Professor Aaron X Smith performs Drake's Headlines remix to open the discussion.

PRESENTATION: DRUGS & RACE in the UNITED GANGSTER STATES

• George H. W. Bush – America's favorite crack dealer
• Someone was called a few blocks from the White House to sell crack
• The Mena Cover-Up

WAR ON DRUGS ORIGINS

• YouTube Video: The Disgraceful Origins of America's War on Drugs
• 1971
• Richard Nixon declared war on drugs
• "Trump did not invent the move of walking off from the mic at a press conference" – Professor Aaron X Smith
• "The war on drugs brought together antiwar people, hippies, and Black people. We criminalize these elements to put control back on our society" – Video. Drugs was used a cover to infiltrate these cultures, and it is important to unpack the language "to break up their meetings." That is a direct language to arrest their leaders
• Instead of facing the enemy and dealing with it on terms that are realistic, they attack fashion, "pants too low." They were aiming to reinstitute control. They were REALLY saying, "we did not want things to change."

The Rockefeller Drug Laws 

• New York Times Video
• A man, Anthony, tells his story of selling drugs for the first time. Twenty cops came and put him under arrest and got a 15-year life sentence for that. In 1973, the mayor put mandatory sentences on people with non-violent drug possession. 

Book: How to be an Anti-racist

• Stamped from the Beginning (another good read)
• Brief synopsis "Shift paradigm from saying I am racist or not racist." An example he offers is the woman in Central Park, saying she is not racist. It should be racist or actively anti-racist. If you are not actively anti-racist, you are a part of the problem
• He talks about being in a school competition and how he viewed himself. One downside about him is that he didn't see college for him and only applied to 2. "Even now I wonder if it was my poor sense of self that generated a poor sense of my people or was it the poor sense of my people that enforced the poor sense of myself." 

• If we think this is about drugs, we are off on the wrong chase

• Reference: movie: I Think I Love My Wife
• Chris rock starts a fight so he can leave and go cheat on her with the mistress. If you focus on the fight and what they were fighting about, you may sit there all night or all your life trying to figure out what could have changed that specific fight. That's not the point! It's you. 
• This relates to drugs. It's not about the drugs. It is you. It doesn't matter what they try to kill you about and the laws; it's about the fact that they are trying to kill you regardless of what the subject is.
• Strike the root (racism) instead of plucking the branches (drugs). The branch is an interchangeable value. The common denominator is the ROOT. 

Book: The Pleasures of Cocaine 

• Crack is Wack
• Your brain on crack:
• Cocaine (snorted) + baking soda = crack (smoke)
• It hits the membrane and gets to your brain in as fast as 8 seconds
• Energy, alertness, aware of a sense
• Large amounts of dopamine
• Book - Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion
• Gary Webb, author
• Book exposes CIA smuggling crack into LA while the Reagan admin shielded drug dealers from prosecution. His death was labeled a suicide. It was not
• How the presidency was co-opted by the CIA
• The war on drugs is a global campaign, led by the US federal government, of drug prohibition, military aid, and military intervention, with the aim being the reduction of the illegal drug trade in the US.
• Why did they not go to the border? They allowed it to be brought in!
• The people who say they were at war with it were the ones selling it.

Ronald Reagan

• American politician who served as 40th president of US
• highly influential voice of modern conservatism
• declared War on Drugs on October 14, 1982. 
• The hustler
• He enacted harsh sentencing laws for drug offenders
• Under his watch, the CIA was caught involved in drug trafficking themselves
• Terrorism and Drug Trafficking
• Ronald Racist
• Ronald Raegan made racist comments about Black people to Nixon in a recording released by national archives
• 1971 (War on Drugs time period)
• They were talking about the United Nations vote
• "To see those monkeys from those African countries – damn them, still uncomfortable wearing shoes."
• Iran Contra

Oliver North (mugshot)

• NSC staff member
• Involved in the illegal sale of weapons and said he was authorized to do everything that he did
• On Fox News as a correspondent, and got promoted despite the situation
• Iran-Contra Affair, a political scandal in which NSC (National Security Council) became involved in secret weapons transactions and other activities prohibited by the US Congress and violated the stated public policy of the government

Planet Rock – WATCH THIS

• Definitive hip-hop historiographies of drugs
• RZA Wu-tang says there was a lot of poverty, drugs, hip-hop. They would travel far on the ferry to go to parties in the Bronx. It was an alternative to the elite clubs where they had cocaine, which was the white people's drug that Black people couldn't even get. It was a sexy thing to say you were doing cocaine. Cocaine was a gate drug. J-Ski and Kurtis Blow were inspired by the popularity of cocaine.
• Freeway Rick Ross
• The Walmart of Crack
• Nancy Reagan War on Drugs YouTube Video
• Cops were riding down the street with military weapons to bust through homes, and it might even be the wrong home. Part of the house was busted in, and the walls were destroyed
• Imagine you are a 10-year-old child. Just understanding your community is a critical stage of development. You wake up in the morning to go to school, and your friend's house looks like that. Amongst all of the sirens and gunshots, there is trauma associated with all of this. 
• Nancy Reagan ran shotgun in the opening of this initiative. The president's WIFE. 

Justice 4 Breonna

• NO KNOCK WARRANTS
• Sound familiar? Still running in people's houses and into the WRONG people's homes. The person they were looking for was already in custody.
• More than 4 billion dollars of military equipment has transferred to local police under the 1033 Program since it was created in the late 1990s, but almost 150 law enforcement agencies have been suspended over the past six years for losing track of equipment since 2009

The CIA Murder Manual

• Talks about preventing the rise of a Black messiah
• They said Elijah Mohammed had the influence to make it happen, but they theorized he was too old. If MLK detaches himself from the establishment, he could be such a figure. Stokely Carmichael was the next one they suspected, and he was ahead of the game and understood what was coming. These agents, the enemies, were studying Black art and politics to find how to defeat them
• This book is a guerilla training manual for Psychological Operations, and it is applied to the specific case of the Christian and democratic crusade being conducted in Nicaragua by the Freedom Commandos. (This is a Columbus rhetoric. Another symbol of white supremacy)
• "Selective Use of Violence for Propaganda Effects"
• "We could neutralize carefully selected and planned-for targets, such as court judges, cattle judges, police or state security officers, CDS chiefs, etc. For purposes of the psychological effect, it is necessary to take extreme precautions, and it is essential to gather the affected population together to attend, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor".
• They are saying, "we are going to make Black people the face of the deficiencies of our society." They are using selective uses of violence for propaganda effects.
• There was a plan to fly a plane that looked like a Cuban plane to people would think it was Cuba
• Is this like Kennedy rolling around in a drop-top so everybody can see it? This sounds a lot like when all of the slaves would be gathered to watch the biggest, strongest slave get raped. The whole point is the spectacle because THAT is more essential than the act itself. It should have a traumatic effect
• "Sometimes you have to shoot the psychological bullet" – Professor Aaron X Smith

The Mena Connection

• Two young boys on train tracks that saw suspicious activity, and those boys ended up missing. They were found dead on the train tracks.
• The president and government at that time were not just aware, but were involved and in charge of it. Things aren't being brought into Mena without the governor knowing. He was involved in it as well.

QUOTE: Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman (in Harper's magazine)

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did."

QUESTIONS:

Just because you don't sell drugs or live in a good neighborhood, is the war on drugs still on me?

 Just because you leave the hood, the hood does not leave you. People who feel they are greater because they escaped from their people is scary and problematic in so many ways. 

Someone who is doing well off financially, how are they affected by the War on Drugs era?

 Those who think they are not affected at all can be the most negatively affected. No traumatic event has no impact. Someone who titles themselves as an overcomer is in a healthier state than someone who barely acknowledges it and says it did not affect them. We need to address and discuss these issues so we can be mentally healthy enough to stand against everything they have coming. 

What are we to take from the past to bring to the moment?

 We need to recognize that we are dealing with a political magician that has refined their strategy for thousands of years. Know the tricks, watch yourself, and how you engage with the games. Let's work to switch the paradigm and the narrative.