GUN CONTROL IS JUST AS RACIST AS DRUG CONTROL
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, a black Democrat who has represented downtown Houston in Congress since 1995, thinks repealing marijuana prohibition is “an important racial justice measure.” Twice in the last three years, she has sponsored or co-sponsored bills that would have removed cannabis from the list of federally proscribed substances, eliminating a ban first imposed in 1937. “Thousands of men and women have suffered needlessly from the federal criminalization of marijuana,” Jackson Lee said in 2020, “particularly in communities of color.”
Like the war on weed, gun control is historically rooted in racism and disproportionately harms African Americans. But on the latter issue, Jackson Lee’s agenda is decidedly different.
In 2021, Jackson Lee introduced a bill that would create an elaborate nationwide system to license gun owners, register firearms, and punish violators with the sort of harsh mandatory minimum penalties that she passionately condemns when they are imposed on drug offenders. Jackson Lee frames her proposed restrictions as sensible public safety measures—just as pot prohibitionists have always done
Jackson Lee embodies a common contradiction. Progressive politicians nowadays overwhelmingly oppose pot prohibition and criticize the war on drugs, in no small part because of its bigoted origins and racially skewed costs. Yet they overwhelmingly favor tighter restrictions on guns, even though such policies have a strikingly similar history and contemporary impact.
Drug control and gun control are unjust because they criminalize conduct that violates no one’s rights, which erodes civil liberties, contributes to mass incarceration, and unfairly imposes lifelong restrictions on millions of Americans. All of that would still be true even if those policies affected different racial and ethnic groups equally. But for progressives who decry “systemic racism,” the drug war’s disparate impact makes it especially troubling, and you might think they would see gun control in a similar light.
Both types of policies have long targeted racial and ethnic minorities, at first explicitly and later in practice. Worse, the costs of these two strategies build on each other. People convicted of drug felonies permanently lose the right to arms, and illegal drug users likewise are not allowed to own guns. Gun possession exposes drug offenders to heavier penalties, whether or not they use firearms to threaten or harm anyone. Drug possession sends gun-law violators back to prison, and gun possession sends drug-law violators back to prison. The burdens of these interacting prohibitions are strongly correlated with race, which by Jackson Lee’s logic should condemn both.
THE RACIST ROOTS OF DRUG CONTROL
THE EARLY ADVOCATES of marijuana prohibition were especially alarmed by marijuana use among racial and ethnic minorities. A 1917 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture described El Paso, Texas, which banned the possession and sale of cannabis in 1914, as “a hot bed of marihuana fiends,” who included “Negroes, prostitutes, pimps and a criminal class of whites” as well as Mexicans. “This menacing evil” and “malicious vice” was said to be especially notable “in the army and among the Negroes.” The report quoted a police captain who warned that marijuana inspired “a lust for blood,” made users “insensible to pain,” and imbued them with “superhuman strength”—claims that would later be recycled in stories about a wide range of psychoactive substances, including crack cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine, and the synthetic cathinones known as “bath salts.”
When Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger began beating the drum against marijuana in the 1930s, he
