A Brief Historical Overview of Drugs and Race in the Modern United States
A Brief Historical Overview of Drugs and Race in the Modern United States

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I intend to argue that the War on Drugs, or American prohibitive drug policy in general, is heavily responsible in driving ethnic conflicts before and after 1970, to contextualize the events of the 2010s in order to provide a historical background. This paper aims to prove that Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs was aimed at maintaining a form of social control over the newly equal black community, and at the retention of some previously held executive and political power over them. Prohibitive drug policy is responsible in a large part for the unrests of the 2010s as a result. To be able to draw this conclusion the history of drugs and race in the United States needs to be briefly reviewed and compared with the international drug regulation, because the two frequently influenced each other during the 20th century, and without this history, an organic understanding of contemporary ethnic conflicts in the United States cannot manifest.

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