The War on Drugs: A War on People Dr. Carl Hart is a world-renowned neuropsychopharmacologist and professor at Columbia University. He conducts groundbreaking research into the nature of drug addiction and often swims against the mainstream, using empirical data to rein in the hyperbole and hysteria that often is associated with certain drugs. Dr. Hart is not your average university professor though. He was one of the first African-Americans to get a tenured position at a major institution and overcame impossible odds to get there. Growing up in dire poverty near Miami, Dr. Hart experienced first hand the crack cocaine epidemic that swept across the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, and was firmly convinced by it that drugs were the primary cause …show more content…
In 1909, the federal government followed suit by passing the Anti-Opium Act. The federal ban however, only served to make the laws racial motives all the more obvious by solely outlawing opium use in its smoked form, which was the customary Chinese method. It made exceptions for injecting opium and mixing opium with drinks, both of which were popular methods of use among whites (Gray, 2000). In 1914, The New York Times ran a headline that read “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ are a New Southern Menace: Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks…” (Williams, 1914, p. 1). Blatantly racist articles such as this were common at the time, and even worse of this one, was that it was written by Dr. Edward H. Williams, a prominent medical doctor in the United States. Dr. Williams went on to make ridiculous claims such as southern police officers having to switch to larger caliber guns because when black people used cocaine, “bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the “fiend” (1914, p. 1). The idea of the “cocaine crazed negro” was engrained in the public mind, and because professionals like Dr. Williams helped peddle the hysteria,