If you look at who supported the drugs policies, blacks supported them almost as much as whites did. Drugs were ravaging neighborhoods, and back then, this is how societies had treated drugs addicts. Russia, China, Singapore, African countries, etc. It wasn't till the Swiss experimented with alternative back in the nineties that others began looking at alternative policies in treating drugs addicts. Then we had a number of countries in Europe begin to try alternative methods to treat their addicts and people began to see these alternatives were more effective than jailing addicts and now we're seeing similar approaches in the US.