Drug Law Violations by Blacks and Whites

The marked racial disparities in drug arrests did not reflect racial differences in violations of drug laws prohibiting possession and sale of illicit drugs. Statistical as well as anecdotal evidence indicate drug possession and drug selling cut across all racial, socio-economic and geographic lines. Yet because drug law enforcement resources have been concentrated in low-income, predominantly minority urban areas, drug offending whites have been disproportionately free from arrest compared to blacks.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calculates drug use trends from data gathered through the federal National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA).79 In a report based on NHSDA data for 1991, 1992, and 1993, SAMHSA estimated that 3.1 percent of non-Hispanic blacks and 2.4 percent of non-Hispanic whites over the age of 12 had used cocaine in the past year. Because there are far more whites than blacks in the national population, these use rates translate into 3,727,680 non-Hispanic whites who had used cocaine compared to 720,130 non-Hispanic blacks.80 That is, there were five times as many non-Hispanic whites as blacks who were cocaine users.

According to the most recent NHSDA survey, in 1998 there were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of all users) and 2.0 million blacks (15 percent) who were current illicit drug users in 1998.81 There were almost five times as many current white marijuana users as black and four times as many white cocaine users. Almost three times as many whites had ever used crack as blacks. Among those who had used crack at least once in the past year, 462,000 were white and 324,000 were black.82 Only among current crack users did the number of blacks exceed the number of whites -- and this was a change from previous years in which the number of current white crack users had exceeded the number of black users (Table 17).83 SAMHSA also estimated that in 1998 there were 4,934,000 whites who used marijuana on 51 or more days in the past year, compared to 1,102,000 blacks, and 321,000 whites who had used cocaine on 51 or more days in the past year compared to 171,999 blacks84

The comparison of racial proportions of drug users and drug arrests in the period 1979 to 1998 reveals a markedly higher arrest rate of black drug offenders compared to both whites and to the black proportion of the drug using population Table 18. The percentage of current drug users who were black and white did not vary significantly in this twenty-year period. Among those arrested on drug charges, however, the percentage of blacks rose markedly, and the percentage of whites decreased correspondingly. For each year, the percentage of black drug arrests was at least double the percentage of blacks among current drug users. Whites, conversely, were under-arrested; that is, they constituted a smaller percent of drug arrests than they did of drug users.