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Why We Should Legalize Drugs
On March 13th, 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed while the police were raiding her home under the pretense that her boyfriend possessed illicit drugs.
The officers — who had a “no-knock” search warrant — forced entry into the home, leading to the shootout that took Taylor’s life. The Supreme Court has established that police raids without announcement are constitutional, claiming that suspects might flee or destroy evidence because of “today’s drug culture”.
Even though no drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment, the drug policy of the United States is largely to blame for her death.
Like many aspects of American history, the underlying motivation behind the so-called “War on Drugs” is more nefarious than we like to acknowledge.
Conservative politicians from the 1960s through the 1990s maligned drugs using race-baiting rhetoric that appealed to suburban whites. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman openly described the political strategy as follows:
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we…
