Since the 1950s, the drug trade in cities—with all its racialized connotations—has motivated much of America’s multidecade drug war. But this deadly assault on cities obscures that there was a corresponding, deep-seated desire to protect the suburbs: home to America’s “otherwise law-abiding” “innocent victims,” “addict-victims,” or “impossible criminals.” The drug war may have raged in America’s cities, but it was driven by suburban interests. Why?
Predictably, the answer comes back to racism. Policymakers were often responding to pressure from below. White suburbanites mobilized at the grass roots, especially in Southern California, to push liberal politicians, such as Governor Pat Brown, to crack down on the racialized “pushers” who they believed threatened their white kids and teenagers. White liberals were often the primary drivers behind the escalating drug war, pushing get-tough solutions for the supply side of the drug war and coercive rehabilitation for the demand side. They were driven by a reoccurring fear of suburban crisis: the alleged vulnerability of innocent white youth, whom parents and policymakers believed were under constant threat from drug pushers but also in need of social control.
Saving these “innocent victims” is the subject of Matthew D. Lassiter’s groundbreaking new book, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs. By reorienting the traditional narrative of the drug war—away from the cities where the war was at its most punitive and to the suburbs where the war was designed to be preventive—Lassiter adds needed political and spatial nuance to the history of the war on drugs. Often, that history is focused on the singular story of the ratcheting up of punitive policy and impact on communities of color. But Lassiter shows how that punishment was doled out at the same time as gentler policies of rehabilitation were carefully constructed for white communities in the suburbs. Taken together, the punitive and preventive sides of the drug war were mutually reinforcing and, in the process, exacerbated the drug war’s racially unequal consequences.
Suburban white felony lawbreakers elicited sympathy from policymakers, parents, and police at the local, state, and federal levels, which drove escalation of the drug war at every stage from the 1950s through the 1980s. Protecting these innocent victims lay at the heart of every piece of major drug war legislation, ranging from the amendment to the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act in 1951, which led to enhanced mandatory minimum penalties for dope peddlers, to the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that put in place the 100:1 crack to powder ratio.