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Let's go wilder: it's a little bit of both. There wasn't anything in the crack/cocaine epidemic that suggested white fear of the same thing happening to them; drug addiction was seen as a moral failure which white society, as a whole, was immune to. Rather, the fear was that the drug epidemic would affect white communities through spillover effects in terms of crime and an expanded welfare state. What actually happened? White people weren't immune to widespread addiction after all. (This would have been obvious if Americans had connected alcoholism to illegal drug addiction, or, well, black and white people not actually being biologically different in regards to addiction, but we weren't ready for that.) Our conscious decision not to treat the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health crisis, because of the racial associations involved therein, meant we were unprepared to deal with the opioid epidemic in an effective manner. But this also serves as a nice example for what you've observed, because the way that the opioid crisis began to be handled once it finally came out of the shadows was directly informed by how America had seen blacks treated in "Drug War I". The impetus for the swift, soft policies that were put in place were 100% the result of reflection on the destruction drug-related incarceration and public and private divestment of black communities wrought on those caught in the first epidemic. But I also want to point out that you're coming at the subject from a white perspective: "It happened to black people, so white people are scared it will happen to them." I want to hit you with the black perspective: "It happened to black people, so it is GOING to happen to white people unless you listen to our stories (and here are some examples of what happened when you didn't)." In this light, it's ironic that you would label me the conspiracy theorist. In a lot of these situations, white Americans are paranoid; black Americans are experienced. And it often takes a white person synergizing what we already know into academ-ese for people to take our warnings seriously. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210715 Again, see you in November. |