this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
222 points (95.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43816 readers
1236 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The distinction between cocaine and crack does not have anything to do with racism. It has to do with the way the drug is processed and consumed.
The criminal distinction is absolutely about racism as crack users are historically urban minorities while cocaine users are primarily wealthy white people so crack gets 10x harsher penalties when compared to cocaine. If we compare this to other drugs, would you consider weed edibles different from flower? They're processed differently and consumed differently much in the same way.
I still argue that it’s not a racial thing. You can find cheap cocaine in urban areas. And you can find expensive rocks in rich neighborhoods.
I don’t make any distinction between edibles and weed. I’ve known rich people who smoke tons of weed and poor people who love to make weed brownies.
I know rich people who have used meth and poor people who used ecstasy.
Where are mushrooms in your book? I know rich artists who swear by it and fast food employees who never go to work without tripping—and I don’t blame them.
The specific drug isn’t about race. The quality could be about income status, but there are plenty of poor white people using shitty drugs cut with law knows what.
Would you feel better if he said “it’s like squares and rectangles, but they’re still both shapes”. Hopefully that’s not racist, too.
Yes, in the context of the 1980s and 1990s when discussing the criminality of cocaine and crack cocaine use, there is a racial component. But it was you who took that leap here in this thread, not the person who made the comparison of two products derived by the same source (hence his point in the first place).