"Poisonous" tumors are difficult to remove! African American writers write books exposing the intergenerational impact of the cheap drug "pandemic" on minority communities in the United States | drugs | epidemics

On July 18th, China Daily reported that in 1970, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Prevention and Control of Drug Abuse Act, which strengthened the control of drugs and addictive drugs nationwide. However, to this day, the United States has become the world's largest consumer of drugs, and "drugs" have become another deep-rooted "American disease".

According to a report by Time magazine earlier this month, in the 1980s, crack cocaine - a low-cost drug - erupted like a "plague" in marginalized urban communities in the United States. The African American communities designated as red lines in concrete city blocks have been ignored, and their affluent white neighbors have escaped the worst impacts. Those who stayed behind were the first to be affected by a doomsday like "epidemic" that crossed racial and economic divides, cruelly reshaping the image of a generation.

Screenshot of a report by Time magazine in the United States

Donovan Ramsey, the author of "The Quick King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era," grew up in a drug ridden community in Columbus, Ohio, USA. He wrote in the book, "Just like growing up in a steel town, where no one talks about steel.". In his book, he made necessary corrections to the biased media coverage of this period and metaphors such as "drug addicts", "drug addict babies", and "super predators", which are the driving forces behind some drug legislation in the United States.

The term "drug addict baby" has had a disproportionate impact on African American children, Ramsey said. As an African American child who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the way teachers treat me and other African American children in the class is like we have a fundamental problem - we need to take medication to attend class, or any challenges we pose as students, whether it's too much talk or inability to sit, all prove that we have problems.

Ramsey outlined the outline of this epidemic, tracing its roots back to the arduous struggle of the African American civil rights movement and the rise of the African American middle class in the 1960s and early 1970s. In a 1969 diary, then President Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Holdman, wrote that Nixon "emphasized that you must face the fact that the entire problem is actually a problem for the African American community. The key is to design a system that acknowledges this without appearing to acknowledge it." Ramsey believed that Nixon's way of achieving this goal was to shift his focus from organized crime and wholesale drug importers to drug users themselves, convicting marginalized African American and brown communities.

The legalization of drugs in multiple states in the United States has resulted in a weak and unsuccessful anti drug war. Faced with the cover of the book "KuaiKe Ka Zeng Wang", we see a photo of a city in ruins. In the bottom left corner of the photo is an African American man wearing a white T-shirt, with his back to us, leaning against a forged iron structure, gazing at the scene before us. Ramsey's book interweaves congressional politics and street politics in the United States, telling the stories of four survivors of the crack cocaine pandemic over the past 60 years. Through the study of four characters, people can understand the political details of that era, the crime laws that led to a sharp increase in large-scale imprisonment, the traditional media's portrayal of crack cocaine and condemnation of drug users, the ineffective anti drug war and its catastrophic consequences, and so on.

KuaiKe cocaine broke the Italian mafia's monopoly on street drugs, and Colombian drug trafficking groups supplied large quantities of this drug to major cities in the United States at prices as low as one tenth per gram. For impoverished African American and Latino youth, becoming a crack cocaine dealer is an opportunity to break free from generational poverty. Ramsey wrote that this drug has the potential to become "their gold rush, their homestead bill, their prohibition on alcohol.".

Ramsey wrote that in my family, drug dealers are indeed always seen as bad people, even though I have relatives who sell drugs. For ordinary people, usually young people, what you see are those with holes in their shoes, their families struggling to pay rent, and they can provide basic necessities to achieve something that may be the American Dream. Most of them are afraid of their own lives. But this is the only way for them to make money during periods of such high unemployment rates, and the unemployment rate among African American youth is even higher.

According to a report by National Public Radio in the United States, Ramsey's book points out that, like other drug epidemics, it is not a single event that led to the spread of crack cocaine in the United States, and has had a catastrophic impact on so many drug users and traffickers. On the contrary, the spread of this epidemic is caused by various reasons, such as government policies isolating impoverished communities of color economically, the so-called drug war and its focus on criminal crime, the decrease in the price of crack cocaine, and so on. In 2017, the Latin American News Agency of Ecuador published articles that exposed many American banks deeply buried behind the international drug trade.

Drug related vending machines on the streets of New York City

The US government's handling of related issues has long been a source of public dissatisfaction. In June of this year, vending machines containing drug-related items appeared on the streets of New York City for people to access for free. Cocaine pipes were looted the night the vending machines were placed, and New York State even set up so-called "drug safety injection points".

Looking further ahead, in 2020, Oregon Governor Brown signed Executive Order 110, making the state the first region in the United States and even the world to legalize "hard drugs" such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Subsequently, Arizona, Montana, South Dakota, New Jersey, and Mississippi also announced the legalization of marijuana

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