 Urban myth. Card number 31. Who uses drugs? Urban myth. Who uses drugs? Contrary to popular notion that drug users are mainly black ghetto dwellers, ex-drugs are William Bennett, recently noted that quote, the typical cocaine user's white male, a high school graduate, employed full-time and living in a small metropolitan area or suburb. End quote. In 1988-1990, survey of 350,000 junior high and high school kids found that 7% of white students used cocaine compared with 7% of black students. Whites were also bigger users of marijuana, 24% versus 13% and alcohol, 57% versus 29%. In all age groups, higher percentages of whites use drugs than blacks, but it is blacks and minorities who are featured in media coverage of the problem and who continue to fill the courts in jails. In 1990, a 1990 study found that former, from 1985-1988, drug prosecutions of white youth dropped 15% while for non-whites, they jumped 88%. 1 in 4 black men under 30 are in prison, on parole or on prohibition, over half of them on drug-related offenses. For whites, the figure is 1 in 17. As black columnist Clarence Page explains, quote, a well-off user who makes his or her deals in downtown office buildings or in a quiet suburb is more difficult to catch and more expensive to prosecute than a street corner crack dealer in an inner city neighborhood. Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately stopped, searched, and swept on site. Instead of war on poverty, we wage war against the poor, end quote. Indeed, the government's war on drugs fails to address the social conditions such as lack of jobs and affordable housing, which breed drug abuse and the culture of violence associated with it. 1990 saw new homicide records set in eight of the nation's largest cities, including Washington, D.C. Urban myth.