I am aware of that as well as the statistics that the number of people arrested under such laws were many times more likely to have been black or latino. It is also commonly accepted that these were the first populations in the US regularly using.

Look, I’m not saying that there weren’t racist people involved with writing the laws, surely that is true to this day, but the suggestion that there was some nefarious conspiracy to do it is just ridiculous. That this stuff is intoxicating is the reason they went after it. The fact that some opportunistic racists put a slant on it is not the same as what is being suggested.

Only trouble is that the opportunistic racists you mention are in fact the people who put those laws and policies in place in the first place.

Do your particular beliefs on the underlying motives rest on some trustworthy evidence that you could share?