Race, Class, and Drugs

Markets for illegal goods and services tend to segment by class, and markets in poor urban areas tend to be both particularly harmful and particularly easy for police to penetrate. The understandable result is a heavy law enforcement tilt against downscale markets, as evidenced by prostitution a century ago, Prohibition in the 1920s, and crack and powder cocaine today. As with those other, earlier crimes, Professor Stuntz argues in this Essay that the crack/powder differential enforcement strategy will likely fail, for it breeds resentment, which undermines the law's normative force. To succeed, Stuntz suggests that drug enforcement needs to become more self-consciously egalitarian.