How the War on Drugs Damages Black Social Mobility

The social mobility of black Americans has suffered collateral damage from the “War on Drugs.” Being convicted of a crime has devastating effects on the employment prospects and incomes of ex-felons and their children... These findings are often used to motivate efforts to reduce criminal behavior. They should also motivate changes in our criminal justice system, which unfairly punishes black Americans—often for victimless crimes that whites are at least as likely to commit.

An estimated one-third of black male Americans will spend time in state or federal prison at some point in their lifetime – more than double the rate from the 1970s and over five times higher than the rate for white males.

What’s driving the imprisonment of black men? Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.

More from Brookings.

Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys and lots of other health stats

From the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality

2010 Emergency Room Visits
Office-Based Medical Provider Visits
2010 Outpatient Visits
Asthma Medication Use among Adults with Reported Treatment for Asthma, United States, 1998-1999 and 2008-2009
Trends in Use and Expenditures for Depression among U.S. Adults Age 18 and Older, Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population, 1999 and 2009
The Uninsured in America, 1996-2011: Estimates for the U.S. Civilian Noninstitutionalized Population under Age 65


From the National Center for Health Statistics

Multiple Chronic Conditions Among Adults Aged 45 and Over: Trends Over the Past 10 Years



From the National Institute on Drug Abuse
Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2011 (Volume II): College Students & Adults Ages 19-50

World Drug Report 2012

Chapter I of this year’s World Drug Report provides an overview of recent trends and the drug situation in terms of production, trafficking and consumption and the consequences of illicit drug use in terms of treatment, drug-related diseases and drug-related deaths.

Chapter II presents a long-term perspective on the characteristics and evolution of the drug problem and the main factors that shaped it. It starts with a discussion of the main characteristics of the contemporary drug problem, followed by an overview of the shifts observed over the last few decades, before concluding with an analysis of the driving factors that shaped the evolution of the drug problem, including a brief outlook for its likely future direction.

Drop Off Your Unwanted or Expired Medications this Saturday

Saturday, October 29, you can dispose of unused, unwanted, or expired medications at a National Prescription Drug Take Back Day collection site. Find a drug collection site near you. If you can’t participate in Prescription Drug Take Back Day, learn how to safely and properly dispose of unused medicines.

List of best cities to get high

The online magazine The Daily Beast ranked...America's Pot-Smoking Capitals. The results were based on drug-usage surveys [from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration], arrest data and an [admittedly subjective] assessment of "local pot culture."

New York cities include: Albany (7), Manhattan - which is part of a city (8), Ithaca (22), Binghamton (27), Buffalo (28), Newburgh (33), Watertown (34), and Syracuse (36).

Read more in the (albany) Times Union HERE.

Pot, ecstasy use up, alcohol use down among US. teens

Source: National Institute on Drug Abuse

Several important findings come out of this year’s Monitoring the Future study, the 36th annual, national survey of American teens in a series that launched in 1975.

•Marijuana use, which had been rising among teens for the past two years, continues to rise again this year — a sharp contrast to the considerable decline of the preceding decade.
•Ecstasy use—which fell out of favor in the early 2000s as concerns about its dangers grew—appears to be making a comeback this year, following a considerable recent decline in the belief that its use is dangerous.
•Alcohol use—and, specifically, occasions of heavy drinking—continues its long-term decline among teens into 2010, reaching historically low levels.

Monitoring the Future, conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, has been funded since its inception under a series of research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of Health. In 2010, more than 46,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, enrolled in nearly 400 secondary public and private schools, participated in the study.

The proportion of young people using any illicit drug has been rising over the past three years, due largely to increased use of marijuana—the most widely used of all the illicit drugs. The proportion of 8th graders who reported using at least one illicit drug in the prior 12 months (called annual prevalence) rose from 13% in 2007 to 16% in 2010, including a statistically significant increase of 1.6 percentage points this year. Among both 10th and 12th graders annual prevalence has increased by two percentage points since 2007. In 2010, the proportions using any illicit drug during the past year were 16%, 30%, and 38% in grades 8, 10, and 12 respectively.

Data Tables