As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws and the prison system they’ve helped create are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight.

But so what. It’s not like the War on Drugs, begun almost two generations ago in 1973, has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America… right?

A lot happened in 1973.

It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, when the kindling of an energy crisis was beginning to pile up, and the year that marks our disentanglement from Vietnam.

But it also marks the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed. And that same year, something funny happened: the income gap between black and white begins to widen back out, instead of closing – as it had been up until 1973.

Is that just a coincidence, or is there demonstrable cause-and-effect at work? If you know anything about American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller drug laws in the first years after its passing were minorities.

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Perhaps there could be no more of a poetic dichotomy than LeBron James furiously masturbating all over the national media during the exact same moments Oakland’s African-American community begins its slow-motion implosion, an event that threatens to leave a sinkhole which could once again drag all of California down along with the isolated events of one city.

While every major news channel was busy reporting about a ball game, a jury lacking a single black member ruled that Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot Grant in the back after he was called a “bitch-ass nigger” and while he was handcuffed facedown on the ground, was guilty only of involuntary manslaughter.

The legal equivalent of accidentally jumping a curb and running someone over with your car, admitting only that Grant is in fact dead and Mehserle’s reckless – but possibly accidental – actions lead to his death.

Folks in Oakland are now, understandably, just a little bit unhappy.

Any outside element seeking to sow the seeds of dissension and unrest in America doesn’t have to squint too hard to see that there are potentially hundreds of thousands of other men who might be a little bit pissed off and a little bit predisposed to violence.

Men who have spent time in prison, have no jobs, no love for the police, and who might jump at the idea of killing a few of them. And the nation we’re currently engaging in a soft nuclear detente with is easily the most likely to try and take advantage of this situation, which was best illustrated by what Iran did at the very start of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Right after they released all the women and children, they released one other subset of the hostages.

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