Drugs and their use have long been contentious topics in the United States. The national conversation about drugs is multifaceted and diverse. One of the problems that needs to be addressed is the blatant racism that has colored the United States’ relationship with drugs.

The United States is currently experiencing an opioid epidemic, which was responsible for about 64,000 deaths in 2016. Victims of this epidemic have been largely white and from rural areas. Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, said in an interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered” that doctors are more likely to prescribe narcotics to white patients over black patients. He added that nonwhite populations are consequently less likely to become addicted to opioids.

“It would seem that if the patient is black, the doctor is more concerned about the patient becoming addicted, or maybe they’re more concerned about the patient selling their pills, or maybe they are less concerned about pain in that population,” he said.

Black people have historically been deprived of proper medical care because of racist assumptions about “biological differences” between black and white people. A study published in 2016 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America revealed that a “substantial number” of white laypeople, medical students and residents had false beliefs about biological differences between black and white people. The study demonstrated that these beliefs predicted racial bias in both pain perception and treatment recommendation accuracy.

The fact that the face of the opioid epidemic is white has had an effect on how people in power are attempting to solve it. Kolodny said that politicians are quick to say that “We can’t arrest our way out of this. We have to see that people who are addicted can access effective treatment … we didn’t hear that during the crack cocaine epidemic.”

The crack epidemic of the ‘80s had a devastating effect on the black American community, however, there was little emphasis on treatment and counseling during this crisis. This epidemic took place during the War on Drugs, a period which saw the United States’ prison population increase by 500 percent. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of cocaine possession. These sentences were much higher for crack cocaine than powder cocaine, which is more expensive and tends to be used by more affluent white Americans.

For example, possession of five grams of crack got you a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, the same sentence that possessing 500 grams of powder cocaine got you.

White Americans are more likely than black Americans to use most kinds of illegal drugs, but black people are still arrested on drug charges three times as often as white people.

Black people are not only blamed for their own drug use. While celebrities of color potentially have more privilege in terms of money and power, they are still often negatively associated with drugs in ways that white celebrities largely are not.

Rappers and hip-hop musicians have been accused of poisoning the youth by glorifying drugs countless times. In December 2017, the Daily Mail put out an article with the headline, “Popular grime artists such as Stormzy are fueling the use of ‘skunk’ by treating cannabis as ‘product placement’ in their chart-topping songs, researcher warns.”

In the article, Ian Hamilton, a lecturer at the University of York, drew a positive correlation between grime music, a UK genre predominantly developed and produced by black people, and increased marijuana use, especially among the youth.

Stormzy, one of the grime artists who was directly named in the article, responded to the article with a tweet that said, “White rockstars (and pop stars) have been sniffing coke and taking MDMA and singing about it since the beginning of music just admit you’re anti-black and fuck off you tramps.”

Logan Freedman, a data scientist at Addictions.com told Rolling Stone that country music ranked first out of eight music genres (the other genres included jazz, pop, electronic, rock, folk, rap and other) with the highest number of drug references. Rap actually came in last, dispelling the assumption that rappers are the only musicians planting images of drugs in their listeners’ minds.

While country music has fans of all races and ethnicities, it has historically been viewed as a genre largely consumed by white people. As a “white” genre, country music does not suffer the same negative stereotyping that music genres associated with black people do.

The United States needs to have a serious conversation about the role that race has played in its reaction to drugs in relation to communities of color.

Annick Tabb is a sophomore double-majoring in English and political science.