Drugs and racial/ethnic relations

SIGNIFICANCE: Because much of the drug trafficking and drug use in the United States involves ethnic gangs and communities and because the criminal justice system has been accused of disproportionately targeting certain ethnic groups and neighborhoods, the relationship between illegal drugs and ethnic background is expected to remain a topic of public debate.

Discussions of racial and ethnic groups and the illegal drug trade run the risk of degenerating into stereotyping. Other factors, such as class and geography, must be taken into account when considering patterns of illegal drug production, distribution, and consumption. However, historically, various aspects of the drug trade have been more closely associated with particular racial or ethnic groups. In addition, attempts to control the illegal drug trade have had implications based on race or ethnicity. For example, from the start of the War on Drugs in the early 1970s, questions have arisen regarding the effect on minority communities of harsh policing of drug use and possession.

Caucasians and Drugs

Classic organized crime in the United States has been a White-dominated activity, divided into three major categories: La Cosa Nostra (commonly known as the Italian Mafia), found in all major metropolitan areas; the Irish mafia, especially the Winter Hill Gang in the Boston/New England area (prior to high-level prosecutions in the 1990s); and the Russian mafia, which has been most prominent in New York City and Los Angeles. All deal chiefly in heroin, although cocaine, marijuana, and other illicit drugs make up an important part of their business. The Italian and Irish gangsters have been around for decades, the former being identified with organized crime to the point of stereotyping. The Russian mafia became a larger factor in the late 1980s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which resulted in widespread open corruption in that nation and abundant migration from its former republics to the United States. Many of these migrants were members of, or drawn to, Russian organized crime.

The Russian traffickers often obtain illegal drugs from the opium-producing nations of the Golden Crescent (Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) and have strong connections in the Muslim areas through which much of the opium and heroin pass on their way to Russia, from where the drugs are transported to Western Europe and North America, usually to New York City. Italian traffickers, who controlled the trade in opiates until the 1970s, also use Golden Crescent sources as well as those in the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand). By the late twentieth century, Nigerian smugglers moved much of the opium from Asia and the Middle East to Europe, where Sicilian and Corsican traffickers shipped the drugs, usually from Marseilles or Amsterdam to New York City.

In the twenty-first century, White supremacist gangs have risen up and been associated with many illicit crimes, including the trafficking of illegal drugs such as fentanyl. One such gang, Peckerwoods, was the target of a sting operation that resulted in 68 members of the gang indicted.

Latinos and Drugs

Most of the world’s cocaine is produced in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Colombia, and control of the drug’s shipment to the United States is usually in the hands of either Colombian (Cali or Medellin) or Mexican (Tijuana, Sinaloa, Ciudad Juarez, and Gulf) cartels. The Mexican traffickers, who account for approximately three-fourths of all cocaine sold in the United States, became major factors in cocaine distribution when the U.S. government began to close off traditional points of entry for the drug in south Florida and the Caribbean in the late 1980s. The Colombian cartels farmed out distribution to the Mexican traffickers, who moved the drug up the Pacific corridor. The Mexican cartels also funneled opium, obtained from Asian traffickers, from Mexico to the United States, where the illegal drugs were distributed by the Mexican mafia (composed of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals), other ethnic gangs, and street dealers of all backgrounds. In the twenty-first century, Mexican cartles have been heavily involved in the trafficking of fentanyl.

Asians and Drugs

Asian gangs became major players in the drug trade beginning in the 1970s. Like Russian organized crime, Asian criminal activity grew along with migration generated by politics and poverty and tended to victimize members of the Asian American community. Asian organized crime became heavily involved in drug traffic by the 1980s, challenging Italian predominance. Of the numerous Asian gangs (Chinese secret societies, Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Chinese gangs, the Japanese yakuza), the ethnic Chinese groups control the lion’s share of the drug enterprise, largely because they have connections throughout the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Golden Triangle opium is produced and shipped to Bangkok, where it awaits shipment to North America. Opiates are smuggled into the United States either from the south by ethnic Chinese gangs in cooperation with the Mexican mafia or from the north by Vietnamese-Chinese gangs in Vancouver, Canada, who carry contraband across the border into Montana and North Dakota.

African Americans and Drugs

African American participation in drug dealing has tended to involve crack cocaine and street gangs, including the rival Bloods and Crips, which originated in Los Angeles and had established branches in many major urban centers west of Chicago by the mid-1980s. Jamaican gangs (also known as posses) originated along the East Coast and moved west, introducing crack cocaine to Kansas City, St. Louis, Dallas, and Houston by the mid-1980s. All of these gangs have been linked to extremely violent behavior, stemming partly from turf wars. The U.S. Attorney General’s office has compared their paroxysms of brutality to the battles between legendary gangsters Frank Nitti and Al Capone. The office found that in contrast to these violent and visible gangs, many drug enterprises in African American communities involved “men and women who operated like successful business people with small or no criminal records.”

Ethnic Groups and Drug Consumption

A December 1994 Los Angeles Times series on crack cocaine focused on the drug’s destructive impact on the city’s minority communities. However, drug problems were hardly limited to poor, ethnic communities, as was pointed out in a late 1990s antidrug commercial. The commercial began with the statistic “Forty-six percent of minors using marijuana are found in the inner city,” then asks the question, “Do you know where the other 54 percent reside?” as a White youth in the suburbs skateboards up to a friend, who hands him a joint. In short, drugs cut across all racial, ethnic, income, and neighborhood barriers. One drug treatment executive put it this way: “When it comes to drugs, there is a complete democracy.” Some communities and ethnic groups are clearly more negatively affected than others by drugs, which give rise to gangs, violence, illnesses, family ruptures, and job losses. However, the 1998 arrest, conviction, and lenient sentence given a Newport Beach, California, socialite for cocaine possession, the arrests of such movie stars as Charlie Sheen and Robert Downey Jr., and the gang-related killings of recording artist Tupac Shakur and an undercover teenage drug informant for the Brea, California, police department demonstrate that drug usage and violence cut across racial, ethnic, and class lines.

Ethnic Groups and the Criminal Justice System

The War on Drugs has proven highly controversial, with some asserting it is discriminatory and ineffective, and others saying it is appropriate and necessary. Those who believe that violations have occurred claim that the War on Drugs gives government more power than is prudent, resulting in invasions of privacy (such as drug testing), needless confiscations of property, and misuse of the military to enforce drug laws (such as assigning military personnel to border patrol duty). Those who believe that civil rights have not been violated assert that these antidrug actions are both necessary and proper. In either case, the laws designed to stamp out illegal production, distribution, and consumption of illicit drugs need to be applied fairly, and many people maintain that a disproportionate number of minorities end up in the criminal justice system and, once there, are more likely to be convicted and receive harsher sentences on average than White offenders. Critics noted that under federal law, the possession of one gram of crack cocaine (more commonly used by African Americans) involved the same penalties as possession of one hundred grams of powder cocaine (the type used primarily by White users). They asserted that this, along with the fact that since 1986 more than 97 percent of crack cocaine defendants in federal court are people of color, represented discrimination. However, in 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, eliminating the mandatory five-year sentence for crack possession and changing the 100-to-1 cocaine-to-crack gram ratio to 18 to 1.

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