A community without a drug problem? Black drug use in Britain.

• Date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Kalunta-Crumpton, Anita
• Published date: 22 March 2004
• Author: Kalunta-Crumpton, Anita

The Visible Place of Race in British Drug Problem: Drug Trafficking

FOLLOWING POST-WORLD WAR II BLACK IMMIGRATION INTO BRITAIN, RACE WAS becoming absorbed into popular discourses about drug trafficking (see Hiro, 1992). During the 1980s, drug trafficking became racialized and was portrayed within the context of black people and deprived inner cities (see Dorn et al., 1992). The concept of the Jamaican "Yardie" that found favor in the 1980s and its connection with crack, guns, and violence enriched media representations of race, blackness, and drug trafficking (see Green, 1998; Murji, 1998; Keith, 1993). It was a discovery that similarly effected police practices toward racialized drugs policing in domestic and international contexts (Ibid.). Black communities attracted media attention, and over-policing operations were justified through descriptions of those communities as a mafia-style drug market saturated by big-time professional black drug traffickers whose origins were in the Caribbean and West Africa.

The foreigner representations of drug trafficking meant that immigrants from countries such as Jamaica and Nigeria were held largely responsible for importing controlled drugs into Britain. As Green (1991:21) argued, the drug problem is not only "a constructed drugs' crisis,'" it is also viewed "as a principally imported crisis--imported by West Africans, Asians, or South Americans...." As such, controlling drug trafficking, according to Dorn et al. (1992: 153), invited a combination of "drugs intelligence and immigration intelligence" based on a "perception ... that it was immigrants, legal and/or illegal, who were responsible for much of the importation of drugs into Britain." The emphatic reference to drug trafficking as a major contributor to Britain's drug problem culminated in the implementation of stringent punitive measures as reflected in the 1985 Controlled Drugs (Penalties) Act and the 1986 Drug Trafficking Offenses Act. While the former imposed a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for trafficking in a Class "A" drug, the latter empowered the courts to confiscate drug traffickers' assets that were believed to be their profits from drug trafficking. Drugs law enforcement by way of policing witnessed a new organizational structure (see Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, 1994), of which low-level policing was given top priority. Policing at the low level was considered a vital pattern of drugs enforcement due to its demand--and harm-reduction approach to drug misuse. It was to involve street-level surveillance and stop and search practices, which concentrated on specific areas such as council estates, public houses, and private flats and streets, and were geared toward detecting retail drug markets.

The sensational media coverage given to drug trafficking and the war on drugs rhetoric in the political sphere amalgamated with law enforcement strategies to map out drug traffickers as key targets in the desperate need to curb the drug problem. Inner-city areas, known to be deprived and referred to as crime prone, were already stereotyped and portrayed by the police and the media as drug trafficking areas, with black men labeled as the drug traffickers (see Keith, 1991; Dorn et al., 1992).

This scenario continued into the 1990s. As the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (1994: 3) has acknowledged, drugs policing strategies harbor drastic implications for race:

An important element of street-level policing is the tactic of stop and search of individuals suspected of involvement in drug offenses. A significant amount of activity involving drugs is concentrated in our inner cities, where ethnic minorities are also heavily represented. In turn, this can result in apparently disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities being stopped and searched compared with the general population. Official prison figures have shown that black people tend to be over-represented in the numbers of those imprisoned for drug offenses (Home Office, 1989; 1999). Such high representations of black people in the prison figures for drug offenses has been largely influenced by the high numbers of foreign nationals--from West Africa and the Caribbean--charged or convicted for importing illegal drugs (Green, 1991; 1998). This is particularly evident with regard to the female prison population (Ibid.)

Drug trafficking formed a category for which black people are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned; the weight of drug laws and criminal justice practices falls heavily on them (Kalunta-Crumpton, 1998a; 1998b; 1999). The attack on drug trafficking has taken the form of more stringent legislative measures. For example, the 1993 Criminal Justice Act and the 1994 Drug Trafficking Act have since strengthened powers of asset confiscation that were introduced under the 1986 Drug Trafficking Offenses Act. Likewise, the 1997 Crime (Sentences) Act effected mandatory minimum sentences of not less than seven years for repeat drug trafficking offenders in a class "A" drug.

Drug Use, Its Problems, and the Invisibility of Racial Diversity in Britain

Unlike heroin and its history as Britain's most resented drug, some claim crack cocaine has not been seen to pose a major problem to Britain (see Brain et al., 1998; Pearson, G., 1992). Although heroin has remained the traditional drug of concern in mainstream discourse, policy, and practical concerns about drug misuse, very little is known about its impact on the heroin-using black population. The relative neglect of the role of race or ethnicity in problem heroin use was probably most evident in the 1980s, especially with regard to the heroin epidemic. During that period, concerns about the effects of heroin misuse at the individual and societal levels led to a significant transformation of political and research interests into the epidemiology of heroin use. The center of interest was the white population and "white" heroin use, and those concerns instigated a relative increase in treatment and rehabilitation services (see MacGregor, 1989; Jamieson et al., 1984). No visibility was given to the possible influence of the heroin epidemic on Britain's black population--at the individual and community levels. As Pearson and Patel (1998: 199) observe:

The "whiteness" of Britain's heroin epidemic was so much taken for granted ... that social researchers almost invariably did not even bother to use any system of ethnic monitoring when studying local populations. Questions surrounding black drug use in the 1980s seemed to be motivated by the crack cocaine tremor of the late 1980s and its production of a mix of discourses around black use of, and trafficking in, crack cocaine (see Keith, 1993; Murji, 1998). Debates over black drug use prioritized the under-representation of black people in statistics on those who became clients in drug treatment services (see Mirza et al., 1991a). Crucial questions raised included whether the black community was relatively drug problem-free (see Ruggiero, 1992) or had a significant drug-using population that was unwilling to turn to white-dominated treatment services for help (see Awiah et al., 1990; 1992). Mirza and colleagues (1991a) acknowledged the under-representation of black people as clients of drug services, but drew attention to the relationship between black drug use and the criminal justice system. They noted that most drug users known to criminal justice agencies were black people who were most likely to be arrested for a drug offense. Relating such arrests to crack cocaine, Mirza et al. (1991b) observed that while such police action presented crack and cocaine use as a black problem, white people made up the vast majority of users of these drugs. A similar scenario surfaces in the area of mental health, where a high proportion of black drug users have been diagnosed as mentally ill (see Crowley et al., 1992; Chantier, 1998), unlike their drug-using white counterparts (see King et al., 1994).

These findings clearly point to the possibility of a significant black drug problem that is seemingly "hidden" in institutions outside drug treatment services. Furthermore, difficulties surrounding efforts to ascertain the extent of black problem drug use have been complicated by the contradictory accounts within which black drug use has been located. Observations that implied a black drug problem serious enough to deserve policy attention have also condemned the association of drug use with the black community. For example, Awiah et al (1990) did identify with the under-representation of black drug users in drug services since such services are operated by white staff for white drug (primarily heroin) users, but they also tended to disassociate black people from extensive drug use. For them, the conception that many blacks misuse drugs is a myth derived from racial stereotypes rather than evidence.

What becomes clear from these conflicting attitudes toward black drug use is that the complexities surrounding black problem drug use owe a great deal to the race factor. Those interested in drug use within the black community are continually torn between unveiling the nature of black problem drug use and avoiding the promotion of racial stereotyping. The vital role of race in perceptions of drug use is demonstrated in other studies. As a Department of Sociology, City University (1997) study of racially underlined images of black people and drugs puts it:

Notions about drug usage and needs in those communities have been informed more by racist constructions of criminality and assumptions of "ethnic welfare" than fact. The representation of the cannabis smoking, crack dealing Afro-Caribbean attests to the former, whilst in the latter that of the "Asians don't do drugs," or "Afro-Caribbeans don't inject" is still prevalent in the approach of agencies towards black communities. Referring to the racialization of crack cocaine use...