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I read this in Forbes today about blacks and the disparity of the drug war. Same thing happens here in Mexico. In Monterrey they ransack and hunt down the local neighborhood dealers, make news reports out of a poor sack that got stopped in his beat up jalopie because he had a joint or two and ends up in jail for years because he can't pay the 50 dollars bail to get out. I've said before that Carlos Slim pays for thousands of those poor guys every Christmas so they can be freed and spend the holiday with their families. On the other side of town, where the fresas and the juniors are, the bars and antros (discos) are open game for drug sales and use by Mexico's middle and elite class. Once in awhile, they get caught but usually are left to do as they wish. Sinful. I still don't know where I stand on all this other than it has been a real battle that "I" believe we are making some ground. They are pulling in the top guns every week but it is creating lots of smaller and more violent groups. Punks that have no education and lack leadership skills.
BTW, another story but related and one that up to now I find nothing on the American newscasts: the police in Ajo, Arizona let a major kingpin slip through Mexican authorities hands in 2009 and it is just now surfacing. Disgusting. What were they thinking?
•Black men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of White men.
•Drug transactions among Blacks are easier for police to target because they more often happen in public than do drug transactions between Whites.
•The disparities are particularly tragic in individual states where Black men are sent to federal prison on drug charges at a rate 57 times greater than White men, according to Human Rights Watch.
•More than 25.4 million Americans have been arrested on drug charges since 1980; about one-third of them were Black.
•The Black populations in state prisons are majorly disproportionate: In Georgia, the Black population is 29 percent, the Black prison population is 54 percent; Arkansas 16 percent -52 percent; Louisiana 33 percent-76 percent; Mississippi 36 percent-75 percent; Alabama 26 percent -65 percent; Tennessee 16 percent -63 percent; Kentucky 7 percent-36 percent; South Carolina 30 percent-69 percent; North Carolina 22 percent-64 percent; and Virginia 20 percent-68 percent.
•According to the Global Commission on Drug Policy arresting and incarcerating people fills prisons and destroys lives but does not reduce the availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organizations.
•The average daily cost per state prison inmate per day in the U.S. is $67.55. State prisons held 253,300 inmates for drug offenses in 2007. That means states spent approximately $17 million per day to imprison drug offenders, or more than $6.2 billion per year.
This war disproportionately targets blacks and other minorities and the poor across all racial demographics.
