The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution [1] demanding an end to the War on Drugs. The resolution comes as young black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap has become a veritable gulf [2]. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well, here's why: it's not extraneous, it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of twenty-first-century discrimination--an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.

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