The War on Drugs in Chicago (1993)

and then we just sold it for five hours like that. - [Corley] Greg is 40 years old, a former drug addict, for nearly 20 years shooting heroin through his veins, smoking it as well, selling drugs, working to support his habit, watching as customer after customer climb the stairs to buy a $10 bag of cocaine or heroin. - So you were in a building. - Yeah, apartment building. Then I've sold it outside, you know. When I sold it outside, it was... - He is working now, raising his children alone, a single father. A few years ago, Greg was a junkie, a pusher, an African-American male, hooked on drugs, an atypical user, because the typical user of illicit drugs looks altogether different. - [Burnett] White, male, high school graduate. - Edwin Burnett is a Cook County public defender. - ...who lives in the suburbs. It's not as easily targeted there as it is in the urban areas where conditions seem to make African-American males more accessible to satisfy the feeding frenzy that society

has for the war on drugs. Society wants to see arrests, society wants to see prosecutions, society wants to see incarcerations. The Black male in the inner city can give them that. - According to government figures, Blacks represent about 15% of illegal drug users. Latinos 8% and whites 77%. Federal figures also belie common and pervasive misconceptions about the use and abuse of drugs by teenagers. The National High School Senior Survey, for example, shows that from 1985 to 1989, white males were twice as likely to use cocaine as Blacks. In Illinois, marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, and white students again have the highest rates for using marijuana and for drinking. Latino students follow and African American students report the lowest rates.

- [Hoch] These are for the Narcotics section alone, but last year we arrested 3,943 people. Michael Hoch heads the Chicago Police Department's Narcotics Division; a magazine about Vietnam and a Dick Tracy mug are neatly placed on his desk. For the last 26 years, he's worked in various departments, Robbery, Homicide, Burglary, Vice Control, and now here, Narcotics. What we target here is mainly traffickers. We, I send out people every day and they purchase drugs from the dealers and we sometimes we do arrest them immediately, other times we defer and lock them up at a later date. Like last Thursday, we locked up 96 people for selling to the police. The people who are arrested by hoax undercover officers are predominantly Black, and the commander has no apologies.

He says cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other drugs are just as much a problem in white areas, but the way the drug is sold in African American neighborhoods makes arresting people much easier. In white neighborhoods, drug sales are more clandestine, sold in homes, bars, and businesses. In Black neighborhoods, a huge amount of drug sales occur on the street, recovering