Wright was still grappling with the question of who would enforce the law once it was enacted.

The main resistance to federal police authority came from the south of the Mason-Dixon line. The Senators from Dixie did not want the federal government tramping through their carefully crafted segregation laws.  A national drug law, enforced by a national police force, would breech the moat of States’ Rights, and God knows what would follow that.  But Wright now saw a chance to remold Southern prejudice into an asset, and it was at this point that his genius took an evil turn.  Motivated no doubt by patriotism and a deep concern for the future of mankind, he decided to play the race card.

The “drug-crazed Nigger” was already a popular bogey man among racists.^[15]  All Wright had to do was fan the flames.  He began feeding the Congress lines like “cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes...”  While it was true that Blacks in the South used cocaine—it was sometimes supplied by white employers trying to get more work out of them—there is no evidence that African Americans abused the drug any more than anyone else.^[16]  But to the Southern Senators, cocaine was particularly ominous because they heard that it transformed the black man into a powerful zombie who not only forgot his place, but was impervious to bullets.  Some say the reason the .38 calibre revolver was adopted as the police standard in the U.S. is because of the belief that the lighter .32 calibre slug could not stop a black man high on cocaine.^[17]

In using racism in his quest for narcotics legislation, Hamilton Wright was following a hallowed tradition.  Almost every drug prohibition ever enacted has had some racial or political component.  When Moslems established the death penalty for coffee drinkers in the 17th century, it wasn’t the caffeine they were after, it was the coffee houses, which were filled with plotting malcontents.^[18]  In the United States, the first anti-narcotics law ever passed—the San Francisco opium ordinance of 1875—was aimed squarely at the Chinese.  They had been imported by the