Meth, Crack, and Racism in the American Public [View All]

My wife works in crime prevention in Portland, OR, and the issue of dealing with the Meth epedemic here has become hotter and hotter, especially this past year. Over 50% of property crime is linked to meth addicts, their labs condemn rental houses, and treatment success rates are dismal. Last August Oregon became the first state to require a prescription to buy cold medecines that contain pseudoephedrine.

The local government and community leaders have held many forums on the issue, trying to work together to clean up the very real problem that our state has with Meth.

Many times prominent African-American leaders from the city have spoken out at these meetings, saying that when Crack was tearing up their communities they were given no resources. Their opinion is that Crack did worse things to their communities than Meth is doing now, and that their situation was ignored because it had to do with poor black people who were being affected.

Black leaders say the fact that the city and state are waging an all out assault on Meth has everything to do with the fact that Meth is a white drug, and that they were abandoned because Crack was/is a black drug.

They generally don't come to offer any solutions to the Meth problem, just to vent their anger that they were ignored when their community needed it, and now they are not very interested in playing ball to help out the white people who are being affected by Meth.

What do you all think of this? Obviously black communities were left to rot by white governments, but does that mean that we should not deal with the issue at hand?

Also now that we've all seen what happened with Katrina, the wounds have been re-opened in regards to the abandonment of poor black people, so there are a lot of exposed nerves, and rightly so.

Crack is not really an issue any longer, as far as I know, but gang violence always is, and black leaders here still feel that they don't get the resources they need to build their communities back up.

When these things are brought up, there's really nothing anyone can say, except to acknowledge that yes, mistakes have probably been made.

In the end, resources will be devoted to combatting Meth, and the black neighborhoods will feel slighted. It's a very political issue, and honestly, there are a lot more white constituents to appease here than black.

Will this cycle ever end?

Race relations just seem to be getting worse.