Maureen Dowd’s Weed Candy Experiment Personifies White Privilege

Dowd’s piece also is a recent reminder of the double standard I notice when Whites and Blacks experiment with drugs. In April, VICE published a YouTube video of one of its correspondents in South Africa experimenting with a dangerous cocktail called “nyaope,” a drug laced with HIV medication.

Maybe it’s me, but I find it curious how drug use by upper-middle class White people can become an intellectual discussion on the residual consequences of drug legalization or the misuse of medication when so many Black men and women who do the same thing are viewed through the lens of criminality.

When publications like VICE or the New York Times publish pieces on their journalists’ reports on personal drug use — who are almost always White, by the way — they normalize the use of drugs by White people without considering how minorities often see the media as criminalizing them for similar actions.

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