How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom

But even ignoring that and assuming this was fully for racist reasons, should that have any impact on those choosing to hire people? Even if the justice system is racist, that is a problem that belongs to the justice system.

>The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population.

If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more.

>Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do.

I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one from SSC that I linked to:

>Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113)

This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in 1984.

Thoughtful conversation is what we're going for. It's possible to have that about inflammatory topics, but it requires a conscious effort at respecting those with opposing views and meeting them where they are. That's not always easy—especially when others appear wrong and disingenuous—but if you can't do it, it's best not to comment until you can.

It is true that black people are more likely to be arrested than white people for drug crimes. 57% of arrestees are white, 37% black. That's about 3x the percentage that you'd expect if you just go by the racial distribution of drug users.

However, that's not actually really relevant here because most drug users, white or black, do not get caught at all. There are about 1.2 million drug arrests per year, so roughly 680k whites and 444k blacks.

We've got about 320 million people. Let's be generous and knock out people 0-14 (20%) because they are probably too young to have gotten into drugs, and also knock out 55+ (26%) because older people don't seem to get arrested much for casual drug use (perhaps if you are old and a regular drug user you've figured out how to not get caught...). So that leaves us 173 million people who are similar demographically to the people getting arrested for drugs.

That would be about 22 million blacks, 109 million whites.

So...we've got about 680k whites arrested for drugs per year out of 109 million, which means 108.6 million out of 109 million whites are NOT arrested. In percentages, 99.4% of whites are not arrested for drugs in any given year.

For blacks, we've got 444k arrested for drugs out of 22 million, which means 21.6 million out of 22 million blacks are NOT arrested. In percentages, 98.0% of blacks are not arrested for drugs in any given year.

98.0% is lower than 99.4%, and that is something that should be investigated--I'm not trying to argue that there is no bias. I'm just saying that by focusing on those arrested rather than those not arrested, you get a misleading picture.

This kind of mistake is common when people assess risks, and so people tend to overreact when something increases a very low probability risk. For instance, we read that some particular food might increase our chances of getting some particular disease from 1/10^6 over our lifetime to 3/10^6, and we think we need to immediately cut that food even if we like it and it does plenty of good things for us, because it increases our risk 3x and that sounds huge.

Oddly, we don't seem to do this with transportation. Someone trying to decide whether to drive or fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco will probably decide based on cost, time, convenience, things on the driving route they might want to visit, whether they want their car with them in San Francisco, and similar factors. For most people I don't think that the fact that flying (at least on a major airline) is safer than driving would be a factor. They recognize that the chances of dying in an automobile accident on a drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco are so low as to not be worth considering, and so that some other mode of transportation would have even lower chances is not relevant.

Because people are much more likely to kill, rob, rape, and do other heinous crimes from crack use than occasional LSD use.

When crack-cocaine hit the black communities, it absolutely destroyed them far much more than any previous drugs did.