Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.'s recent chest-thumping against the California ballot initiative that seeks to legalize marijuana underscores how the war on drugs in the United States has become a war focused on marijuana, one being waged primarily against minorities and promoted, fueled and financed primarily by Democratic politicians. According to the New York Times, a report released Friday by the Marijuana Arrest Research Project for the Drug Policy Alliance says that in the last 20 years California made 850,000 arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, and half-a-million arrests in the last 10 years. The people arrested were disproportionately African-Americans and Latinos, overwhelmingly young people, especially men. This imbalance is not specific to California; it exists across the country. One could justify this on some level if young blacks and Hispanics were using marijuana more than young whites, but that isn't the case. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, young white people consistently report higher marijuana use than blacks or Hispanics. How can such a grotesquely race-biased pattern of arrests exist? The report paints a sordid picture: young police officers are funneled into low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods where they are encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk young men. __
