People widely consume psychoactive drugs for millennia all around the world.
In Asia and Africa, cannabis (commonly known as Marijuana) is widely cultivated, traded, and used as a health-care drug. It has a sacred role in Sufism and Hindu culture. Its medicinal uses, also mentioned in Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, are considered authoritative medical texts in Europe. Besides, opium poppy has been used as a medication and for recreational purposes in Asia and the Middle East.
However, the US has strongly backed the anti-opium movement that had economic interests in making Europe’s political and economic dominance enfeeble. This movement eventually got successful in laying the foundation stone of a global system of drug control.
The cruel racism was one of the significant reasons to stand for this prohibition as stuff like Marijuana, cocaine, and opium dominantly associate with African Americans. The government of the US believed that the lure of the substance affects the White people.
Records have shown that international conferences on drug policy featured predominantly that the psychoactive plants used by the Black and Brown people must be forbidden.
Efforts to design an international agreement to control alcohol are highly restrained by the wine-producing countries in Europe, revealing the inconsistencies in regulating illegal and harmful drugs.
Terrible racial discrimination occurs in the name of drug control around the globe. Hence it should be the subject of growing concern.
In the preceding year, the UN experts noted about the African originates that the operations on drugs have more keenly observed as a matter of racism than as an event for resisting the consumption and trafficking of narcotics.
Arrests, confinement, detention, and ruinous police brutality to control drug abuse usually have fallen disparately on people from different racial backgrounds. All this has sought to eradicate the illicit drug trade, but it affects people of color more.
The United States has reported that people of color charge five times higher incarcerations than White people for drug-related offenses. While in the UK, people of color or say the Blacks are more likely to be interrogated nearly eight times than the White people. Reported in Brazil are about 80% deaths of the Black by law enforcement agents. Unfortunately, the policing strategies and the racist policies unfairly practiced on indigenous communities have usually received very little attention yet. In Australia, the aboriginal people are fifteen to twenty times more likely to be incarcerated than others. While in Canada, the criminal justice system continues to disparately harm Black communities at almost similar rates to that in the United States.
Violent and unfair police actions are intolerable. The cruel incidents have been heard so many times. Therefore, a system that prioritizes and values criminalization over health and on racial grounds should stop.