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President Barack Obama will tackle the 40-year drug war that has plagued America if elected to a second term.

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According to GQ, an insider who has spoken with Obama aides and associates says the drug war will be a focal point of his second term.

As reported by GQ:

From his days as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has considered the Drug War to be a failure, a conflict that has exacerbated the problem of drug abuse, devastated entire communities, changed policing practices for the worse, and has led to a generation of young children, disproportionately black and minority, to grow up in dislocated homes, or in none at all.

The historian Richard Miller, who usually writes about Abraham Lincoln, describes for viewers how drug laws in American history were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups.

When Chinese immigrants began to crowd out jobs for white people in California, opium consumption suddenly became a crime. Hemp was legal and consumed in a variety of forms until it became a way to reduce economic competition from Mexicans. Cocaine, notoriously, was consumed in polite society throughout the century, but was not the subject of police attention until blacks migrated North to escape the Jim Crowified South.

The 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine was the most obvious manifestation of how different blacks and whites were treated.

In his first term, Obama signed a law reducing the disparity to 18 to 1, it was considered a reform, even though the two forms of cocaine are still pretty much the same thing.

How the President plans to tackle the drug war is still unclear, but if reelected he will surely draw attention to the issue.

SOURCE: GQ