Drugs are a valuable commodity and have a positive or negative  effect in the lives of individuals, based on their use and perception about drugs. We live in a world were drugs are addicts living homeless and are placed in lower social standings because of their drug problems, while patients use drugs in the same breath but in a controlled environment. In courts drugs related cases are treated differently based on the population in consumption of the particular drug. People of lower economic social status use crack in higher numbers because it is cheaper and easier access, compared drugs people of middle and upper class use like cocaine. But are given less time imprison because of the effects of the social constructions surrounding these two drugs. The social construction that places people of color down are multifaceted, for it is on education, economy, medicine, and the judicial system. This not only creates data that is biased, it creates false imagery of a group of people that internalize those ideologies believing it’s how they are meant to behave.

The sentencing of people in courts are biased based on the completion of their skin not even based in race with is also a social construct. Scientist proved that we are all 99.99% identical disregarding our origins, the concept of race was created to place people in social groups of different standings because of the human obsession of categorization and control. This system always places people of color lower on the spectrum often with support from science and political powers that impact people on a daily basis that people fail to recognize. There were more than 1.5 million drug arrests in the U.S. in 2016. The vast majority – more than 80% – were for possession only. People of color experience discrimination at every stage of the judicial system and are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, harshly sentenced. Research shows that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for black people as for white people charged with the same offense. Among people who received a mandatory minimum sentence in 2011, 38% were Latino and 31% were black, while they are the minorities in the population as a whole.

http://www.drugpolicy.org/resource/drug-war-mass-incarceration-and-race-englishspanish