War on Drugs- visual




 Dani Wiggins

Dr. Harris

English 2016

1 December 2025

War on Drugs

This collage is meant to represent the War on Drugs, specifically the systemic racism Black communities and Black individuals faced as a consequence. Although Richard Nixon never stated the phrase “war on drugs” explicitly, his statement from a press conference held in 1971, “America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse” led the media to popularize the term. The entirety of this speech is included as a transcript in the background of the collage, along with a news headline titled “Nixon’s war on drug addicts” and a photo of Nixon taken during the speech. The speech signified the beginning of the War on Drugs that catapulted the domino effect of systemic racism faced by Black communities, even to this present day. Two of the major issues Black people face with the law is racial disparity in sentencing and incarceration rates. At the center of the collage stands a vibrant image of an incarcerated Black man with a target on his back. This piece is sampled from the quilted collage titled “If all Lives Matter ‘Cause We’re All Equal, Why Are Some Lives More Equal Than Others?" by Sylvia Hernández. The literal target depicted on the man’s back represents the targeting of Black men by the law and police enforcement, especially among drug related sentencing and arrests. The disparity among drug sentencing is depicted in the top right corner: lines of cocaine in place of prison bars as two Black handcuffed hands reach out. Cocaine can take the form of a power or a rock (crack); there is no difference between the two besides physical. Despite this, arrests for crack cocaine require a smaller gram amount than powdered cocaine, this is referred to as the 100-to-1 quantity ratio. The arrests for crack are majority Black individuals even with most cocaine users being white. Another reason for this is the surveilling of Black communities, represented by a security camera in the top left corner that casts a line of sight to a pile of crack cocaine and marijuana. Black communities are often targeted by police presence and heavily surveilled often due to racial profiling and drug use in poorer communities. The accumulation of these factors perpetuates systemic racism, furthering the “us vs. them” mentality Black communities have with the law and government.

Works Cited

“Crack Cocaine Sentencing Policy: Unjustified and Unreasonable.” The Sentencing Project, www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/sp/1003.pdf. Accessed 1 Dec. 2025. 

Cohen, Andrew, et al. “Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs.” Brennan Center for Justice, 17 May 2021, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/race-mass-incarceration-and-disastrous-war-drugs. 

Hernandez, Sylvia. If all Lives Matter ‘Cause We’re All Equal, Why Are Some Lives More Equal Than Others? 2020, Agriarte.

Nixon, Richard. “War on Drugs.” Press Conference, 17 July 1971, Washington DC, USA.

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