This link's been sitting on my desktop for almost two weeks now, constantly reminding me that I wanted to bring it to your attention and say a thing or two about it: Eric Eckholm, " Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests ,"May 6th, 2008. It's based largely on a newly updated report from Human Rights Watch,and its main conclusion, as reported by theis that "large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though(emphasis added by me).I emphasize the end of that sentence because most Americans who get their news from television take it for granted that this is not true, but you can look up the numbers yourself in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's recurring reports. This paragraph in thewas a major breakthrough of reality into most people's racist fiction; I've heard it claimed that it's the first time a major newspaper in the US has admitted, above the fold, that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at basically identical rates.Now, here's the fascinating thing that I didn't know until I saw it in thethis is a more localized problem than I ever guessed. In every state for which they were able to get data, black drug users are more likely to go to jail than white drug users. But the level of the disparity varies from a low in my own home state of Missouri of 2.7 to 1, to a high in Wisconsin (of all places) ofThe comments to thearticle include a lot of speculation, only some of it at all informed by facts, as to why the disparity is so wide. One plausible hypothesis about Missouri's numbers is that it's the result of a very high profile campaign against both marijuana and methamphetamine by the state police in (very, very white) rural south-central Missouri bringing up the arrest rate for white drug users. One hypothesis that I find equally plausible about Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, knowing what I know about Illinois politics, is that one of the things that makes Illinois' rate the 2nd worst in the nation (23.6 to 1) has to do with the fact that the state police and the feds both almost completely ignore down-state Illinois (almost entirely white outside of the East St. Louis area), that all the police resources are up in (more racially mixed) Chicago, so there are no state or federal cops to bust the vast majority of Illinois' white drug users who live in nearly-all-white rural counties. Anyway, the actual results are in a table in the report I linked above, but to give you a taste for it, here's themap:Oh, and I can't resist saying it, but isn't it justoverlaying that map with the map of the states that Hillary Clinton won?