Featured working paper
The War on Drugs in the Cotton Kingdom
Historical Coercion, Racial Animus, and the Enforcement of Drug Laws in the U.S. South
Abstract
This paper examines the historical origins of racial disparities in the enforcement of drug laws in the U.S. South. I test the hypothesis that the coercive labor practices of antebellum cotton plantations fostered punitive attitudes towards Black individuals that persisted across generations and shaped the local response to the War on Drugs. Combining county-level arrest records for 1974 to 2007 with data from the 1860 Census of Agriculture, harmonized to modern county boundaries, I find that the Black–White gap in drug-possession arrests widened by 25.8 per 100,000 residents more in former cotton counties after the campaign began. The results hold under a triple-difference design, an instrumental-variables strategy based on land suitability for cotton, and a within-state comparison. To identify the mechanism, I show that the response is confined to offenses in which officers exercise discretion, that it is organized by pre-1982 measures of anti-Black animus, and that a formal decomposition attributes it to inherited animus rather than to economic, policing, or geographic factors.
JEL: J15 · K42 · N31 · N32 · Z13 · Keywords: War on Drugs, racial disparity, cultural persistence, slavery, law enforcement, cotton
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