More Reagan Issues

• Reagan takes on the War on Drugs.

  We lose the war (yay drugs)

  It looks different for Reagan, he goes on TV with his wife and claims drugs are bad and that he’s going to make it a priority to stop drugs.

  Nancy Reagan starts the “just say no” campaign.

  President Reagan goes after drug users and dealers by signing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986).
• Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986- gives a mandatory minimum sentence for drug trafficking, dealing, and usage. We decide some drugs need more penalty than others.

  Mandatory minimums between coke and crack bc crack was new.

  Early 80s- too much cocaine in the US, dealers decide to make crack with it so they sell out more since crack is cheaper and comes in smaller quantities.

  Low income people buy crack, cocaine is for rich people.
• Low income communities are hit with harsher penalties for having crack, even though it’s the same thing as cocaine. No difference between possession and intent to sell, everyone got the same sentence.

  The Contras and the Cartel have overlap, Contras would give the CIA drugs in exchange for guns.

  More people in prison for longer because of crack, mass incarceration issue begins in the 1980s because of Reagan.
• The US has the largest prison sentences and population in the world, but surprisingly does not have the highest crime rates. Beginning of private prisons in the US.
• AIDS epidemic- another crisis Reagan deals with. Several men in LA had illnesses that they shouldn’t have. Called it Gay Cancer at first because every man who had it was gay.

  GRID- Gay Related Immune Deficiency, then they realized it wasn’t gay related, so they called it AIDS.

  Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
• 5 H’s

  1. Homos
  2. Hookers
  3. Heroin
  4. Haitian Immigrants?
  5. Hemophiliacs- blood doesn’t clot, go periodically to get blood transfusions.

  Ryan White- got kicked out of schools because he had AIDS

  Princess Diana shook hands with an AIDS patient without gloves to prove it couldn’t spread through touch.
• More Gay men died from aids than people who died in Vietnam.

  Ryan White was a big deal, millions of celebrities wrote songs about him and memorialized him because of how young he was.

  Reagan didn’t say or do anything about AIDS so people got mad at him. He’s asked by a reporter and he says “don’t be gay or a sex worker or an addict and you won’t get AIDS.”

  ACT UP- a group/organization dealing with AIDS

  Gay people were calling out the genocide of Gay people due to the AIDS epidemic, government has only approved AZT.
• AZT is super expensive, 40% of users will go blind.

  ACT UP starts doing protests to make this medicine cheaper and more accessible, and for better medicines to come out.

  Mid 90’s- we’ll finally help the AIDS crisis and create more medicine to treat it.

  ACT UP would buy drugs illegally that helped treat AIDS and sold it to people in order to help them since no one could afford AZT.
• Reaganomics: the economic policies of the former US president Ronald Reagan, associated especially with the reduction of taxes for the rich