ABSTRACT:  While American drug control policies have been consistently irrational and ineffective when measured by levels of substance abuse, they have been remarkably rational and successful as agents of social control in maintaining the stratification patterns of racial/ethnic minorities and women.  In this sense, racism and sexism are impediments to achieving rational drug control policies.  In the current "War on Drugs," African American men and women are disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated for abuse of cocaine and its derivative crack.  A deconstruction of this "War" suggests that it maintains and efficiently updates for the new millennium America's long standing war on the African American family begun under the system of chattel slavery.
 

• While drug abuse has diminished from that of previous decades on almost all measures of cost, public fear about illicit drugs and their consequences continues to climb and is higher than at any time in recent history.
• It has become exceedingly clear that the conditions which make drugs an explosive and timely issue do not lend themselves to rational analysis and evaluation, or even to a reasonable consideration of what we might learn from past efforts to control substance abuse.
• Levels of drug and alcohol use in America have varied widely over time and have been subject to rather large fluctuations that cannot be attributed to official control measures.
• There is no basis in most of American history for the distinction commonly drawn between beverage alcohol, which has consistently been the most widely used and abused drug, and other psychoactive substances described as drugs.
• The social construction of substance abuse as an ill which permeates all levels of society tends to conceal the fact that minorities are disproportionately represented among hard-core substance abusers, and disproportionately incarcerated in the name of "treatment" for their substance abuse.
• African-Americans and other racial/ethnic groups comprise up to "75% of the inmate population in state operated correctional facilities and other similar services nationwide."
• The drugs that have been of greatest concern to Americans and have been designated as illegal are all associated in the public mind with the repression of a racial minority, e.g.,
• opium with the Chinese laborers in the West
• marijuana with Mexican immigrants
• cocaine with African-Americans.  "The fear of the cocainized Black coincided with the peak of lynchings, legal segregation, and voting laws all designed to remove political and social power from him.  Fear of cocaine might have contributed to the dread that the Black would rise above `his place' as well as reflecting the extent to which cocaine may have released defiance and retribution."
• Even the prohibition movement, which ultimately failed, was associated in the public mind with the suppression of the massive, White European immigration that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century.