 kilos of powered cocaine, you were probably a major dealer. Assuming a typical crack dose of 20mg, that'd be about 5,000 doses of crack. According to testimony submitted in the 2007 hearings on mandatory minimum sentencing laws, Eric Stirling stated that he developed those numbers by consulting the police and drug policy groups. The math-inclined will notice that's a 50-to-1 ratio, not a 100-to-1 ratio. (You can read the testimony here: https://books.google.com/books?id=mPYlv45BYJ4C&lpg=PA171&dq=%22H.Rept%2099-845%22&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q=%22H.Rept%2099-845%22&f=false)
So how did we get to 100-to-1? I can't pinpoint it, but it happened between the committee's report and the final drafting of the bill. This all happened very fast -- we're talking weeks. By the time it went to the Senate, that 100 grams of crack had become 50. Remember that's for major dealers. To figure out lesser sentences, congress just reduced the numbers and kept the ratios. According to Stirling's testimony (above), this was not the original intent. But they were working fast. The Omnibus bill was introduced on September 8th, and underwent significant amendments September 11th. This all happened in a matter of hours.
On September 11th, the House considered 25 amendments, adopting 18 of them. Most of the adopted amendments were fairly bipartisan, as members from both parties approved amendment after amendment that increased penalties against drug dealers and added money to programs. The process generated some criticism. Rep. Brian Donnelly (D-MA) asserted it had become "a mob mentality in there." And Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) dubbed it a "political 'piling on' right before an election." Source: https://www.thecongressproject.com/anti-drug-abuse-act-of-1986/#Initial-House-Consideration
And they mean right before -- the election is weeks away. Sensationalist stories from LA (see afterhoughts) and New York have lit a fire under these representatives. They see crack -- not wrongly -- as a bigger danger than powered cocaine. And they've got this shiny new hammer with the USSC that doesn't require additional appropriations, and... they used it. Remember, people thought at the time that tougher sentences would deter crime. The congressional record shows that they understood that crack was impacting urban areas disproportionately, but Congress thought that this would help.
This is why the bill ultimately passed the house 395 to 17.
Okay, so we got Congress ridin' roughshod and drafting some sloppy laws, but... where does Reagan fit into all this? Well, on September 15th, 1986 -- after the house passed their version -- Reagan transmitted to Congress his version of these bills called "The Drug Free America Act of 1986." While most of this was similar to stuff in the Omnibus bill, Reagan's ratios were different. Can you guess what Reagan's ratios were? Big reveal... it was... 25:1. That's right, Reagan's proposal was the most equitable we've heard so far. And frankly, not too far away from the 18:1 ratio that came to be after the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 when Congress decided that the old law was inequitable.
So in summary, a law got written quickly, slapped in with a bunch of other laws quickly to make an omnibus bill, sauced with additional election year politics, and then signed.
TL;DR: You can blame Reagan for drug war rhetoric, but blame Congress for the crack / powder disparity.
Afterthoughts:
Another source you may enjoy browsing is the Justice Department's handbook on the Anti Drug Abuse act. This talks specifically about some of the goals and enforcement mechanisms and is a fun insight into the executive branch interpreting the law. You can happy access that at: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Handbook_on_the_Anti_Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1/ULXOt5I3EPEC
If you have a minute, you'd do well to read this article about how the war on crack in LA was... crazy. It really informs the change into what critics would call the modern police state. https://diversity.williams.edu/davis-center/files/2015/05/Crack-in-Los-Angeles-Crisis-Militarization-and-Black-Response-to-the-Late-Twentieth-Century-War-on-Drugs.pdf
re: why Nixon "started the drug war", I think it quite possible you may have some confusion. I have an older answer about this that I'll reproduce here.
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CONTENT WARNING: I quote Nixon being racist.
The problem with the "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did" quote is, despite Nixon being racist, the quote doesn't match what happened with the history of Nixon's policy. I do mean unquestionably racist.
That's the key ... I have the greatest affection for [blacks], but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.
-- Nixon from 1971
Now, Nixon was completely against drugs, and attributed them in part to the rise of hippies, and he said drugs were "decimating a generation of Americans" and promised to triple the number of custom agents in his 1968 campaign.
The government in 1969 had a drug budget of $81 million, a little more than half going for treatment, the rest going for enforcement. Nixon did in fact increase Customs (double rather than triple) but notice that by "customs" we're meaning a focus on international import -- stopping drugs at the source. The "French Connection" at the time had opium from Turkey turned into morphine and then turned into heroine in labs of Marseilles (run by local organized crime). Nixon went particularly went hard at the international angle; Nixon in a 1969 memo:
I feel very strongly that we have to tackle the heroin problem regardless of the foreign policy consequences. I understand that the major problem is with Turkey and to a lesser extent with France and with Italy.
So: a strong enforcement angle, but in international terms. Bud Krogh was put in charge of the problem (incidentally, he also made a cameo in my recent post about Nixon and Elvis).
He went to Paris to push on French enforcement; the French, according to the US ambassador, regarded it as an American issue and not their concern. Krogh kept up meetings with various agencies trying to push the needle, keeping up contacts with Turkey at the same time.
While this was going on, Krogh also consulted with Robert DuPont, heroin addict specialist. DuPont had done interviews with inmates in Washington DC and found 45 percent used heroine. Krogh helped DuPont expand a drug abuse program into the Narcotics Treatment Administration of 1970, including methadone treatment. It had the full backing of the White House.
One report from the DC program found in several-month-period that 2.6 percent of enrollees were arrested as opposed to 26 percent of those who tried to drop addiction on their own. Krogh himself felt like the program was a success need to roll out nationwide, and had to convince Ehrlichman to do so. (Both of them were Christian Scientists who would normally abhor this kind of thing, but Krogh was a pragmatist.)
Where heroin really started to hit the Nixon administration hard was an addiction issue with soldiers in Vietnam; this was enough for Ehrlichman to decide a meeting with Nixon was necessary (Krogh in tow). Nixon still held his views of drug use as abhorrent, but he was also pragmatic, and was interested in the idea of reducing crime with treatment. This eventually led to a June 17 press conference where Nixon requested $155 million in funds, with about two-thirds going to treatment (notice the increase from one-half). This was the president declaring war on drugs. The emphasis was to shift to going after demand rather than supply, and Jerome Jaffe -- Nixon's new drug czar -- was far more concerned with heroin rather than marijuana. He was the one that made national use of methadone for treatment popular and also worked on other detoxification programs.
It wasn't until 1979 that enforcement of supply (going after dealers) and demand (generally detox programs) reached parity; during the Reagan administration funding of attack of supply shot off into the billions. While Nixon during the end of his time as president certain became more interested in heavier enforcement, when in 1973 Rockefeller (New York governor) proposed mandatory minimums, which Nixon followed up with in March 1973. However, Watergate hit not long after, and Nixon never got a chance to steer enforcement -- and criminalization -- in a harsher direction.
In summary: Nixon certainly felt animosity towards drugs, and would not have been adverse to a harsh approach, but was also a pragmatist, and was talked into expanding methadone treatment due to the twin problems of addicted returning veterans and crime. He was intrigued by increased criminalization but resigned before having a chance for any policy changes; the major sea-change in that respect came with Reagan where attack of demand and attack of supply swapped priorities.
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Courtwright, D. T. (2004). The Controlled Substances Act: How a “big tent” reform became a punitive drug law. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 76(1), 9-15.
Courtwright, D. T. (2015). The cycles of American drug policy. The American Historian.
Maguire, K. (Ed.). (1996). Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics 1995. Diane Publishing.
Massing, M. (2000). The Fix. University of California Press.
FYI---the San Jose Mercury News "broke" the story re: CIA and crack in 1996. setting the stage for most the comments in this thread. The newspaper retracted the story soon after is was published in the form of an open letter to its readers in which it apologized for the stories. Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos wrote, “I believe that we fell short at every step of our process -- in the writing, editing and production of our work.” The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, all published reports on the story, finding no evidence to support the claims Unfortunately a bottom line of "sorry, our bad" isn't very sexy nor does offer aid and comfort to alleged "victims." Way past time for a new Boogie Man guys.