The New War on Drugs is the Old Terror: Legal Lynching

Jeff Sessions doesn't give a flying fuck how many drugs people do; all he cares about is how the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some Classes of) Drugs (tm LGM) gives him an excuse to throw millions of ni**ers in prison for life. Or just mow them down in the streets. The latter saves money, while the former puts money in the pockets of his private prison corporate friends.

The world he intends to re-create is the one depicted in the movie Rosewood: successful blacks lynched and burned out by drunk, stupid, violent whites.

Charlie Pierce:

It is now conventional wisdom that one of the worst mistakes the country ever made was launching its idiotic, wasteful "war"on drugs. In the three decades in which this "war" has been waged, we have lost two generations of African-Americans to the prison system, shaved the Bill of Rights down to a nub, tied the hands of the judiciary, and, finally, made not an appreciable dent in the problem of drug use and drug addiction. We have blessed ourselves with private prisons and militarized police forces, so there is that.

Prior to the ascension of President* Trump, there was a strong, evolving, and bipartisan consensus that it was time to call a truce on the "war" we were making on our own citizens. The country was getting sensible about marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences at the same time; conservatives abandoned simplistic law 'n order coding and hopped on the bandwagon of criminal justice reform; in many cases, they took the wheel on it. And, at least rhetorically, the response to the opioid crisis was more reasoned and measured than the response to the crisis of crack cocaine was—and the reasons for that are worth exploring. But nobody wants to, least of all JeffBo. Over the weekend, we learned that this brief, fragile truce had ended.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I’d like to remind you of that day when Trump’s OMB Director Mike Mulvaney told us that the reason this administration’s budget cut funding to programs like Meals on Wheels and after-school initiatives for kids was because they could no longer defend spending tax dollars on programs that don’t work.

Let’s put aside the fact that feeding seniors and children is a self-defined success: hungry people are no longer hungry. It’s really that simple.

My reaction to Mulvaney was that if we’re going to defund programs that don’t work, then the best place to start is by ending the so-called “war on drugs.”

But of course if your goal is to kill and imprison as many ni**ers as possible, then the failed War on Drugs is a brilliant success.

Apparently AG Sessions and his top lieutenant Steven Cook think that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the drug problem, even though both science and recent history tell us that is nonsense. It is worth asking why this administration would cling to one failed federal initiative while proposing to eliminate so many others. Ava DuVernay answered that question with a documentary titled simply: “13th.”

Whether it is Sessions’ move to pull away from police reform, his history of opposition to voting rights, or his plans to ramp up the war on drugs, there is one key element that binds his approach on all of these issues: racism. While we’re in the business of breaking taboos, let’s get rid of the one that keeps us from naming exactly what’s going on here.

What's going on here is what's been going on in this country for 400 years. Vicious, cowardly whites terrified of having to compete on a level field enslaving and killing with impunity.