Fentanyl Policies Repeat America’s Racist Drug Past
We can solve issues when we want to
When the John Singleton-created show “Snowfall” first aired on Hulu in 2017, it reminded me of my teenage years when crack cocaine was raging through some of America’s Black communities.
The year was 1983, and I was a freshman at Walnut Ridge, an inner-city high school in Columbus, Ohio. The topic of crack was regularly on the news and in our faces.
The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, made drug policy a cornerstone of his presidency. First Lady Nancy Reagan even produced ads telling people to:
“Just Say No!”
We can set aside how absurd it was to think that people surrounded by and then addicted to drugs can all just say “No.” We made fun of the ads as teenagers. There were even rap songs that mixed in the ridiculous ads.
However, President Reagan’s strategy was worse than his star charts following his wife’s strategy.
In June 1986, two premier Black athletes died of crack cocaine overdoses—one at the University of Maryland, just a 30-minute drive from the White House.
This led to Reagan proposing new anti-drug legislation in September 1986. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act, whose main thrust was to significantly increase…
