No Stupid Questions

I think the answer is less complicated than you might think.

It's because they were black.

To destabilize black communities and disrupt their growing social and economic power.

It was explicit racism.

13th amendment and a history of black slaves. Not just crack either. Not complicated: Nixon. His domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman admitted in an interview that the Nixon administration's "War on Drugs" was designed to target Black communities and anti-war activists.

Here's the famous quote:

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin, then, by criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Wow it's so surprising such a country would devolve further, nobody saw it coming /s.

As a few others have mentioned here... it's because they were black.

I've personally witnessed a racist try to explain to an South Asian friend of mine that he was "OK" because there's black people and everyone else. I was flabbergasted because this wasn't some nazi skinhead or something, but instead was an older white gentleman.

All racism is bad. But there's racism, and then there's racism in the USA towards black people, which unless you've witnessed it, it's hard to understand how it is a whole other level of racism.

The war on drugs was a dog whistle continuation of the Jim Crow era. Because it was now illegal to discriminate against black people simply for being black, new methods of oppression needed to be instituted. When Nixon announced the war on drugs, drug use was going down and was approaching it's lowest point in decades. His hope was that by finding ways to continue to police black people, he'd win support of Southern Democrats who were largely at the time, pro labor but mad about the civil rights movement.

This strategy worked, and it was continued and expanded under Reagan. When Nancy Reagan pleaded with Americans to 'just say no' drug use was at about 3% nationwide.

American police were always a tool of oppression of black communities. They grew out of post civil war racist brotherhoods like the KKK. On multiple occasions, entire chapters of KKK members were deputized.

The narco trafficking the CIA did was a natural progression of this, and was used as an excuse to further militarize the police.

"Because they were black" is a simple answer. And it's correct. But you could add "and black people are who we oppress in this country."

CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking

Or in Asian neighbor hoods all over the west coast?

Most East-Asians don't do drugs btw...

Especially 1st gens and the 1.5/2nd gens that grew up under 1st gen parents

(future generations that get more "Americanized" might be more willing to use illegal drugs)

There'a a huge cultural stigma as a remnant of the Opium Wars... "Drugs=Bad" was heavily drilled into my upbringing... and I was told alcohol and gambling were bad too... and I kinda agreed with it and just accepted theae statements as facts

Like white dudes literally tried the "introduce drugs to your people" thing before... we're kinda culturually immunized to it, we see what y'all doing, we aint doing it

All of this was built on slave labor

Looking through the answers so far, I think the only thing not covered is why not the po white folk or other groups.

The simple answer really is that they aren't black, because when it comes right down to it, any excuse they found to target black people would have excluded other groups except by accident.

But, that misses out on the other factor. The Appalachians aren't a hotbed of protest and opposition. Folks up in the hills are too poor, too spread out, and too disconnected from external policies on a national level. There's simply no need to destabilize those communities because they're not a problem to the people making laws and decisions.

Same with the asian populations you asked about.

Black folks in cities have an advantage that rural people of any color don't. Numbers in concentration. Even a minority can be a disruption to oppressors when there's enough in one place. So keeping that population off balance becomes a priority for oppressors. That it's black people in the U.S. is largely a matter of detail because the same principle would apply everywhere, with any given minority population being a target where that population group is a potential difficult to enforcing power. Like the rohingya or uyghur peoples as recent examples that were in the news.

Now, being real, black people across the world have been oppressed and abused for hundreds of years. So pretty much anywhere they exist, they get shit on in some way.

They didn't like what the civil rights movement was doing.

America never got over giving their "property" freedom.

The idea that the existence of crack was a government plot is an old and debunked conspiracy theory.

Not that our government isn't that racist, just that it's not that competent or forward thinking.

The real racism was the response to crack. The drug became synonymous with black Americans the same way AIDS became synonymous with gay men: because they were the early and obvious victims. Unlike AIDS, crack is actually much less dangerous than people think. Opioids are way worse.

But even the idea that crack was a "black" problem is a myth. My cracker-ass friend group experimented with free-basing cocaine (which is turning cocaine into crystal inside the smoking vessel, a practice far older than "cooking" crack, but produces the same drug and effect)

Appalachians already voted Republican

I don't know that. Its modification is so simple I find it hard to believe you need a whole conspiracy around its discovery. Generally flooding cocaine I can believe. Im kinda surprised crack was not something developed sooner giving how dead simple it is. People trumping aroudn with ether when you could just cook it in a baking soda solution.

Inherent racism and population density. It feels a bit redundant to say it now that i see it written but that's just the truth of it i guess