“Congrats to drugs for winning the war on drugs” is a phrase that is simply not true at all when you look at what the purpose of it was.
It was not to prevent the spread of drugs, it was to funnel Black people into prison and permanently curtail voting rights, to keep a provisional Jim Crow that could deflect criticism long enough to get the average white moderate to accept it, and to make the average white liberal’s dreams of “reform” still include the same framework.
Felons can’t vote because certain drug crimes were labeled felonies, because those drug crimes could be pinned on Black people and passed by or reduced to a misdemeanor on whites. Because you could cite the amount of (drug) felonies in an area (Black neighborhood) and assign more cops, militarized cops (why it was called a “war”), because you could claim random searches of suspicious individuals (Black people, including children) were necessary. The war on drugs worked. It was never about the fucking drugs.
