Around 200 convenience store owners and clerks gathered here at the Asian American convenience store association located at Dekalb Industrial Way, Decatur on Sunday, January 08 and protested against racial targeting of Indian and other Asian communities. A few months back around 50 Indian American convenience store owners and employees were arrested in Georgia, and charged with selling substances used in the illegal drug manufacture of methamphetamine (meth), a highly addictive stimulant. 

The rally was organized challenging the racially targeted prosecutions of South Asian clerks and convenience store owners in ‘Operation Meth Merchant’. The organizers mobilized defendants, their families and community supporters in response to the implementation in Georgia of "Operation Meth Merchant", the US Drug Enforcement Agency's latest effort in the federal government's crackdown on communities of
color as part of this country's "War on Drugs".

Operation Meth Merchant led to the arrests of nearly 50 store clerks and shop owners for the alleged knowing sale of products used to create the illegal drug methamphetamine (“meth”). All but one of the 24 stores that was targeted are South Asian-owned, and all but five of the 49 individuals prosecuted were of South Asian decent -- 33 have the last name Patel. The Racial Justice Campaign against Operation Meth Merchant is a grassroots campaign, made up of several community groups, whose objective is to persuade the prosecutors to drop these cases because of this unlawful racial targeting.

Speakers at the protest included Ajamu Baraka from the U.S. Human Rights Network, McCracken Poston, a lawyer for several wrongly accused defendants, Upendra Patel, president of the Asian American Convenience Store Owners Association, Aparna Bhattacharya from Raksha, and Shareef Cousins, organizer with Fairness for Prisoners’ Families, and Lisa Wang, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union.