If drug use is largely equal, wouldn't the logical conclusion you have to infer be that police are racist, if the former is true? (P.S. I'm not saying this and don't believe it, just pointing out what that reasoning leads to.)
There's far more poor white people in the country, as a number, than there are poor black people.
I think information deeply critical to this discussion is missing.
I think that is an interesting article, thanks.
Regarding the discussion of race; and, just to be clear, I never got the impression that Alpo was attempting to make the case that the police are racist or anything. He was simply offering up an explanation for what happened to the black community. My take away from the article about crack is that the laws passed to combat the crack "epidemic" had a disproportionate impact on black people largely because they inhabited the poorer areas of large cities. Consequently, those areas became a large part of the distribution network for those cities and the police departments of those cites inevitably arrested the people involved in those narcotics distribution networks.
Poorer whites weren't impacted in the same way because they lived in rural areas that didn't develop the same dynamic between criminal narcotics distribution and large city police departments.
I don't think it is necessary to believe that there was an intentional racist policy to understand that the unintended consequences could have effected one race harder than the other. I think the crack laws were passed because of the media making a big deal out of it, the way they always do about anything that might sell papers. I do not think for one second that anyone had the foresight to actually figure out that it would impact black people way out of proportion to whites, nobody is that clever.
Unfortunately, the unintended consequences have made it easier for demagogues that want to make the racist claim by giving them something that seems plausible on the surface, which I think helps explain the mess we are in now.