<story><title>The Tragedy of Baltimore</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people&amp;#x27;s drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man&amp;#x27;s aspirin).  A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it&amp;#x27;s no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.</text></item><item><author>yters</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s curious the difference in response to the current &amp;quot;opioid epidemic&amp;quot;.  Where is the police crackdown in this case?</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>I grew up in Baltimore City, born in the 70s. Up until the drug war in the 80s, it was a multiracial working class city. I lived near &amp;quot;Pigtown&amp;quot; one of the poorer areas, but I was never afraid to go out at night.&lt;p&gt;During the summer months when it was hot and humid, I&amp;#x27;d sleep during the day, and friends and I would sneak out and walk all over the city in the middle of the night, we were only 11-12 years old.&lt;p&gt;Yes, we hung out on the stairs of our row houses, and on the corners of the streets, and played radios loud, but by and large, violence was confined mostly to bullying. In fact, we had often walked down Pratt street past Martin Luther King Boulevard with no problem from the people living in the projects.&lt;p&gt;Things changed after the drug war started in the 80s. I started experiencing shootings. Kids got shot at my school. I&amp;#x27;d hear gunshots all during the night. I even got caught up in a shootout at one point, which sounded like firecrackers going off if it wasn&amp;#x27;t for the sounds of bullets ricocheting off of the brick houses (thank god old Baltimore rowhouses had real brick facades)&lt;p&gt;Many of my childhood friends became drug addicts, crack houses sprung up around my home. One of the friends I knew who I thought would graduate highschool and college, who was smart and into electronics, ended up as the neighborhood drug kingpin. Older neighbors and others who could, fled the city for the suburbs. Homes were boarded out, and soon, it looked like Mad Max. Our house sprouted bars on the windows.&lt;p&gt;If it hadn&amp;#x27;t been for my 300 baud vic-modem and Vic-20&amp;#x2F;C64, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have gotten off the streets. I mostly survived by vanishing into the online world, and staying in libraries, and avoiding the streets.&lt;p&gt;To me, the war against crack cocaine is what leveled Baltimore. Not the drug itself, if the government had treated it as a public health problem, things might have turned out better. But the drug war only served to make drugs the most lucrative, most important part of the local economy, and for the losers in that economy, the dopamine it provided became an escape from despair.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pryce</author><text>The &amp;#x27;drug war&amp;#x27; has always been intended to treat black and white users differently (and consequently the drugs they tend to reach for differently, not the other way around as many people assume); in many ways that was the whole point. See this article from Harpers [1]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;harpers.org&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;legalize-it-all&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;harpers.org&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;legalize-it-all&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Tragedy of Baltimore</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a huge differential in the way the criminal justice system handled black people&amp;#x27;s drugs (crack), and cocaine (rich man&amp;#x27;s aspirin).  A few rocks of crack got you an arrest with jail time, repeat 3 times, and a fatherless home is created with a new felon in the system. But white professionals who did coke? Slap on the wrist unless they were possessing huge amounts.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s a stretch to say that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor, and exceptionally biased against poor minorities. Since Baltimore demographics are heavily represented by minorities, it&amp;#x27;s no surprise things happening differently there vs Appalachia.</text></item><item><author>yters</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s curious the difference in response to the current &amp;quot;opioid epidemic&amp;quot;.  Where is the police crackdown in this case?</text></item><item><author>cromwellian</author><text>I grew up in Baltimore City, born in the 70s. Up until the drug war in the 80s, it was a multiracial working class city. I lived near &amp;quot;Pigtown&amp;quot; one of the poorer areas, but I was never afraid to go out at night.&lt;p&gt;During the summer months when it was hot and humid, I&amp;#x27;d sleep during the day, and friends and I would sneak out and walk all over the city in the middle of the night, we were only 11-12 years old.&lt;p&gt;Yes, we hung out on the stairs of our row houses, and on the corners of the streets, and played radios loud, but by and large, violence was confined mostly to bullying. In fact, we had often walked down Pratt street past Martin Luther King Boulevard with no problem from the people living in the projects.&lt;p&gt;Things changed after the drug war started in the 80s. I started experiencing shootings. Kids got shot at my school. I&amp;#x27;d hear gunshots all during the night. I even got caught up in a shootout at one point, which sounded like firecrackers going off if it wasn&amp;#x27;t for the sounds of bullets ricocheting off of the brick houses (thank god old Baltimore rowhouses had real brick facades)&lt;p&gt;Many of my childhood friends became drug addicts, crack houses sprung up around my home. One of the friends I knew who I thought would graduate highschool and college, who was smart and into electronics, ended up as the neighborhood drug kingpin. Older neighbors and others who could, fled the city for the suburbs. Homes were boarded out, and soon, it looked like Mad Max. Our house sprouted bars on the windows.&lt;p&gt;If it hadn&amp;#x27;t been for my 300 baud vic-modem and Vic-20&amp;#x2F;C64, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have gotten off the streets. I mostly survived by vanishing into the online world, and staying in libraries, and avoiding the streets.&lt;p&gt;To me, the war against crack cocaine is what leveled Baltimore. Not the drug itself, if the government had treated it as a public health problem, things might have turned out better. But the drug war only served to make drugs the most lucrative, most important part of the local economy, and for the losers in that economy, the dopamine it provided became an escape from despair.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roenxi</author><text>Aren&amp;#x27;t minorities the majority in Baltimore? I don&amp;#x27;t know what the difference is between Baltimore City and whatever is Baltimore in practice, but the statistics I&amp;#x27;ve seen today [0] suggest that &amp;quot;minorities&amp;quot; are white people.&lt;p&gt;Honest question - how can the criminal justice system in Baltimore be biased against &amp;#x27;black people&amp;#x27;s drugs&amp;#x27; as a minority when they are numerically in the majority? It is an interesting logistical challenge to discriminate against a 60% voting block in a democracy. Is criminal justice enforced by non-city actors? (I&amp;#x27;m not an American)&lt;p&gt;[0] planning.baltimorecity.gov&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;2a_City%20Profile%20-%203.30.16_0.pdf</text></comment>