13th Page #3

that I will faithfully

execute the Office...

The election of Ronald Reagan was, uh,

in many ways, transformative,

in a negative sense.

President Richard Nixon

was the first to coin the term

"a war on drugs,"

but President Ronald Reagan turned

that rhetorical war into a literal one.

It's back to school time

for America's children.

And while drug and alcohol abuse

cuts across all generations,

it's especially damaging

to the young people

on whom our future depends.

The modern war on drugs was declared

by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

As we mobilize for this national crusade,

I'm mindful that drugs

are a constant temptation for millions.

Popular opinion polls of the day

show that it wasn't an issue

for most people in the United States.

But Reagan was determined

to put this onto the agenda

to define it as a problem.

A war against drugs

is a war of individual battles.

Reagan used his wife, for example,

in this "Just Say No" campaign.

She has helped so many of our young people

to say no to drugs.

Nancy, much credit belongs to you.

This is your brain.

This is drugs.

This is your brain on drugs.

I joined it.

And some people said,

"Well, how can you join

a person declaring a war on drugs,

someone like Ronald Reagan?"

I joined with Nancy Reagan

because she said, "Just say no."

Just say no so loud

that everyone around you can hear it.

We're talking about a general education

that we're talking about.

We're not talking about locking up people.

We're talking about educating people.

We're talking about prevention.

There was a crisis

in the US economy at that time.

I regret to say

that we're in the worst economic mess

since the Great Depression.

There is a frontal assault

on institutions that are designed

to assist human beings,

on the education system, welfare,

on jobs, healthcare.

Government programs that can't be paid for

out of a balanced budget

must be paid for out of your pocket.

The rich are getting richer

and the poor are getting poorer.

The idea of expanding, uh,

the freedom of American business

and the entrepreneurial class...

We will save $1.8 billion

in fiscal year 1982.

Luxury stores like

Neiman Marcus predicts record sales.

The number of Americans

dipping under the poverty level

has reached the highest rate

in two decades.

Yes, there has been

an increase in poverty,

but it is a lower rate of increase

than it was in the preceding years,

before we got here.

It has begun to decline,

but it is still going up.

In the mid-1980s,

we were already starting to embark

on a war on drugs

and then all of a sudden,

along comes this new drug, crack cocaine.

Steve Young reports

on a new kind of cocaine called crack.

It's dangerous. It's deadly.

It will kill you.

"The drug epidemic is as dangerous

as any terrorist that we face."

That is just some of what was said today

to House and Senate committees

holding hearings on drug abuse in America.

We have this drug that

could be marketed in very small doses,

relatively inexpensively,

this was going to just

take over communities,

and particularly

African American communities.

Crack was largely an inner-city issue

and cocaine was largely a suburban issue.

Smokable cocaine,

otherwise known as crack,

it is an uncontrolled fire.

Congress,

in virtually record time,

established

mandatory sentencing penalties for crack

that were far harsher than those

for powder cocaine.

The same amount of time in prison

for one ounce of crack cocaine

that you get for 100 ounces

of powder cocaine.

Police here are cracking down

on crack dealers.

Usually black or Hispanic, Latino,

they were getting long sentences

for possession of crack.

You're black with crack cocaine,

you goin' to prison

for basically the rest of your life.

Um, and if you're white, you're

pretty much getting slapped on the wrist.

Cocaine...

was more sophisticated.

It was just a powder.

By next year,

our spending for drug law enforcement

will have more than tripled

from its 1981 levels.

All of a sudden, a scythe

went through our black communities,

literally cutting off men

from their families,

literally huge chunks

just disappearing into our prisons,

and for really long times.

Millions of dollars

will be allocated

for prison and jail facilities.

These sorts of disparities

under Reagan

quickly exploded

into the era of mass incarceration.

What Reagan ultimately does is...

takes the problem of economic inequality,

of hypersegregation in America's cities,

and the problem of drug abuse,

and criminalizes all of that

in the form of the war on drugs.

We absolutely should have treated

crack and cocaine,

uh, as exactly the same thing.

I think it was an enormous burden

on the black community,

but it also fundamentally violated

a sense of core fairness.

When crack cocaine hit

in the early '80s,

there were a lot of mayors who felt

very strongly that this is a real threat

and they wanted to crack down.

And Rangel was one of the guys

pushing for stronger sentencing.

It may have seemed

like a good idea at the time,

but it sure didn't work out

as being effective.

Then, years later,

there was an effort to rewrite history,

that it was a racial disparity

put in by mean white people.

Um, it's not where it came from.

In many ways,

the so-called war on drugs

was a war on communities of color,

a war on black communities,

a war on Latino communities.

And you see a rhetorical war that was,

you know,

announced as part of a political strategy

by Richard Nixon

and which morphed into a literal war

by Ronald Reagan,

um, turning into something

that began to feel nearly genocidal

in many poor communities of color.

So Nixon's Southern strategy

was implemented right after

the civil rights movement.

He played on fear of crime,

and law and order

to win the election easily.

Reagan promised tax cuts to the rich,

and to throw all the crack users in jail,

both of which devastated

communities of color

but were effective

in getting the Southern vote.

There's really no understanding

of our American political culture

without race at the center of it.

And in 1981,

just before Reagan assumed the presidency,

his campaign strategist, Lee Atwater,

was caught on tape

explaining the Southern strategy.

In other words, you start out...

They claiming I'm a criminal

But now I wonder how

Some people never know

The enemy

Could be their friend, guardian

I'm not a hooligan

I rock the party and

The minute they see me, fear me

I'm the epitome

A public enemy

Used, abused without clues

I refuse to blow a fuse

They even had it on the news

Don't believe the hype, don't

Don't, don't, don't believe the hype

The war on drugs had become

part of our popular culture,

in television programs like Cops.

When you cut on your local news at night,

you see black men

being paraded across the screen

in handcuffs.

Black people, black men

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