It's dumb because governments do determine criminality.
That's not actually how it works. If the government is composed of only 5 people, and there are vast networks of corporations that dominate, say, a continent, do you think those 5 people are going to have control over what the corporations do? No, they're not going to.
Criminality has different meanings in different spaces. When the government can arbitrarily make certain things illegal then kidnap people for using those things, it's not a government that belongs to the people, and therefor, is the entity itself that is committing crime.
You meant the DEA.
No, I meant the EPA. The government lied about an international crime epidemic and used that leverage to ban drugs. That's why the EPA was formed. They were lying about what was causing crime rates to rise. It wasn't drugs. It wasn't blacks, it wasn't poverty.
Blaming gang crime on the war on drugs alone is, again, absolutely braindead and devoid of any sort of depth whatsoever.
Drug cartels would have never existed if we weren't using paramilitaries that became wealthy by selling Americans drugs, which they were allowed to do because drugs were artificially illegal. It has nothing to do with my opinion. It's just a fact. If you made oranges illegal tomorrow, the cartels would start selling it.
Do you think Nixon and Reagan initiated the drug war in order to oppress black people? Or do you think they did it to combat drug use primarily and also utilized it to target black groups (esp. civil rights movement)?
I'm basing it off of what Nixon's aide said, and the reality that the vast majority of policing against drugs goes into arresting poor people and has little to do with stopping the actual proliferation of drugs. That's why drugs are incredibly easy to attain in prison, the exact place where they're not supposed to be, since we're supposedly fighting a war against them right now.
It was invented to allow the government to use terrorist techniques against leftist movements and minorities. It had nothing to do with stopping drug use. If you read anything Harry Anslinger wrote, you might have learned already that he was simply a government criminal.
but it is still a crime regardless because the government makes the laws.
Still, you only sound like a communist propagandist, rather than someone who rationally stepped through the fact that if the government is inventing reasons to arrest people, they must A: Not be allocating resources toward real crime, B: Willing to further take away everyone's rights if suddenly they weren't able to actually find anyone using drugs or arrest them, which is exactly what's been happening in America.
Since nobody has spoken up against the Drug War fast enough, we've seen a very large portion of our rights gradually shrink away, because lazy pseudo intellectuals say that "if you don't want to get arrested for drugs, don't use them" rather than acknowledging that arresting people for drug use in the first place is criminal.
If the government is willing to arbitrarily "Arrest" people for non-crimes, the government is illegitimate. They're just performing what's called "kidnapping." When they're taking people's property on suspicion that they've committed a crime, it's just "theft." Cavity searches? Rape. The list goes on. It's the government committing the crimes, not the general public.
Other black people and people who would come into their neighborhoods to purchase drugs.
That doesn't make any sense. Black people are the poorest people in the country, and you said:
it would be ignorant to completely deny the role black Americans played in distributing heroine,
It wouldn't be ignorant, it would be disingenuous. If their role is so significant, yet they're mostly selling to
Other black people and people who would come into their neighborhoods to purchase drugs.
How could it possibly be that the drug trade is so incredibly lucrative, and the role of black Americans so significant? Even though black Americans are the most distinct looking group of people in the country, are you trying to tell me that somehow they were able to sneak vast amounts of drugs all over America, set up supply lines and distribution centers, and are the ones most responsible for the proliferation of drugs in America?
No, they're not. They were simply middle men, while those most responsible, including those that arbitrarily made drugs illegal in the first place, did all the real work.
And you're implying that only black people were the victims of the drug war and that white people weren't arrested for drug crimes.
Aw. Poor white Americans. In Silverlake, cops are leaping out of unmarked cars and shaking down teenagers at gunpoint and siccing dogs on them in search of pot, right? Or is that happening 5 miles away in South LA?
The ACLU reports that blacks are 4-8x as likely to get arrested for drugs than anyone else because police put in 20-40x the effort doing so.