2014/02/14/How the Myth of the 'Negro Cocaine Fiend' Helped Shape American Drug Policy
- when: 2014/02/14 (2014/02/14)
- author: Carl L. Hart
- source: The Nation
- topics: war on drugs racism myth 1914
- keywords
- link: http://www.thenation.com/article/178158/how-myth-negro-cocaine-fiend-helped-shape-american-drug-policy
- title: How the Myth of the "Negro Cocaine Fiend" Helped Shape American Drug Policy
- summary: «In 1914, a racist fiction helped sell one of the nation's first drug laws; 100 years later, it's still with us.»
Excerpt
The author, a distinguished physician, wrote: "[The Negro fiend] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims." And he continued, "the deadly accuracy of the cocaine user has become axiomatic in Southern police circles... the record of the 'cocaine nigger' near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing."
Cocaine, in other words, made black men uniquely murderous and better marksmen. But that wasn't all. It also produced "a resistance to the 'knock down' effects of fatal wounds. Bullets fired into vital parts that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the 'fiend.'"
Preposterous? Yes, but such reporting was not the exception. Between 1898 and 1914, numerous articles appeared exaggerating the association of heinous crimes and cocaine use by blacks. In some cases, suspicion of cocaine intoxication by blacks was reason enough to justify lynchings. Eventually, it helped influence legislation.