‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Ferguson

They don't target one group anymore than any other group. It's just that one group commits a massively disproportionate amount of crime, so that group is massively over-represented when it comes to interactions with the police.

And despite what the DEA agent said, I haven't seen a single shred of evidence that whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks. The only thing I've ever seen when it comes to races and drugs is that blacks are far more likely than any other race to lie about using them.

A 2005 study in the Journal of Urban Health, for example, found that blacks were ten times more likely than whites to lie about cocaine. Hispanics were five times more likely. When it came to marijuana, not one of the 109 whites in the sample lied, but one in eight of the 191 blacks lied.

A 2008 study of Vietnam-era veterans in the journal Addictive Behaviors found that blacks were more than 20 times more likely than whites to lie about cocaine, and twice as likely to lie about marijuana.

A 2003 report also in Addictive Behaviors surveyed 290 black men who were being treated for high blood pressure. Only 48 admitted they were using illegal drugs but urine tests found that 131 of them were. Forty-five percent were taking drugs but only 19 percent admitted it.

This behavior goes back a long way. In 1994, more than 20 years ago, a large study of young people, aged nine to 20, found that blacks were six times more likely than whites to claim they didn’t use cocaine–but have it show up in a urine test.

The Journal of Urban Health article I quoted earlier says this, and I quote: “the results replicate and extend a growing body of research suggesting that African Americans underreport substance use on surveys.” Underreport is a nice way of saying that they lie about it.

But there’s a better way to tell which groups are more likely to use illegal drugs. Every year, the US Department of Health and Human Services tells us how many people went to the emergency room because they took an illegal drug and got sick or went crazy. Since the government tabulates these numbers by race, we can calculate rates. Blacks are 3-1/2 times more likely than whites to go to the emergency room because they took an illegal drug. They are 2.8 times more likely than whites to end up in the ER because of marijuana, and seven times more likely because they took cocaine.

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