If you go back to the origins of TWOD, in the '20s and '30s, and read Anslinger and his boys, we discover that it has worked WONDERFULLY well. NO, not at stemming the flow of "dangerous narcotics." But at it's true purpose--criminalizing the whole "dangerous" racial/ethnic/youth underclass, bringing and keeping them under close, vigorous, prosecutorial supervision--it is a success on par with the Electoral College or the Volunteer Army.
More than half of ALL black males have criminal records. In one recent year,
an estimated 827,440 men or 32.2% of African American men age 20 to 29 were under judicial supervision, compared with 6.7% of white men of similar age and 12.3% of Hispanics. Blacks make up about 12% of the population of the United States.The overwhelming majority of those records stem from encounters with the law over "substance use." (Not all, perhaps not even most, use is "abuse.") In the country ("We're #1!") which incarcerates both the greatest raw numbers of its population, and the greatest per capita percentage, of it's population, even compared with such "notorious" (alleged) violators as China, Cuba, and Iran, over FIFTY FIVE PERCENT of penitentiary inmates are serving sentences for "drug violations."
If I, hypothetically, ran the zoo, and wanted to "keep the ni**ers down," that's how I'd do it.
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Here a citizen, recognizing GHWBush out slumming for gnosh, probably in Houston somewhere, gets the chance not given to many of us: the opportunity to speak unvrnished truth to power. Such an opportunity is astonishingly rare, and that citizen did NOT disappoint. I can only hope that, were I presented with such an opportunity, I would rise to the occasion as admirably as the "unknown videographer."
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