It's more of a money thing. In the US, law enforcement agencies are allowed to keep and liquidate assets seized during drug raids. This generates a lot of money for the agencies, many of which have small budgets otherwise.
As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).
I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.
It became somewhat about money, but that's a fairly recent development in policing in general -- it's not much different from allowing the executive branch to keep all or part of other various fines.
But there's nowhere near as much money coming from seizure as is coming from the government to fund the manpower and equipment used to do the seizing.
The enforcement divisions of the DOJ seize less than 2B annually. (That's FBI/DEA/ATF/etc combined.) Their combined budget is ~27B.
Seizure (and prosecution in general) is more a problem due to perverse incentive schemes: Police are incentivized to seize money not so much to have the money directly, but to have those seizures show up on their performance reviews. Not unlike prosecutors trying to rack up convictions or traffic cops trying to fill ticket quotas.
As far as I can tell, they care less about pot. With the exception of massive amounts of pot, they care mostly about everything else. Small amounts of pot are virtually decriminalized in much of the US, but not small amounts of other scheduled substances (I knew a [white] guy in college who went to jail during a routine traffic stop for possession of one 10 mg pill of dexmethylphenidate (a.k.a. Foculin) without a prescription -- $1500 bail).
I'm not saying police don't do racial profiling, just that the War on Drugs is not about holding a race war; it's primarily about money.