By Adam Zivo

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]

Is drug prohibition racist? Many left-wing institutions seem to think so. But their argument is historically illiterate—and it contradicts recent polling data, too, which show that minorities overwhelmingly reject that view.

Policies and laws are tools to establish order. Like any tool, they can be abused. The first drug laws in North America, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguably fixated on opium as a legal pretext to harass Asian immigrants, for example. But no reasonable person would argue that laws against home invasion, murder, or theft are “racist” because they have been misapplied in past cases. Absent supporting evidence, leaping from “this tool is sometimes used in racist ways” to “this tool is essentially racist” is kindergarten-level reasoning.

Yet this is precisely what institutions and activist groups throughout the Western world have done. The Drug Policy Alliance, a U.S.-based organization, suggests that drug prohibition is rooted in “racism and fear.” Harm Reduction International, a British NGO, argues for legalization on the grounds that drug prohibition entrenches “racialized hierarchies, which were established under colonial control and continue to dominate today.” In Canada, where I live, the top public health official in British Columbia, our most drug-permissive province, released a pro-legalization report last summer claiming that prohibition is “based on a history of racism, white supremacy, paternalism, colonialism, classism and human rights violations.”

These claims ignore how drug prohibition has been and remains popular in many non-European societies. Sharia law has banned the use of mind-altering substances since the seventh century. When Indigenous leaders negotiated treaties with Canadian colonists in the late 1800s, they asked for “the exclusion of fire water (whiskey)” from their communities. That same century, China’s Qing Empire banned opium amid a national addiction crisis. “Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality,” the Daoguang emperor wrote in an 1810 edict.

Today, Asian and Muslim jurisdictions impose much stiffer penalties on drug offenders than do Western nations. In countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Singapore, and Thailand, addicts and traffickers are given lengthy prison sentences or executed. Meantime, in Canada and the United States, de facto decriminalization has left urban cores littered with syringes and shrouded in clouds of meth.

The anti-drug backlash building in North America appears to be spearheaded by racial minorities. When Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, was recalled in 2022, support for his ouster was highest among Asian voters. Last fall, 73 percent of Latinos backed California’s Proposition 36, which heightened penalties for drug crimes, while only 58 percent of white respondents did.

In Canada, the first signs of a parallel trend emerged during Vancouver’s 2022 municipal election, where an apparent surge in Chinese Canadian support helped install a slate of pro-police candidates. Then, in British Columbia’s provincial election last autumn, nonwhite voters strongly preferred the BC Conservatives, who campaigned on stricter drug laws. And in last month’s federal election, within both Vancouver and Toronto’s metropolitan areas, tough-on-crime conservatives received considerable support from South Asian communities.

These are all strong indicators that racial minorities do not, in fact, universally favor drug legalization. But their small population share means there is relatively little polling data to measure their preferences. Since only 7.6 percent of Americans are Asian, for example, a poll of 1,000 randomly selected people will yield an average of only 76 Asian respondents—too small a sample from which to draw meaningful conclusions. You can overcome this barrier by commissioning very large polls, but that’s expensive.

Nonetheless, last autumn, the Centre for Responsible Drug Policy (a nonprofit I founded and operate) did just that. In partnership with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, we contracted Mainstreet Research to ask over 12,000 British Columbians: “Do you agree or disagree that criminalizing drugs is racist?”

The results undermine progressives’ assumptions. Only 26 percent of nonwhite respondents agreed (either strongly or weakly) that drug criminalization is racist, while over twice as many (56 percent) disagreed. The share of nonwhite respondents who strongly disagreed was three times larger than the share that strongly agreed (43.2 percent versus 14.3 percent). These results are fairly conclusive for this jurisdiction, given the poll’s sample size of 2,233 nonwhite respondents and a margin of error of 2 percent.

Notably, Indigenous respondents seemed to be the most anti-drug ethnic group: only 20 percent agreed (weakly or strongly) with the “criminalization is racist” narrative, while 61 percent disagreed. Once again, those who disagreed were much more vehement than those who agreed. With a sample size of 399 respondents, the margin of error here (5 percent) is too small to confound these dramatic results.

We saw similar outcomes for other minority groups, such as South Asians, Southeast Asians, Latinos, and blacks. While Middle Eastern respondents also seemed to follow this trend, the poll included too few of them to draw definitive conclusions. Only East Asians were divided on the issue, though a clear majority still disagreed that criminalization is racist.

As this poll was limited to British Columbian respondents, our findings cannot necessarily be assumed to hold throughout Canada and the United States. But since the province is arguably the most drug-permissive jurisdiction within the two countries, these results could represent the ceiling of pro-drug, anti-criminalization attitudes among minority communities.

Legalization proponents and their progressive allies take pride in being “anti-racist.” Our polling, however, suggests that they are not listening to the communities they profess to care about.

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