In 1971 President Richard Nixon State said drug abuse was public enemy No. 1, ushering in the so-called War on Drugs. By 1989, “New Jersey incarcerated a higher percentage of people due to the drug war than any state in the nation,” according to a new report from the New Jersey Policy Perspective think tank, which examined state data from the last decade.

In 2021, the report finds, “black residents are 3.3 times more likely to be arrested for drug war violations than their white peers, despite white people both using and selling criminalized drugs at higher rates.”

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