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The War on Drugs, Essay Example

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The “Drug War” should be waged even more vigorously and is a valid policy; government should tell adults what they can or cannot ingest. This paper argues for the position that the United States government should ramp up its efforts to fight the war on drugs.  Drug trafficking adversely affects the nation’s economy, and increases crime.  The increase in crime necessitates a need for more boots on the ground in preventing illegal drugs from entering this country.  Both police and border patrol agents are on the frontline on the battle against the war on drugs.  The war on drugs is a valid policy because it is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens.  Citizens who are addicted to drugs are less likely to contribute to society in an economic manner, and many end up on government assistance programs and engage in crimes.

Introduction

This paper argues that The War on Drugs is a valid policy, and that government has a right, perhaps even a duty to protect citizens from hurting themselves and others.  Fighting drug use is an integral part of the criminal justice system.  Special taskforces have been created to combat the influx of illegal drugs into the United States. The cost of paying police and border control agents is just the beginning of the equation.  Obviously, the detriment to the US economy is tremendous.  But the emotional stress on the friends and family of the drug user represent the human cost of illegal drugs.  Families are literally torn apart by this phenomen.

(1). The cost of police resources to fight the drug war is exorbitant, but necessary .  In order for a war against drugs to be successful, federal, local and state authorities must make sure that there a plenty of drug enforcement officers to make the appropriate arrests.  This means that drug enforcement officers must be provided with the latest equipment, including technology to detect illegal drugs (Benson).  The cost of providing all the necessary equipment to border patrol agents and the policemen and policemen on the frontlines is well justified.  It is necessary to have a budget that will ensure that drug enforcers have everything they need to combat illegal drugs at their disposal.

(2). The government has the responsibility to protect its citizens.   If a substance is illegal, it should be hunted down by law enforcement authorities and destroyed.  The drug user is a victim of society who needs help turning his or her life around.  Without a proper drug policy in effect, the drug user will continue to purchase drugs without the fear of criminal punishment.  That is why the drug war is appropriate.  The government has a right to tell citizens what it cannot ingest, particularly substances that when ingested can cause severe harm to the individual.  This harm may take on the form of addiction.  Once a person is addicted to drugs, the government has treatment programs to help him or her get off drugs.  The economic cost of preventing illegal drugs from getting into the wrong hands, and the cost of drug treatment is worth the financial resources expended because people who are not addicted to drugs are more involved in society and in life in general (Belenko).

(3). Anti-drug policies tend to make citizens act responsibly .  Adult drug users must understand that what they are doing is negatively impacting society.  Purchasing illegal drugs drains the nation’s economy.  These users have probably been in and out of drug rehabilitation programs many times with little to no success.  These drug programs are run by either the federal, state, or local governments (Lynch).   Each failed incident of a patient going back to the world of drugs costs the taxpayers money.  Once the drug user is totally rehabbed, he or she will realize the drag that he or she has been on society.  Therefore, the drug treatment centers are a way to teach adults how to be more responsible.

(4). Drug regulation in the United States has an effect on the international community.  America’s image to the rest of the world is at stake.  If America cannot control its borders, rogue leaders of other countries will think that America is soft on drugs.  This in turn makes America’s leaders look weak (Daemmrich).  Border patrol agents on the United States-Mexican border represent the best that America has to offer in preventing illegal drugs from entering the United States.  It is imperative that part of the drug policy of the United States provides enough financial resources for the agents to do their job.  The international community must see a strong front from the United States against illegal drugs.  Anything less is a sign of weakness in the eyes of international leaders, including our allies.

(5). Women are disproportionately affected by illegal drug use and therefore neglect their children.   As emotional beings, women have to contend with many issues that evade men (Gaskins).  The woman’s primary responsibility is to her children.  If a woman is a drug user, her children will be neglected.  Most of the children end up becoming wards of the state.  Having to cloth and feed children places a major burden on organizations that take these children of addicts in.  A drug addict cannot take care of herself, and she certainly cannot take care of her children.  Both the woman and her children will become dependent on the government for food and shelter.  This person is not a productive member of society.  Increased prison sentences may seem harsh for women with children, but these sentences may serve as deterrence from using drugs.

(6 ). If students know that the criminal penalty is severe, it may serve as a deterrent to drug related crimes.   Educating students, while they are still in school about the harmful effects and consequences of using drugs is imperative in fighting the drug war.  However, many students may tune out the normal talk about how drugs affect them physically.  The key to effectively making the point to students that illegal drug use is wrong is to present them with the consequences of having a felony drug conviction on their record (Reynolds). In fact, having a criminal record is bad enough without the felony drug conviction.  Students should know that such a record can prevent them from obtaining employment in the future.  It should be stressed that many companies will not hire anyone with a criminal record, especially if the conviction was related to illegal drugs.  The threat of extensive incarceration should also deter students from using illegal drugs or participating in drug related activities.

(7). Parents who use drugs in front of their children are bad influences and contribute to the delinquency of the minor.    Children are extremely impressionable, and starting to use drugs at a young age can be devastating to their future.  The government fights the drug war to protect law abiding citizens, and to punish criminals.  People who use illicit drugs are criminals, and parents who influence their children by introducing and approving of their drug use need to suffer severe penalties under the law (Lynch).  It is more than likely that the parents that use drugs have been incarcerated at one time or the other.  This incarceration may be drug related.  Children see their parents go in and out of jail, so that becomes their “normal.” Thus you have generational incarcerations which are an expense to prison sector and taxpayers.  The government is right in ramping up the penalties on drug use in front of children.

(8). People who use drugs are likely to drive under the influence which has all sorts of possible negative outcomes. There are so many consequences resulting from illegal drug use that they are too numerous to list.  One of the “unspoken” consequences is driving under the influence.  The entire population has made a concerted effort to curtail drinking and driving, and the deaths from alcohol related traffic accidents gave gone down significantly since strict laws have been put in place.  The government needs to find a way to crack down on drivers who are under the influence of illegal drugs (Belenko).  Drivers must be clear headed and focused to driver responsibly.  The government should get harsher, and find a way to test (as in the breathalyzer for alcohol) for marijuana.  The government has been successful in keeping the number of drunken drivers down.  However, many drivers are still legally able to pass a breathalyzer test if they are smoking marijuana, or using other drugs.  Accidents can still happen regardless of what drug the driver is under the influence of.  The government must find a way to crack down on these drivers who think that they are beating the system.

If the United States wants to get serious on the war on drugs, it should wage the war more vigorously.  Although the war on drugs is a valid policy, it needs to receive more attention and financial resources from the Federal government.  Preventing illegal drugs from crossing our borders is costly, but highly effective if there are plenty of border patrol agents on the United States-Mexican border.  This is the main avenue by which illegal drugs make it into the United States.  The argument that the government has the right to tell citizens what they can ingest is correct.  This is because it is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens.  Keeping people off of drugs makes for productive citizens who contribute to building a drug free society.

Works Cited

Belenko, Steven R., ed. Drugs and Drug Policy in America: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

Benson, Bruce L., Ian Sebastian Leburn, and David W. Rasmussen. “The Impact of Drug Enforcement on Crime: An Investigation of the Opportunity Cost of Police Resources.” Journal of Drug Issues 31.4 (2001): 989+. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

Daemmrich, Arthur A. Pharmacopolitics: Drug Regulation in the United States and Germany. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2004. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

Gaskins, Shimica. “”Women of Circumstance”-The Effects of Mandatory Minimum Sentencing on Women Minimally Involved in Drug Crimes.” American Criminal Law Review 41.4 (2004): 1533+. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

Lynch, Timothy, ed. After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2000. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

Reynolds, Marylee. “Educating Students about the War on Drugs: Criminal and Civil Consequences of a Felony Drug Conviction.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 32.3/4 (2004): 246+. Questia. Web. 2 Nov. 2012.

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Race, Mass Incarceration, and the Disastrous War on Drugs

Unravelling decades of racially biased anti-drug policies is a monumental project.

• Nkechi Taifa
• Cutting Jail & Prison Populations
• Social & Economic Harm

This essay is part of the  Brennan Center’s series  examining  the punitive excess that has come to define America’s criminal legal system .

I have a long view of the criminal punishment system, having been in the trenches for nearly 40 years as an activist, lobbyist, legislative counsel, legal scholar, and policy analyst. So I was hardly surprised when Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor  John Ehrlichman  revealed in a 1994 interview that the “War on Drugs” had begun as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize Blacks and the anti-war left.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” Ehrlichman said.

Before the War on Drugs, explicit discrimination — and for decades, overtly racist lynching — were the primary weapons in the subjugation of Black people. Then mass incarceration, the gradual progeny of a number of congressional bills, made it so much easier. Most notably, the 1984  Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Act  eliminated parole in the federal system, resulting in an upsurge of  geriatric prisoners . Then the 1986  Anti-Drug Abuse Act  established mandatory minimum sentencing schemes, including the infamous 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine sentences.  Its expansion  in 1988 added an overly broad definition of conspiracy to the mix. These laws flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses.

During the early 1990s, I walked the halls of Congress lobbying against various omnibus crime bills, which culminated in the granddaddy of them all — the  Violent Crime Control and Safe Streets Act  of 1994. This bill featured the largest expansion of the federal death penalty in modern times, the gutting of habeas corpus, the evisceration of the exclusionary rule, the trying of 13-year-olds as adults, and 100,000 new cops on the streets, which led to an explosion in racial profiling. It also included the elimination of Pell educational grants for prisoners, the implementation of the federal three strikes law, and monetary incentives to states to enact “truth-in-sentencing” laws, which subsidized an astronomical rise in prison construction across the country, lengthened the amount of time to be served, and solidified a mentality of meanness.

The prevailing narrative at the time was “tough on crime.” It was a narrative that caused then-candidate Bill Clinton to leave his presidential campaign trail to oversee the execution of a mentally challenged man in Arkansas. It was the same narrative that brought about the crack–powder cocaine disparity, supported the transfer of youth to adult courts, and popularized the myth of the Black child as “superpredator.”

With the proliferation of mandatory minimum sentences during the height of the War on Drugs, unnecessarily lengthy prison terms were robotically meted out with callous abandon. Shockingly severe sentences for drug offenses — 10, 20, 30 years, even life imprisonment — hardly raised an eyebrow. Traumatizing sentences that snatched parents from children and loved ones, destabilizing families and communities, became commonplace.

Such punishments should offend our society’s standard of decency. Why haven’t they? Most flabbergasting to me was the Supreme Court’s 1991  decision  asserting that mandatory life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense was not cruel and unusual punishment. The rationale was ludicrous. The Court actually held that although the punishment was cruel, it was not unusual.

The twisted logic reminded me of another Supreme Court  case  that had been decided a few years earlier. There, the Court allowed the execution of a man — despite overwhelming evidence of racial bias — because of fear that the floodgates would be opened to racial challenges in other aspects of criminal sentencing as well. Essentially, this ruling found that lengthy sentences in such cases are cruel, but they are usual. In other words, systemic racism exists, but because that is the norm, it is therefore constitutional.

In many instances, laws today are facially neutral and do not appear to discriminate intentionally. But the disparate treatment often built into our legal institutions allows discrimination to occur without the need of overt action. These laws look fair but nevertheless have a racially discriminatory impact that is structurally embedded in many police departments, prosecutor’s offices, and courtrooms.

Since the late 1980s, a combination of federal law enforcement policies, prosecutorial practices, and legislation resulted in Black people being disproportionately arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for possession and distribution of crack cocaine. Five grams of crack cocaine — the weight of a couple packs of sugar — was, for sentencing purposes, deemed the equivalent of 500 grams of powder cocaine; both resulted in the same five-year sentence. Although household surveys from the National Institute for Drug Abuse have revealed larger numbers of documented white crack cocaine users, the overwhelming number of arrests nonetheless came from Black communities who were disproportionately impacted by the facially neutral, yet illogically harsh, crack penalties.

For the system to be just, the public must be confident that at every stage of the process — from the initial investigation of crimes by police to the prosecution and punishment of those crimes — people in like circumstances are treated the same. Today, however, as yesterday, the criminal legal system strays far from that ideal, causing African Americans to often question, is it justice or “just-us?”

Fortunately, the tough-on-crime chorus that arose from the War on Drugs is disappearing and a new narrative is developing. I sensed the beginning of this with the 2008  Second Chance Reentry  bill and 2010  Fair Sentencing Act , which reduced the disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I smiled when the 2012 Supreme Court ruling in  Miller v. Alabama  came out, which held that mandatory life sentences without parole for children violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. In 2013, I was delighted when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his  Smart on Crime  policies, focusing federal prosecutions on large-scale drug traffickers rather than bit players. The following year, I applauded President Obama’s executive  clemency initiative  to provide relief for many people serving inordinately lengthy mandatory-minimum sentences. Despite its failure to become law, I celebrated the  Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act  of 2015, a carefully negotiated bipartisan bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015; a few years later some of its provisions were incorporated as part of the 2018  First Step Act . All of these reforms would have been unthinkable when I first embarked on criminal legal system reform.

But all of this is not enough. We have experienced nearly five decades of destructive mass incarceration. There must be an end to the racist policies and severe sentences the War on Drugs brought us. We must not be content with piecemeal reform and baby-step progress.

Indeed, rather than steps, it is time for leaps and bounds. End all mandatory minimum sentences and invest in a health-centered approach to substance use disorders. Demand a second-look process with the presumption of release for those serving life-without-parole drug sentences. Make sentences retroactive where laws have changed. Support categorical clemencies to rectify past injustices.

It is time for bold action. We must not be satisfied with the norm, but work toward institutionalizing the demand for a standard of decency that values transformative change.

Nkechi Taifa is president of The Taifa Group LLC, convener of the Justice Roundtable, and author of the memoir,  Black Power, Black Lawyer: My Audacious Quest for Justice.

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War on Drugs

By: History.com Editors

Updated: December 17, 2019 | Original: May 31, 2017

The War on Drugs is a phrase used to refer to a government-led initiative that aims to stop illegal drug use, distribution and trade by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both drug dealers and users. The movement started in the 1970s and is still evolving today. Over the years, people have had mixed reactions to the campaign, ranging from full-on support to claims that it has racist and political objectives.

The War on Drugs Begins

Drug use for medicinal and recreational purposes has been happening in the United States since the country’s inception. In the 1890s, the popular Sears and Roebuck catalogue included an offer for a syringe and small amount of cocaine for $1.50. (At that time, cocaine use had not yet been outlawed.)

In some states, laws to ban or regulate drugs were passed in the 1800s, and the first congressional act to levy taxes on morphine and opium took place in 1890.

The Smoking Opium Exclusion Act in 1909 banned the possession, importation and use of opium for smoking. However, opium could still be used as a medication. This was the first federal law to ban the non-medical use of a substance, although many states and counties had banned alcohol sales previously.

In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Act, which regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine.

Alcohol prohibition laws quickly followed. In 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified, banning the manufacture, transportation or sale of intoxicating liquors, ushering in the Prohibition Era. The same year, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act (also known as the Volstead Act), which provided guidelines on how to federally enforce Prohibition.

Prohibition lasted until December, 1933, when the 21st Amendment was ratified, overturning the 18th.

Marijuana Tax Act of 1937

In 1937, the “Marihuana Tax Act” was passed. This federal law placed a tax on the sale of cannabis, hemp, or marijuana .

The Act was introduced by Rep. Robert L. Doughton of North Carolina and was drafted by Harry Anslinger. While the law didn’t criminalize the possession or use of marijuana, it included hefty penalties if taxes weren’t paid, including a fine of up to $2000 and five years in prison.

Controlled Substances Act

President Richard M. Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) into law in 1970. This statute calls for the regulation of certain drugs and substances.

The CSA outlines five “schedules” used to classify drugs based on their medical application and potential for abuse.

Schedule 1 drugs are considered the most dangerous, as they pose a very high risk for addiction with little evidence of medical benefits. Marijuana , LSD , heroin, MDMA (ecstasy) and other drugs are included on the list of Schedule 1 drugs.

The substances considered least likely to be addictive, such as cough medications with small amounts of codeine, fall into the Schedule 5 category.

Nixon and the War on Drugs

In June 1971, Nixon officially declared a “War on Drugs,” stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.”

A rise in recreational drug use in the 1960s likely led to President Nixon’s focus on targeting some types of substance abuse. As part of the War on Drugs initiative, Nixon increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and proposed strict measures, such as mandatory prison sentencing, for drug crimes. He also announced the creation of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), which was headed by Dr. Jerome Jaffe.

Nixon went on to create the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. This agency is a special police force committed to targeting illegal drug use and smuggling in the United States. 

At the start, the DEA was given 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion.

Ulterior Motives Behind War on Drugs?

During a 1994 interview, President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, provided inside information suggesting that the War on Drugs campaign had ulterior motives, which mainly involved helping Nixon keep his job.

In the interview, conducted by journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine, Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies: “the antiwar left and black people.” His comments led many to question Nixon’s intentions in advocating for drug reform and whether racism played a role.

Ehrlichman was quoted as saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”

The 1970s and The War on Drugs

In the mid-1970s, the War on Drugs took a slight hiatus. Between 1973 and 1977, eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession.

Jimmy Carter became president in 1977 after running on a political campaign to decriminalize marijuana. During his first year in office, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to decriminalize up to one ounce of marijuana.

Say No to Drugs

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixon’s War on Drugs policies. In 1984, his wife Nancy Reagan launched the “ Just Say No ” campaign, which was intended to highlight the dangers of drug use.

President Reagan’s refocus on drugs and the passing of severe penalties for drug-related crimes in Congress and state legislatures led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug crimes. 

In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain drug offenses. This law was later heavily criticized as having racist ramifications because it allocated longer prison sentences for offenses involving the same amount of crack cocaine (used more often by black Americans) as powder cocaine (used more often by white Americans). Five grams of crack triggered an automatic five-year sentence, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to merit the same sentence.

Critics also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites. Overall, the policies led to a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 2014, nearly half of the 186,000 people serving time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on drug-related charges, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

A Gradual Dialing Back

Public support for the war on drugs has waned in recent decades. Some Americans and policymakers feel the campaign has been ineffective or has led to racial divide. Between 2009 and 2013, some 40 states took steps to soften their drug laws, lowering penalties and shortening mandatory minimum sentences, according to the Pew Research Center .

In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which reduced the discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine offenses from 100:1 to 18:1.

The recent legalization of marijuana in several states and the District of Columbia has also led to a more tolerant political view on recreational drug use.

Technically, the War on Drugs is still being fought, but with less intensity and publicity than in its early years.

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The War On Drugs: 50 Years Later

After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us'.

During the War on Drugs, the Brownsville neighborhood in New York City saw some of the highest rates of incarceration in the U.S., as Black and Hispanic men were sent to prison for lengthy prison sentences, often for low-level, nonviolent drug crimes. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption

During the War on Drugs, the Brownsville neighborhood in New York City saw some of the highest rates of incarceration in the U.S., as Black and Hispanic men were sent to prison for lengthy prison sentences, often for low-level, nonviolent drug crimes.

When Aaron Hinton walked through the housing project in Brownsville on a recent summer afternoon, he voiced love and pride for this tightknit, but troubled working-class neighborhood in New York City where he grew up.

He pointed to a community garden, the lush plots of vegetables and flowers tended by volunteers, and to the library where he has led after-school programs for kids.

But he also expressed deep rage and sorrow over the scars left by the nation's 50-year-long War on Drugs. "What good is it doing for us?" Hinton asked.

Revisiting Two Cities At The Front Line Of The War On Drugs

Critics Say Chauvin Defense 'Weaponized' Stigma For Black Americans With Addiction

As the United States' harsh approach to drug use and addiction hits the half-century milestone, this question is being asked by a growing number of lawmakers, public health experts and community leaders.

In many parts of the U.S., some of the most severe policies implemented during the drug war are being scaled back or scrapped altogether.

Hinton, a 37-year-old community organizer and activist, said the reckoning is long overdue. He described watching Black men like himself get caught up in drugs year after year and swept into the nation's burgeoning prison system.

"They're spending so much money on these prisons to keep kids locked up," Hinton said, shaking his head. "They don't even spend a fraction of that money sending them to college or some kind of school."

Aaron Hinton, a 37-year-old veteran activist and community organizer, said it's clear Brownsville needed help coping with the cocaine, heroin and other drug-related crime that took root here in the 1970s and 1980s. His own family was devastated by addiction. Brian Mann hide caption

Aaron Hinton, a 37-year-old veteran activist and community organizer, said it's clear Brownsville needed help coping with the cocaine, heroin and other drug-related crime that took root here in the 1970s and 1980s. His own family was devastated by addiction.

Hinton has lived his whole life under the drug war. He said Brownsville needed help coping with cocaine, heroin and drug-related crime that took root here in the 1970s and 1980s.

His own family was scarred by addiction.

"I've known my mom to be a drug user my whole entire life," Hinton said. "She chose to run the streets and left me with my great-grandmother."

Four years ago, his mom overdosed and died after taking prescription painkillers, part of the opioid epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Hinton said her death sealed his belief that tough drug war policies and aggressive police tactics would never make his family or his community safer.

The nation pivots (slowly) as evidence mounts against the drug war

During months of interviews for this project, NPR found a growing consensus across the political spectrum — including among some in law enforcement — that the drug war simply didn't work.

"We have been involved in the failed War on Drugs for so very long," said retired Maj. Neill Franklin, a veteran with the Baltimore City Police and the Maryland State Police who led drug task forces for years.

He now believes the response to drugs should be handled by doctors and therapists, not cops and prison guards. "It does not belong in our wheelhouse," Franklin said during a press conference this week.

Aaron Hinton has lived his whole life under the drug war. He has watched many Black men like himself get caught up in drugs year after year, swept into the nation's criminal justice system. Brian Mann/NPR hide caption

Aaron Hinton has lived his whole life under the drug war. He has watched many Black men like himself get caught up in drugs year after year, swept into the nation's criminal justice system.

Some prosecutors have also condemned the drug war model, describing it as ineffective and racially biased.

"Over the last 50 years, we've unfortunately seen the 'War on Drugs' be used as an excuse to declare war on people of color, on poor Americans and so many other marginalized groups," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement sent to NPR.

On Tuesday, two House Democrats introduced legislation that would decriminalize all drugs in the U.S., shifting the national response to a public health model. The measure appears to have zero chance of passage.

But in much of the country, disillusionment with the drug war has already led to repeal of some of the most punitive policies, including mandatory lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent drug users.

In recent years, voters and politicians in 17 states — including red-leaning Alaska and Montana — and the District of Columbia have backed the legalization of recreational marijuana , the most popular illicit drug, a trend that once seemed impossible.

Last November, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small quantities of all drugs , including heroin and methamphetamines.

Many critics say the course correction is too modest and too slow.

"The war on drugs was an absolute miscalculation of human behavior," said Kassandra Frederique, who heads the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group that advocates for total drug decriminalization.

She said the criminal justice model failed to address the underlying need for jobs, health care and safe housing that spur addiction.

Indeed, much of the drug war's architecture remains intact. Federal spending on drugs — much of it devoted to interdiction — is expected to top $37 billion this year.

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Drug overdose deaths spiked to 88,000 during the pandemic, white house says.

The U.S. still incarcerates more people than any other nation, with nearly half of the inmates in federal prison held on drug charges .

But the nation has seen a significant decline in state and federal inmate populations, down by a quarter from the peak of 1.6 million in 2009 to roughly 1.2 million last year .

There has also been substantial growth in public funding for health care and treatment for people who use drugs, due in large part to passage of the Affordable Care Act .

"The best outcomes come when you treat the substance use disorder [as a medical condition] as opposed to criminalizing that person and putting them in jail or prison," said Dr. Nora Volkow, who has been head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse since 2003.

Volkow said data shows clearly that the decision half a century ago to punish Americans who struggle with addiction was "devastating ... not just to them but actually to their families."

From a bipartisan War on Drugs to Black Lives Matter

Wounds left by the drug war go far beyond the roughly 20.3 million people who have a substance use disorder .

The campaign — which by some estimates cost more than $1 trillion — also exacerbated racial divisions and infringed on civil liberties in ways that transformed American society.

Frederique, with the Drug Policy Alliance, said the Black Lives Matter movement was inspired in part by cases that revealed a dangerous attitude toward drugs among police.

In Derek Chauvin's murder trial, the former officer's defense claimed aggressive police tactics were justified because of small amounts of fentanyl in George Floyd's body. Critics described the argument as an attempt to "weaponize" Floyd's substance use disorder and jurors found Chauvin guilty.

Breonna Taylor, meanwhile, was shot and killed by police in her home during a drug raid . She wasn't a suspect in the case.

"We need to end the drug war not just for our loved ones that are struggling with addiction, but we need to remove the excuse that that is why law enforcement gets to invade our space ... or kill us," Frederique said.

The United States has waged aggressive campaigns against substance use before, most notably during alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s.

The modern drug war began with a symbolic address to the nation by President Richard Nixon on June 17, 1971.

Speaking from the White House, Nixon declared the federal government would now treat drug addiction as "public enemy No. 1," suggesting substance use might be vanquished once and for all.

"In order to fight and defeat this enemy," Nixon said, "it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive."

President Richard Nixon's speech on June 17, 1971, marked the symbolic start of the modern drug war. In the decades that followed Democrats and Republicans embraced ever-tougher laws penalizing people with addiction.

Studies show from the outset drug laws were implemented with a stark racial bias , leading to unprecedented levels of mass incarceration for Black and brown men .

As recently as 2018, Black men were nearly six times more likely than white men to be locked up in state or federal correctional facilities, according to the U.S. Justice Department .

Researchers have long concluded the pattern has far-reaching impacts on Black families, making it harder to find employment and housing, while also preventing many people of color with drug records from voting .

In a 1994 interview published in Harper's Magazine , Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman suggested racial animus was among the motives shaping the drug war.

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] War or Black," Ehrlichman said. "But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

Despite those concerns, Democrats and Republicans partnered on the drug war decade after decade, approving ever-more-severe laws, creating new state and federal bureaucracies to interdict drugs, and funding new armies of police and federal agents.

At times, the fight on America's streets resembled an actual war, especially in poor communities and communities of color.

Police units carried out drug raids with military-style hardware that included body armor, assault weapons and tanks equipped with battering rams.

President Richard Nixon explaining aspects of the special message sent to the Congress on June 17, 1971, asking for an extra $155 million for a new program to combat the use of drugs. He labeled drug abuse "a national emergency." Harvey Georges/AP hide caption

President Richard Nixon explaining aspects of the special message sent to the Congress on June 17, 1971, asking for an extra $155 million for a new program to combat the use of drugs. He labeled drug abuse "a national emergency."

"What we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam, not another limited war fought on the cheap," declared then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., in 1989.

Biden, who chaired the influential Senate Judiciary Committee, later co-authored the controversial 1994 crime bill that helped fund a vast new complex of state and federal prisons, which remains the largest in the world.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden stopped short of repudiating his past drug policy ideas but said he now believes no American should be incarcerated for addiction. He also endorsed national decriminalization of marijuana.

While few policy experts believe the drug war will come to a conclusive end any time soon, the end of bipartisan backing for punitive drug laws is a significant development.

More drugs bring more deaths and more doubts

Adding to pressure for change is the fact that despite a half-century of interdiction, America's streets are flooded with more potent and dangerous drugs than ever before — primarily methamphetamines and the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

"Back in the day, when we would see 5, 10 kilograms of meth, that would make you a hero if you made a seizure like that," said Matthew Donahue, the head of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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"Now it's common for us to see 100-, 200- and 300-kilogram seizures of meth," he added. "It doesn't make a dent to the price."

Efforts to disrupt illegal drug supplies suffered yet another major blow last year after Mexican officials repudiated drug war tactics and began blocking most interdiction efforts south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

"It's a national health threat, it's a national safety threat," Donahue told NPR.

Last year, drug overdoses hit a devastating new record of 90,000 deaths , according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The drug war failed to stop the opioid epidemic

Critics say the effectiveness of the drug war model has been called into question for another reason: the nation's prescription opioid epidemic.

Beginning in the late 1990s, some of the nation's largest drug companies and pharmacy chains invested heavily in the opioid business.

State and federal regulators and law enforcement failed to intervene as communities were flooded with legally manufactured painkillers, including Oxycontin.

"They were utterly failing to take into account diversion," said West Virginia Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who sued the DEA for not curbing opioid production quotas sooner.

"It's as close to a criminal act as you can find," Morrisey said.

Courtney Hessler, a reporter for The (Huntington) Herald-Dispatch in West Virgina, has covered the opioid epidemic. As a child she wound up in foster care after her mother became addicted to opioids. "You know there's thousands of children that grew up the way that I did. These people want answers," Hessler told NPR. Brian Mann/NPR hide caption

Courtney Hessler, a reporter for The (Huntington) Herald-Dispatch in West Virgina, has covered the opioid epidemic. As a child she wound up in foster care after her mother became addicted to opioids. "You know there's thousands of children that grew up the way that I did. These people want answers," Hessler told NPR.

One of the epicenters of the prescription opioid epidemic was Huntington, a small city in West Virginia along the Ohio River hit hard by the loss of factory and coal jobs.

"It was pretty bad. Eighty-one million opioid pills over an eight-year period came into this area," said Courtney Hessler, a reporter with The (Huntington) Herald-Dispatch.

Public health officials say 1 in 10 residents in the area still battle addiction. Hessler herself wound up in foster care after her mother struggled with opioids.

In recent months, she has reported on a landmark opioid trial that will test who — if anyone — will be held accountable for drug policies that failed to keep families and communities safe.

"I think it's important. You know there's thousands of children that grew up the way that I did," Hessler said. "These people want answers."

A needle disposal box at the Cabell-Huntington Health Department sits in the front parking lot in 2019 in Huntington, W.Va. The city is experiencing a surge in HIV cases related to intravenous drug use following a recent opioid crisis in the state. Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images hide caption

A needle disposal box at the Cabell-Huntington Health Department sits in the front parking lot in 2019 in Huntington, W.Va. The city is experiencing a surge in HIV cases related to intravenous drug use following a recent opioid crisis in the state.

During dozens of interviews, community leaders told NPR that places like Huntington, W.Va., and Brownsville, N.Y., will recover from the drug war and rebuild.

They predicted many parts of the country will accelerate the shift toward a public health model for addiction: treating drug users more often like patients with a chronic illness and less often as criminals.

But ending wars is hard and stigma surrounding drug use, heightened by a half-century of punitive policies, remains deeply entrenched. Aaron Hinton, the activist in Brownsville, said it may take decades to unwind the harm done to his neighborhood.

"It's one step forward, two steps back," Hinton said. "But I remain hopeful. Why? Because what else am I going to do?"

• drug policy
• war on drugs
• public health
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The war on drugs, explained

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The US has been fighting a global war on drugs for decades. But as prison populations and financial costs increase and drug-related violence around the world continues, lawmakers and experts are reconsidering if the drug war's potential benefits are really worth its many drawbacks.

What is the war on drugs?

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon formally launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the US. "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."

Over the next couple decades, particularly under the Reagan administration, what followed was the escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. But in that process, the drug war led to unintended consequences that have proliferated violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration in the US, even if it has made drugs less accessible and reduced potential levels of drug abuse.

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Nixon inaugurated the war on drugs at a time when America was in hysterics over widespread drug use. Drug use had become more public and prevalent during the 1960s due in part to the counterculture movement, and many Americans felt that drug use had become a serious threat to the country and its moral standing.

Over the past four decades, the US has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs. But the crackdown has in some ways failed to produce the desired results: Drug use remains a very serious problem in the US, even though the drug war has made these substances less accessible. The drug war also led to several — some unintended — negative consequences, including a big strain on America's criminal justice system and the proliferation of drug-related violence around the world.

While Nixon began the modern war on drugs, America has a long history of trying to control the use of certain drugs. Laws passed in the early 20th century attempted to restrict drug production and sales. Some of this history is racially tinged , and, perhaps as a result, the war on drugs has long hit minority communities the hardest.

In response to the failures and unintended consequences, many drug policy experts and historians have called for reforms: a larger focus on rehabilitation , the decriminalization of currently illicit substances, and even the legalization of all drugs.

The question with these policies, as with the drug war more broadly, is whether the risks and costs are worth the benefits. Drug policy is often described as choosing between a bunch of bad or mediocre options, rather than finding the perfect solution. In the case of the war on drugs, the question is whether the very real drawbacks of prohibition — more racially skewed arrests, drug-related violence around the world, and financial costs — are worth the potential gains from outlawing and hopefully depressing drug abuse in the US.

Is the war on drugs succeeding?

The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific aim is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade — making drugs scarcer and costlier, and therefore making drug habits in the US unaffordable. And although some of the data shows drugs getting cheaper, drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making the substances less accessible.

The prices of most drugs, as tracked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy , have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Between 1986 and 2007, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 54 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.

Much of this is explained by what's known as the balloon effect : Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn't necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs. Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

The balloon effect has been documented in multiple instances, including Peru and Bolivia to Colombia in the 1990s, the Netherlands Antilles to West Africa in the early 2000s, and Colombia and Mexico to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the 2000s and 2010s.

Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan. The US spent $7.6 billion between 2002 and 2014 to crack down on opium in Afghanistan, where a bulk of the world's supply for heroin comes from. Despite the efforts, Afghanistan's opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013.

On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. The Monitoring the Future survey , which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In 1975, four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, 30.7 percent of high school seniors reportedly used drugs in the previous month. In 1992, the rate was 14.4 percent. In 2013, it was back up to 25.5 percent.

Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal. A 2014 study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means — one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.

But there's also evidence that the drug war is too punitive: A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there's no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.

Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.

The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferation of violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it's not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.

How does the US decide which drugs are regulated or banned?

The US uses what's called the drug scheduling system . Under the Controlled Substances Act , there are five categories of controlled substances known as schedules, which weigh a drug's medical value and abuse potential.

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Medical value is typically evaluated through scientific research, particularly large-scale clinical trials similar to those used by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceuticals. Potential for abuse isn't clearly defined by the Controlled Substances Act, but for the federal government, abuse is when individuals take a substance on their own initiative, leading to personal health hazards or dangers to society as a whole.

Under this system, Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 drugs have high potential for abuse but some medical value. As the rank goes down to Schedule 5, a drug's potential for abuse generally decreases.

It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical group is the Schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and high potential for abuse. The medical group is the Schedule 2 to 5 drugs, which have some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential (from high to low).

Marijuana and heroin are Schedule 1 drugs, so the federal government says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Cocaine, meth, and opioid painkillers are Schedule 2 drugs, so they're considered to have some medical value and high potential for abuse. Steroids and testosterone products are Schedule 3, Xanax and Valium are Schedule 4, and cough preparations with limited amounts of codeine are Schedule 5. Congress specifically exempted alcohol and tobacco from the schedules in 1970.

Although these schedules help shape criminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, they're not always the final word. Congress, for instance, massively increased penalties against crack cocaine in 1986 in response to concerns about a crack epidemic and its potential link to crime. And state governments can set up their own criminal penalties and schedules for drugs as well.

Other countries, like the UK and Australia , use similar systems to the US, although their specific rankings for some drugs differ.

How does the US enforce the war on drugs?

The US fights the war on drugs both domestically and overseas.

David McNew/Getty Images

On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs. Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug dealing organizations.

"[Federal] assistance helped us take out major drug organizations, and we took out a number of them in Baltimore," said Neill Franklin, a retired police major and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition , which opposes the war on drugs. "But to do that, we took out the low-hanging fruit to work up the chain to find who was at the top of the pyramid. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins."

Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program , encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it — providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.

Although the focus is on criminal groups, casual users still get caught in the criminal justice system. Between 1999 and 2007, Human Rights Watch found at least 80 percent of drug-related arrests were for possession, not sales.

It seems, however, that arrests for possession don't typically turn into convictions and prison time. According to federal statistics , only 5.3 percent of drug offenders in federal prisons and 27.9 percent of drug offenders in state prisons in 2004 were in for drug possession. The overwhelming majority were in for trafficking, and a small few were in for an unspecified "other" category.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mexican officials incinerate 130 tons of seized marijuana.

Internationally, the US regularly aids other countries in their efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the 2000s provided military aid and training to Colombia — in what's known as Plan Colombia — to help the Latin American country go after criminal organizations and paramilitaries funded through drug trafficking.

Federal officials argue that helping countries like Colombia attacks the source of illicit drugs, since such substances are often produced in Latin America and shipped north to the US. But the international efforts have consistently displaced , not eliminated, drug trafficking — and the violence that comes with it — to other countries.

Given the struggles of the war on drugs to meet its goals , federal and state officials have begun moving away from harsh enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime stances. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy now advocates for a bigger focus on rehabilitation and less on law enforcement. Even some conservatives, like former Texas Governor Rick Perry , have embraced drug courts , which place drug offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of jail or prison.

The idea behind these reforms is to find a better balance between locking up more people for drug trafficking while moving genuinely problematic drug users to rehabilitation and treatment services that could help them. "We can't arrest our way out of the problem," Michael Botticelli, US drug czar, said , "and we really need to focus our attention on proven public health strategies to make a significant difference as it relates to drug use and consequences to that in the United States."

How has the war on drugs changed the US criminal justice system?

The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.

After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the 1970s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into the world's leader in incarceration . (But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons — which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population — were violent offenders in 2012, and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics .)

Sentencing Project

Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons — to the point that some states, such as California , have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.

In terms of police powers, civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' assets — cash in particular — and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them.

But there have been many documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected — but couldn't prove — that there was some sort of illegal activity going on. In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal — instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Similarly, the federal government helped militarize local and state police departments in an attempt to better equip them in the fight against drugs. The Pentagon's 1033 program , which gives surplus military-grade equipment to police, was created in the 1990s as part of President George HW Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The deployment of SWAT teams, as reported by the ACLU, also increased during the past few decades, and 62 percent of SWAT raids in 2011 and 2012 were for drug searches.

Various groups have complained that these increases in police power are often abused and misused. The ACLU, for instance, argues that civil asset forfeitures threaten Americans' civil liberties and property rights, because police can often seize assets without even filing charges. Such seizures also might encourage police to focus on drug crimes, since a raid can result in actual cash that goes back to the police department, while a violent crime conviction likely would not. The libertarian Cato Institute has also criticized the war on drugs for decades, because anti-drug efforts gave cover to a huge expansion of law enforcement's surveillance capabilities, including wiretaps and US mail searches.

The militarization of police became a particular sticking point during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown . After heavily armed police responded to largely peaceful protesters with armored vehicle that resemble tanks, tear gas, and sound cannons, law enforcement experts and journalists criticized the tactics.

Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug war struggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies — which many describe as draconian — have been called into question. If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US.

How has the drug war contributed to violence around the world?

The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities. This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions.

In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels. As many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case.

Pedro Ugarte/AFP via Getty Images

But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale. Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

In 2014, for instance, the drug war significantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.

The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America explained . "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police."

As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands in a major humanitarian crisis . Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.

Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events — a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime — is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened in Colombia , Mexico , Venezuela , and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.

The Wall Street Journal explained :

Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run. But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.

As a 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime explained, "one country’s success became the problem of others."

This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it.

How much does the war on drugs cost?

Enforcing the war on drugs costs the US more than $51 billion each year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance . As of 2012, the US had spent $1 trillion on anti-drug efforts.

AFP via Getty Images

The spending estimates don't account for the loss of potential taxes on currently illegal substances. According to a 2010 paper from the libertarian Cato Institute, taxing and regulating illicit drugs similarly to tobacco and alcohol could raise $46.7 billion in tax revenue each year.

These annual costs — the spending, the lost potential taxes — add up to nearly 2 percent of state and federal budgets, which totaled an estimated $6.1 trillion in 2013. That's not a huge amount of money, but it may not be worth the cost if the war on drugs is leading to drug-related violence around the world and isn't significantly reducing drug abuse .

Is the war on drugs racist?

In the US, the war on drugs mostly impacts minority, particularly black, communities. This disproportionate effect is why critics often call the war on drugs racist .

Although black communities aren't more likely to use or sell drugs, they are much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses.

When black defendants are convicted for drug crimes, they face longer prison sentences as well. Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

The Sentencing Project explained the differences in a February 2015 report: "Myriad criminal justice policies that appear to be race-neutral collide with broader socioeconomic patterns to create a disparate racial impact… Socioeconomic inequality does lead people of color to disproportionately use and sell drugs outdoors, where they are more readily apprehended by police."

One example: Trafficking crack cocaine, one of the few illicit drugs that's more popular among black Americans, carries the harshest punishment. The threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence of crack is 28 grams. In comparison, the threshold for powder cocaine, which is more popular among white than black Americans but pharmacoligically similar to crack, is 500 grams.

New York Daily News via Getty Images

As for the broader racial disparities, federal programs that encourage local and state police departments to crack down on drugs may create perverse incentives to go after minority communities. Some federal grants , for instance, previously required police to make more drug arrests in order to obtain more funding for anti-drug efforts. Neill Franklin, a retired police major from Maryland and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition , said minority communities are "the low-hanging fruit" for police departments because they tend to sell in open-air markets, such as public street corners, and have less political and financial power than white Americans.

In Chicago, for instance, an analysis by Project Know , a drug addiction resource center, found enforcement of anti-drug laws is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which tend to have more crime but are predominantly black :

Project Know

"Doing these evening and afternoon sweeps meant 20 to 30 arrests, and now you have some great numbers for your grant application," Franklin said. "In that process, we also ended up seizing a lot of money and a lot of property. That's another cash cow."

The disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates have clearly detrimental effects on minority communities. A 2014 study published in the journal Sociological Science found boys with imprisoned fathers are much less likely to possess the behavioral skills needed to succeed in school by the age of 5, starting them on a vicious path known as the school-to-prison pipeline .

As the drug war continues, these racial disparities have become one of the major points of criticism against it. It's not just whether the war on drugs has led to the widespread, costly incarceration of millions of Americans, but whether incarceration has created "the new Jim Crow" — a reference to policies, such as segregation and voting restrictions, that subjugated black communities in America.

What are the roots of the war on drugs?

Beyond the goal of curtailing drug use , the motivations behind the US war on drugs have been rooted in historical fears of immigrants and minority groups.

The US began regulating and restricting drugs during the first half of the 20th century, particularly through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 , the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 , and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 . During this period, racial and ethnic tensions were particularly high across the country — not just toward African Americans, but toward Mexican and Chinese immigrants as well.

National Library of Medicine

As the New York Times explained , the federal prohibition of marijuana came during a period of national hysteria about the effect of the drug on Mexican immigrants and black communities. Concerns about a new, exotic drug, coupled with feelings of xenophobia and racism that were all too common in the 1930s, drove law enforcement, the broader public, and eventually legislators to demand the drug's prohibition. "Police in Texas border towns demonized the plant in racial terms as the drug of 'immoral' populations who were promptly labeled 'fiends,'" wrote the Times's Brent Staples.

These beliefs extended to practically all forms of drug prohibition. According to historian Peter Knight , opium largely came over to America with Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. Americans, already skeptical of the drug, quickly latched on to xenophobic beliefs that opium somehow made Chinese immigrants dangerous. "Stories of Chinese immigrants who lured white females into prostitution, along with the media depictions of the Chinese as depraved and unclean, bolstered the enactment of anti-opium laws in eleven states between 1877 and 1900," Knight wrote .

Cocaine was similarly attached in fear to black communities, neuroscientist Carl Hart wrote for the Nation. The belief was so widespread that the New York Times even felt comfortable writing headlines in 1914 that claimed "Negro cocaine 'fiends' are a new southern menace." The author of the Times piece — a physician — wrote, "[The cocaine user] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims." He later added, "Many of the wholesale killings in the South may be cited as indicating that accuracy in shooting is not interfered with — is, indeed, probably improved — by cocaine. … I believe the record of the 'cocaine n----r' near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing."

The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Most recently, these fears of drugs and the connection to minorities came up during what law enforcement officials characterized as a crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and '90s. Lawmakers, judges, and police in particular linked crack to violence in minority communities. The connection was part of the rationale for making it 100 times easier to get a mandatory minimum sentence for crack cocaine over powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are pharmacologically identical. As a result, minority groups have received considerably harsher prison sentences for illegal drugs. (In 2010, the ratio between crack's sentence and cocaine's was reduced from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1.)

Hart explained , after noting the New York Times's coverage in particular: "Over the [late 1980s], a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. Entire specialty police units were deployed to 'troubled neighborhoods,' making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems; resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods’ real needs, such as job creation."

None of this means the war on drugs is solely driven by fears of immigrants and minorities, and many people are genuinely concerned about drugs' effects on individuals and society. But when it comes to the war on drugs, the historical accounts suggest the harshest crackdowns often follow hysteria linked to minority drug use — making the racial disparities in the drug war seem like a natural consequence of anti-drug efforts' roots.

What about the band The War on Drugs?

They're pretty great, though they don't have much to do with the actual war on drugs.

But since you mentioned them, take a break and listen to a couple songs from their latest album, Lost in the Dream .

The War on Drugs, "Red Eye":

The War on Drugs, "Under the Pressure":

Bonus from their 2011 album, Slave Ambient : The War on Drugs, "Best Night":

What are the most dangerous drugs?

This is actually a fairly controversial question among drug policy experts. Although some researchers have tried to rank drugs by their harms, some experts argue the rankings are often far more misleading than useful.

In a report published in The Lancet , a group of researchers evaluated the harms of drug use in the UK, considering factors like deadliness, chance of developing dependence, behavioral changes such as increased risk of violence, and losses in economic productivity. Alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine topped the chart.

Anand Katakam/Vox

There are at least two huge caveats to this report. First, it doesn't entirely control for the availability of these drugs, so it's likely heroin and crack cocaine in particular would be ranked higher if they were as readily available as alcohol. Second, the scores were intended for British society, so the specific scores may differ slightly for the US. David Nutt, who led the analysis, suggested meth's harm score could be much higher in the US, since it's more widely used in America.

But drug policy experts argue the study and ranking miss some of the nuance behind the harm of certain drugs.

Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, gave the example of an alien race visiting Earth and asking which land animal is the biggest. If the question is about weight, the African elephant is the biggest land animal. But if it's about height, the giraffe is the biggest. And if the question is about length, the reticulated python is the biggest.

"You can always create some composite, but composites are fraught with problems," Caulkins said. "I think it's more misleading than useful."

The blunt measures of drug harms present similar issues. Alcohol, tobacco, and prescription painkillers are likely deadlier than other drugs because they are legal, so comparing their aggregate effects to illegal drugs is difficult. Some drugs are very harmful to individuals, but they're so rarely used that they may not be a major public health threat. A few drugs are enormously dangerous in the short term but not so much the long term (heroin), or vice versa (tobacco). And looking at deaths or other harms caused by certain drugs doesn't always account for substances, such as prescription medications, that are often mixed with others, making them more deadly or harmful than they would be alone.

Given the diversity of drugs and their effects, many experts argue that trying to establish a ranking of the most dangerous drugs is a futile, misleading exercise. Instead of trying to base policy on a ranking, experts say, lawmakers should build individual policies that try to minimize each drug's specific set of risks and harms.

Why are alcohol and tobacco exempted from the war on drugs?

Tobacco and alcohol are explicitly exempted from drug scheduling, despite their detrimental impacts on individual health and society as a whole, due to economic and cultural reasons.

Tobacco and alcohol have been acceptable drugs in US culture for hundreds of years, and they are still the most widely used drugs , along with caffeine, in the nation. Trying to stop Americans — through the threat of legal force — from using these drugs would likely result in an unmitigated policy disaster, simply because of their popularity and cultural acceptance.

In fact, exactly that happened in the 1920s: In 1920, the federal government attempted to prohibit alcohol sales through the 18th Amendment . Experts and historians widely consider this policy, popularly known as Prohibition, a failure and even a disaster , since it led to a massive black market for alcohol that funded criminal organizations across the US. It took Congress just 14 years to repeal Prohibition.

Alcohol and tobacco are also major parts of the US economy. In 2013, alcohol sales totaled $124.7 billion (excluding purchases in bars and restaurants), and tobacco sales amounted to $108 billion. If lawmakers decided to prohibit and dismantle these legal industries, it would cost the economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

Lawmakers were well aware of these cultural and economic issues when they approved the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 . So they exempted alcohol and tobacco from the definition of controlled substances.

If these drugs weren't exempted, tobacco and alcohol would likely be tightly controlled under the current scheduling regime. Mark Kleiman , one of the nation's leading drug policy experts, argued both would be considered schedule 1 substances if they were evaluated today, since they're highly abused, addictive, detrimental to one's health and society, and have no established medical value.

All of this gets to a key point about the war on drugs: Policymakers don't evaluate drugs in a vacuum. They also consider the socioeconomic implications of banning a substance, and whether those potential drawbacks are worth the gains of potentially reducing substance use and abuse.

But this type of analysis of the pros and cons is also why critics want to end the war on drugs today. Even if the drug war has successfully brought down drug use and abuse, its effects on budgets , civil rights , and international violence are so great and detrimental that the minor impact it may have on drug use might not be worth the costs.

How much of the war on drugs is tied to international treaties?

If lawmakers decided to stop the war on drugs tomorrow, a major hurdle could be international agreements that require restrictions and regulations on certain drugs.

There are three major treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 , the Convention on Psychotropic Drugs of 1971 , and the UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988 . Combined, the treaties require participants to limit and even prohibit the possession, use, trade, and distribution of drugs outside of medical and scientific purposes, and work together to stop international drug trafficking.

Guillermo Legaria/AFP via Getty Images

There is a lot of disagreement among drug policy experts, enforcers, and reformers about the stringency of the treaties. Several sections of the conventions allow countries some flexibility so they don't violate their own constitutional protections. The US, for example, has never enforced penalties on inciting illicit drug use on the basis that it would violate rights to freedom of speech.

Many argue that any move toward legalization of use, possession, and sales is in violation of international treaties. Under this argument, some governments — including several US states and Uruguay — are technically in violation of the treaties because they legalized marijuana for personal possession and sales.

Others say that countries have a lot of flexibility due to the constitutional exemptions in the conventions. Countries could claim, for instance, that their protections for right to privacy and health allow them to legalize drugs despite the conventions. When it comes to individual states in the US, the federal government argues that America's federalist system allows states some flexibility as long as the federal government keeps drugs illegal.

"It's pretty clear that the war on drugs was waged for political reasons and some countries have used the treaties as an excuse to pursue draconian policies," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program. "Nevertheless, we've seen a number of countries drop criminal penalties for minor possession of all drugs. We've seen others put drugs into a pharmaceutical model, including the prescription of heroin to people with serious addictions. This seems completely possible within the treaties."

Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images

Even if a country decided to dismantle prohibition and violate the treaties, it's unclear how the international community would respond. If the US, for example, ended prohibition, there's little other countries could do to interfere; there's no international drug court, and sanctions would be very unlikely for a country as powerful as America.

Still, Martin Jelsma, an international drug policy expert at the Transnational Institute, argued that ignoring or pulling out of the international drug conventions could seriously damage America's standing around the world. "Pacta sunt servanda ('agreements must be kept') is the most fundamental principle of international law and it would be very undermining if countries start to take an 'a-la-carte' approach to treaties they have signed; they cannot simply comply with some provisions and ignore others without losing the moral authority to ask other countries to oblige to other treaties," Jelsma wrote in an email. "So our preference is to acknowledge legal tensions with the treaties and try to resolve them."

To resolve such issues, many critics of the war on drugs hope to reform international drug laws in 2016 during the next General Assembly Special Session on drugs .

"There is tension with the tax-and-regulate approach to marijuana in some jurisdictions," Malinowska-Sempruch said. "But it's all part of a process, and that's why we hope the UN debate in 2016 is as open as possible, so that we can settle some of these questions and, if necessary, modernize the system."

Until then, any country taking steps to revamp its drug policy regime could face criticisms and a loss of credibility from its international peers.

How do other countries deal with drugs?

There is a lot of variety in how different countries have adopted the UN conventions , ranging from levels of enforcement even more stringent than US drug laws to outright decriminalization. Here are a few examples:

• China carries out some of the harshest punishments for illicit drug trafficking. In the lead-up to International Anti-Drug Day , Chinese officials unveiled executions and other harsh punishments for drug traffickers in 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2010 , and 2009 .
• The United Kingdom maintains a classification system similar to America's scheduling system , with criminal penalties set based on a drug's classification. For example, selling class A substances can get someone up to life in prison, while class B sentences are limited to a maximum of 14 years.
• Portugal in 2001 decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. A 2009 report authored by Glenn Greenwald for the libertarian Cato Institute found drug use fell among teenagers in Portugal following decriminalization, but use ticked up for young adults ages 20 to 24.
• Uruguay in 2012 legalized marijuana for personal use and sales to eliminate a major source of revenue for violent drug cartels. The government is now working to establish regulations for the sales and distribution of pot.

The varied approaches show that even though the US has been a major leader in the global war on drugs, its model of combating drug use and trafficking domestically is hardly the only option. Other countries have looked at the pros and cons and decided on vastly different drug policy regimes, with varying degrees of success.

What's the case for focusing more on rehabilitation and addiction treatment?

The most cautious reform to the drug war puts more emphasis on rehabilitation instead of locking up drug users in prison, but it does this without decriminalizing or legalizing drugs.

Allison Joyce/Getty Images

This is the approach recently embraced by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, which plans to increase funding for rehabilitation programs in the coming years. The Obama administration also approved several legal and regulatory reforms , including Obamacare , that increased access to addiction treatment through health insurance. (However, the federal government still spends billions each year on conventional law enforcement operations against drugs.)

Drug courts , which even some conservatives like former Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) support, are an example of the rehabilitation-focused approach. Instead of throwing drug offenders into jail or prison, these courts send them to rehabilitation programs that focus on treating addiction as a medical, not criminal, problem. (The Global Commission on Drug Policy, however, argues that drug courts can end up nearly as punitive as the full criminalization of drugs, because the courts often enforce total drug abstinence with the threat of incarceration. Since relapse is a normal part of rehabilitation, the threat of incarceration means a lot of nonviolent drug offenders can end up back in jail or prison through drug courts.)

Other countries have taken even more drastic steps toward rehabilitation, some of which acknowledge that not all addicts can be cured of drug dependency. Several European countries prescribe and administer , with supervision, heroin to a small number of addicts who prove resistant to other treatments. These programs allow some addicts to satisfy their drug dependency without a large risk of overdose and without resorting to other crimes to obtain drugs, such as robbery and burglary.

Researchers credit the heroin-assisted treatment program in Switzerland, the first national scheme of its kind, with reductions in drug-related crimes and improvements in social functioning, such as stabilized housing and employment. But some supporters of the war on drugs, such as the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy , argue that these programs give the false impression that drug habits can be managed safely, which could weaken the social stigma surrounding drug use and lead more people to try dangerous drugs.

For drug policymakers, the question is whether potentially breaking this stigma — and perhaps leading to more drug use — is worth the benefit of getting more people the treatment they need. Generally, drug policy experts agree that this tradeoff is worth it.

What's the case for decriminalizing drugs?

Pointing to the drug war's failure to significantly reduce drug use, many drug policy experts argue that the criminalization of drug possession is flawed and has contributed to the massive rise of incarceration in the US. To these experts, the answer is decriminalizing all drug possession while keeping sales and trafficking illegal — a scheme that would, in theory, keep nonviolent drug users out of prison but still let law enforcement go after illicit drug supplies.

Mark Kleiman , one of the leading drug policy experts in the country, once opposed the idea of decriminalization, but he warmed up to it after looking at the evidence. "What I've learned since then," he said, "is nobody's got any empirical evidence that shows criminalization reduces consumption noticeably."

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Kleiman said decriminalization could be paired with a focus on rehabilitation. He advocated for policies like 24/7 Sobriety Programs that require twice-daily alcohol testing for every single person convicted of drunk driving; anyone who fails the test is swiftly sent to jail for a few days. In South Dakota, alcohol-related traffic deaths declined by 33 percent between 2006 and 2007 — the highest decrease in the nation — after implementation of a 24/7 Sobriety Program.

In a paper , Kleiman analyzed a similar program in Hawaii for illicit drug users. Participants in that program had large reductions in positive drug tests and were significantly less likely to be arrested during follow-ups at three months, six months, and 12 months.

"Nobody's got any empirical evidence that shows criminalization reduces consumption noticeably"

A 2009 report from the libertarian Cato Institute found that after Portugal decriminalized all drugs, people were more willing to seek out rehabilitation programs. "The most substantial barrier to offering treatment to the addict population was the addicts' fear of arrest," Glenn Greenwald, who authored the paper, wrote. "One prime rationale for decriminalization was that it would break down that barrier, enabling effective treatment options to be offered to addicts once they no longer feared prosecution. Moreover, decriminalization freed up resources that could be channeled into treatment and other harm reduction programs."

As with heroin-assisted treatment programs, supporters of the war on drugs argue decriminalization legitimizes and increases drug use by removing the social stigma attached to it. But the research doesn't appear to support this point.

Some drug policy reform advocates and experts, however, are critical of decriminalization without the legalization of sales. Isaac Campos , a drug historian at the University of Cincinnati, argued that keeping the drug market in criminal hands lets them maintain a huge source of revenue. "The black market might even be fueled somewhat by the fact that people won't be arrested anymore, because maybe more people will use," Campos said. "We don't know if that's the case, but it's possible."

The concern for decriminalization supporters is that letting businesses come in and sell drugs could lead to aggressive marketing and advertising, similar to how the alcohol industry behaves today. This could lead to more drug use, particularly among problem users who would likely make up most of the demand for drugs. The top 10 percent of alcohol drinkers, for example, account for more than half the alcohol consumed in any given year in the US.

Decriminalization, then, is a bit of a compromise in reforming the war on drugs. It would reduce some of the incarceration caused by the drug war, but it would continue operations that seek to reduce drug trafficking and hopefully make a drug habit less affordable and accessible.

What's the case for legalizing drugs?

Given the concerns about the illicit drug market as a source of revenue for violent drug cartels , some advocates call for outright legalization of drug use, possession, distribution, and sales. Exactly what legalization entails, however, can vary.

Seth McConnell/Denver Post via Getty Images

Drug policy experts point out that there are several ways to legalize a drug. For example, in a January 2015 report about marijuana legalization for the Vermont legislature , some of the nation's top drug policy experts outlined several alternatives, including allowing possession and growing but not sales (like DC), allowing distribution only within small private clubs, or having the state government operate the supply chain and sell pot.

The report particularly favors a state-run monopoly for marijuana production and sales to help eliminate the black market and produce the best public health outcomes, since regulators could directly control prices and who buys pot. Previous research found that states that maintained a government-operated monopoly for alcohol kept prices higher, reduced access to youth, and reduced overall levels of use — all benefits to public health. A similar model could be applied to other drugs.

There are other options. Governments could spend much, much more on prevention and treatment programs alongside legalization to deal with a potential wave of new drug users. They could require and regulate licenses to buy drugs, as some states do with guns. Or they could limit drug use to special facilities, like supervised heroin-injection sites or special facilities in which people can legally use psychedelics.

But Jeffrey Miron , an economist at Harvard University and the libertarian Cato Institute, supports full legalization, even it means the commercialization of drugs that are currently illegal. This, he said, is the only complete answer to eliminating the black market as a source of revenue for violent criminal groups.

John Moore/Getty Images

When asked about full legalization, Mark Kleiman , a drug policy expert who supports decriminalization, pushed back against the concept. He said full legalization could foster and encourage more problem drug users. For-profit drug businesses, just like alcohol and tobacco companies, would prefer heavy users, because the heavy users tend to buy way more of their product. In Colorado's legal marijuana market , for example, the heaviest 30 percent of users make up nearly 90 percent of demand for pot. "They are an industry with a set of objectives that flatly contradicts public interest," Kleiman said.

Miron argued that even if sales or distribution are legalized, the harder drugs could be taxed and regulated similarly to or more harshly than tobacco and alcohol, although he personally doesn't support that approach. "You could absolutely legalize it and have restrictions on commercialization," Miron said. "Those should be separate questions."

Kleiman argued the alcohol model has clear pitfalls . Alcohol still causes health problems that kill tens of thousands each year, it's often linked to violent crime, and some experts consider it one of the most dangerous drugs .

Still, some evidence suggests the alcohol model could be adjusted to reduce its issues. In a big review of the evidence , Alexander Wagenaar, Amy Tobler, and Kelli Komro concluded that increasing alcohol taxes — and, as a result, getting people to drink less alcohol — would significantly reduce violence, crime, and other negative repercussions of alcohol use.

But there's evidence that the drug war increases prices and decreases accessibility far beyond taxes and regulation could. A 2014 study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, found that prohibition multiplies hard drug prices by as much as 10 times, so legalization — by eliminating prohibition and allowing greater access to drugs — could greatly increase the rates of drug abuse.

The question of legalization, then, goes back once again to considerations about balancing the good and the bad: Is reducing the rates of drug abuse, particularly in the US, worth the carnage enabled by the money violent criminal organizations make off the black market for drugs? This is a common refrain of drug policy that's repeated again and again by experts: A perfect solution doesn't exist, so policymaking should focus on picking the best of many bad options.

"There are always choices," Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert at Stanford University, explained. "There is no framework available in which there's not harm somehow. We've got freedom, pleasure, health, crime, and public safety. You can push on one and two of those — maybe even three with different drugs — but you can't get rid of all of them. You have to pay the piper somewhere."

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Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America's War on Drugs

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How can the United States chart a path forward in the war on drugs? This book uncovers the full history of this war that has lasted more than a century. The book provides an essential view of the economic, political, and human impacts of U.S. drug policies. It takes readers from Afghanistan to Colombia, to Peru and Mexico, to Miami International Airport and the border crossing between El Paso and Juarez to trace the complex social networks that make up the drug trade and drug consumption. Through historically driven stories, the book reveals how the war on drugs has evolved to address mass incarceration, the opioid epidemic, the legalization and medical use of marijuana, and America's shifting foreign policy.

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The War on Drugs: History, Policy, and Therapeutics

• Welcome to The War on Drugs: History, Policy, and Therapeutics

History of the War on Drugs

The war on drugs defined, trends in u.s. corrections related to drug offenses, **content warning: sexual assault**classic propaganda used to scare the u.s. public about cannabis: "reefer madness" (1936), america's longest war: the war on drugs.

• Racist Roots of the War on Drugs
• The Last Prisoner Project
• Introductory Library Resources
• Drug Schedule Classifications
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The War on Drugs is an effort in the United States since the 1970s to combat illegal drug use by greatly increasing penalties, enforcement, and incarceration for drug offenders.

The War on Drugs began in June 1971 when U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one” and increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and drug-treatment efforts. In 1973 the Drug Enforcement Administration was created out of the merger of the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the Office of Narcotics Intelligence to consolidate federal efforts to control drug abuse.

The War on Drugs was a relatively small component of federal law-enforcement efforts until the presidency of Ronald Reagan, which began in 1981. Reagan greatly expanded the reach of the drug war and his focus on criminal punishment over treatment led to a massive increase in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997. In 1984 his wife, Nancy, spearheaded another facet of the War on Drugs with her “Just Say No” campaign, which was a privately funded effort to educate schoolchildren on the dangers of drug use. The expansion of the War on Drugs was in many ways driven by increased media coverage of—and resulting public nervousness over—the crack epidemic that arose in the early 1980s. This heightened concern over illicit drug use helped drive political support for Reagan’s hard-line stance on drugs. The U.S. Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which allocated $1.7 billion to the War on Drugs and established a series of “mandatory minimum” prison sentences for various drug offenses. A notable feature of mandatory minimums was the massive gap between the amounts of crack and of powder cocaine that resulted in the same minimum sentence: possession of five grams of crack led to an automatic five-year sentence while it took the possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger that sentence. Since approximately 80% of crack users were African American, mandatory minimums led to an unequal increase of incarceration rates for nonviolent Black drug offenders, as well as claims that the War on Drugs was a racist institution.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2020).  War on Drugs .  Encyclopedia Britannica . https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs

Data Compiled By The Sentencing Project:

Trends in U.S. Corrections . The Sentencing Project. (2021, August 18). Retrieved from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/trends-in-u-s-corrections/.

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The War on Drugs turns 50 today. It’s time to make peace.

America’s longest war has been a failure.

As declarations of war go, it was pretty low key. On June 17, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon held a news briefing in the West Wing of the White House. In his usual dark suit and striped tie, speaking comfortably from notes, the president branded Americans’ rising tide of drug abuse “public enemy number one.” He continued: “In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. … This will be a worldwide offensive. … It will be government-wide … and it will be nationwide.” To fund this new war, Nixon declared, he would ask Congress to appropriate a minimum of $350 million. (In 1969, when Nixon first took the oath of office, the nation’s entire federal drug budget was just $81 million .) Fifty years later, the United States has expended approximately one trillion dollars waging war on illegal drugs.

That money has bought some 30 million arrests and millions of imprisonments. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses; the federal government expends well over $9 million every day, more than $3 billion a year, just to lock up drug offenders. States and localities, combined, pay far more . Black Americans are almost six times as likely as White Americans to have been incarcerated on drug charges, even as White and Black Americans use illegal drugs at around the same rate. The War on Drugs — a civil war waged by U.S. authorities against the tens of millions of Americans — is another of America’s “longest wars,” in which the light at the end of the tunnel remains dim.

It would fit conventional wisdom to fault Nixon for the grotesque policy mistakes of the ongoing war on drugs. But we can’t blame Nixon for this one. His war was targeted primarily at the scourge of heroin addiction that was ravaging New York City and affecting U.S. troops in Vietnam, who had easy access to the drug in Southeast Asia. Nixon-the-pragmatist appointed drug rehabilitation experts, not anti-drug moralists, to lead his fight.

Elected officials, however, quickly realized the War on Drugs was good politics. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, known as a moderate Republican, was among the first to successfully push for draconian drug laws, in 1973, as a way to demonstrate his law-and-order credentials in hopes of finally attaining the presidency. Others followed suit.

Those politicians had good instincts. America’s parents had watched in horror as their children embraced illegal drugs, especially marijuana and hallucinogens, such as LSD. Already in 1969, 84 percent of Americans said anyone caught with even the smallest amount of marijuana should go to prison. Congress was fully onboard. In 1970, Congress passed “The Federal Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” that made LSD, peyote, psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and other hallucinogens Schedule One drugs, meaning they were illegal to use for any and all purposes, including scientific research.

The war only intensified in the 1980s, as it became a critical aspect of the culture wars that permeated the era. Millions of Americans embraced recreational pharmaceuticals, including the new party drug, cocaine. While Time magazine and the mass media made light of Yuppies’ use of the “Bolivian marching powder,” public health officials issued warnings, and friends and families feared for their loved ones. The introduction of cheap, highly potent rock cocaine — crack — intensified those fears, as this new drug ravaged poor inner-city communities. White, middle-class suburban parents were terrified that their children would move from cannabis to crack and would be lost to the ravages of addiction. While such fears were largely unfounded, a moral panic ensued. Once again, elected officials saw opportunity.

These fears and furies drove the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which targeted petty African American drug dealers — perceived as the source of the “deadly” drug — with draconian prison sentences . President Ronald Reagan had made a punitive war on drugs central to his administration’s domestic policy agenda. In 1987, at the height of the crack cocaine crisis, some 38 percent of Americans surveyed told pollsters that convicted “drug dealers,” guilty of no other crime and with the quantity and kind of drug being dealt unspecified, should be executed.

Two years later, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) tore into the George H.W. Bush administration, declaring, “We need another D-Day. Instead, you’re giving us another Vietnam: a limited war, fought on the cheap, financed on the sly, with no clear objectives, and ultimately destined for stalemate and human tragedy.” Mainstream politicians vied with one another to be seen as the toughest of the drug warriors. Harsh drug laws did not end with Reagan. Both Bush and Bill Clinton further escalated the War on Drugs, passing federal laws that increased imprisonment and provided massive resources for local and state enforcement.

Yet, even as the war escalated, opponents began to speak out. Among the most prominent elected officials was Rep. Ron Dellums, a Democratic congressman from Oakland, Calif. Dellums believed, as did increasing numbers of other Black elected officials and activists, that the War on Drugs had become far more harmful than helpful in protecting their constituents from the dangers of drug addiction and abuse. Young Black men were being sent to prison as drug criminals in massive numbers not seen before in U.S. history. Dellums, ironically, sought a return to Nixon’s original vision, focused not on punishment but rehabilitation, not prison but treatment centers. Black reformers were joined by public health officials, opponents of the “carceral state” and even police officials and prosecutors. They saw a war with no end, a merciless and destructive juggernaut that was upending communities, families and individual lives — to little purpose. The War on Drugs had become a civil war.

The War on Drugs has only continued to lose public support in the decades since. At least one recent survey indicates decriminalization has become a majoritarian position in the United States — 55 percent of those surveyed said all drug offenses should be treated not as felonies but as civil offenses, “like minor traffic violations rather than crimes,” in the words of the survey .

As president, Biden has acknowledged the harm the merciless War on Drugs has caused, especially on low-income African Americans. His understanding of the issue has fundamentally changed. On the 2020 campaign trail, he insisted that education, prevention and redemption — not incarceration — should govern American drug policy. “No one should be incarcerated for drug use,” he said .

Following the success of medical marijuana legalization campaigns in 17 states between 1996 and 2011, Colorado and Washington in 2012 made cannabis legal for recreational users. Other states have followed — though many still only allow the drug for “medical” use. Even so, the federal government has refused to budge on its statutory prohibition of marijuana, creating a legal conundrum that has yet to be resolved.

Likewise, a growing movement, given legitimacy by scientists and members of the medical and therapeutic community, has emerged to challenge the total criminal sanctioning of LSD and other hallucinogens. Researchers insist such drugs can alleviate and even cure a range of illnesses, including PTSD, depression and addiction. A few localities, including Denver, Oakland and Santa Cruz, Calif., have gone further, completely decriminalizing the use of psilocybin for any purpose, including recreation. Yet, on this issue as well, the federal government has continued to classify hallucinogens as Schedule One drugs, making it extremely difficult for research scientists to legally access and study them in clinical settings.

No opponents of the current War on Drugs believe we should simply replace a punitive “Just say No” approach to illegal drugs with a simplistic “Just say Yes” version. Some compellingly argue for a public health approach, in which “harm reduction” replaces incarceration. Many activists and researchers propose that the federal regulatory system we use to manage “white market” drugs, including powerful depressants and stimulants, can be applied to a range of “black market” drugs, including heroin, that we now criminalize. (A number of European nations, including Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, have moved in that direction.) Of course, as the American experience with the prescription drug OxyContin has shown, regulatory solutions to addictive drugs are far from perfect.

Nonetheless, most Americans now agree: The 50-year-long War on Drugs has failed. We have begun to negotiate an end to this tragic and destructive war. We must demand that our elected officials find the political courage they will need to win the peace.

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The human rights consequences of the war on drugs in the Philippines

Subscribe to this week in foreign policy, vanda felbab-brown vanda felbab-brown director - initiative on nonstate armed actors , co-director - africa security initiative , senior fellow - foreign policy , strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology @vfelbabbrown.

August 8, 2017

• 18 min read

On August 2, 2017, Vanda Felbab-Brown submitted a statement for the record for the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the human rights consequences of the war on drugs in the Philippines. Read her full statement below.

I am a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.  However, as an independent think tank, the Brookings Institution does not take institutional positions on any issue.  Therefore, my testimony represents my personal views and does not reflect the views of Brookings, its other scholars, employees, officers, and/or trustees.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines is morally and legally unjustifiable. Resulting in egregious and large-scale violations of human rights, it amounts to state-sanctioned murder. It is also counterproductive for countering the threats and harms that the illegal drug trade and use pose to society — exacerbating both problems while profoundly shredding the social fabric and rule of law in the Philippines. The United States and the international community must condemn and sanction the government of the Philippines for its conduct of the war on drugs.

THE SLAUGHTER SO FAR

On September 2, 2016 after a bomb went off in Davao where Duterte had been  mayor for 22 years, the Philippine president declared a “state of lawlessness” 1 in the country. That is indeed what he unleashed in the name of fighting crime and drugs since he became the country’s president on June 30, 2016. With his explicit calls for police to kill drug users and dealers 2 and the vigilante purges Duterte ordered of neighborhoods, 3 almost 9000 people accused of drug dealing or drug use were killed in the Philippines in the first year of his government – about one third by police in anti-drug operations. 4 Although portrayed as self-defense shootings, these acknowledged police killings are widely believed to be planned and staged, with security cameras and street lights unplugged, and drugs and guns planted on the victim after the shooting. 5 According to the interviews and an unpublished report an intelligence officer shared with Reuters , the police are paid about 10,000 pesos ($200) for each killing of a drug suspect as well as other accused criminals. The monetary awards for each killing are alleged to rise to 20,000 pesos ($400) for a street pusher, 50,000 pesos ($990) for a member of a neighborhood council, one million pesos ($20,000) for distributors, retailers, and wholesalers, and five million ($100,000) for “drug lords.” Under pressure from higher-up authorities and top officials, local police officers and members of neighborhood councils draw up lists of drug suspects. Lacking any kind transparency, accountability, and vetting, these so-called “watch lists” end up as de facto hit lists. A Reuters investigation revealed that police officers were killing some 97 percent of drug suspects during police raids, 6 an extraordinarily high number and one that many times surpasses accountable police practices. That is hardly surprising, as police officers are not paid any cash rewards for merely arresting suspects. Both police officers and members of neighborhood councils are afraid not to participate in the killing policies, fearing that if they fail to comply they will be put on the kill lists themselves.

Similarly, there is widespread suspicion among human rights groups and monitors, 7 reported in regularly in the international press, that the police back and encourage the other extrajudicial killings — with police officers paying assassins or posing as vigilante groups. 8 A Reuters interview with a retired Filipino police intelligence officer and another active-duty police commander reported both officers describing in granular detail how under instructions from top-level authorities and local commanders, police units mastermind the killings. 9 No systematic investigations and prosecutions of these murders have taken place, with top police officials suggesting that they are killings among drug dealers themselves. 10

Such illegal vigilante justice, with some 1,400 extrajudicial killings, 11 was also the hallmark of Duterte’s tenure as Davao’s mayor, earning him the nickname Duterte Harry. And yet, far from being an exemplar of public safety and crime-free city, Davao remains the murder capital of the Philippines. 12 The current police chief of the Philippine National Police Ronald Dela Rosa and President Duterte’s principal executor of the war on drugs previously served as the police chief in Davao between 2010 and 2016 when Duterte was the town’s mayor.

In addition to the killings, mass incarceration of alleged drug users is also under way in the Philippines. The government claims that more than a million users and street-level dealers have voluntarily “surrendered” to the police. Many do so out of fear of being killed otherwise. However, in interviews with Reuters , a Philippine police commander alleged that the police are given quotas of “surrenders,” filling them by arresting anyone on trivial violations (such as being shirtless or drunk). 13 Once again, the rule of law is fundamentally perverted to serve a deeply misguided and reprehensible state policy.

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SMART DESIGN OF DRUG POLICIES VERSUS THE PHILIPPINES REALITY

Smart policies for addressing drug retail markets look very different than the violence and state-sponsored crime President Duterte has thrust upon the Philippines. Rather than state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings and mass incarceration, policing retail markets should have several objectives: The first, and most important, is to make drug retail markets as non-violent as possible. Duterte’s policy does just the opposite: in slaughtering people, it is making a drug-distribution market that was initially rather peaceful (certainly compared to Latin America, 14 such as in Brazil 15 ) very violent – this largely the result of the state actions, extrajudicial killings, and vigilante killings he has ordered. Worse yet, the police and extrajudicial killings hide other murders, as neighbors and neighborhood committees put on the list of drug suspects their rivals and people whose land or property they want to steal; thus, anyone can be killed by anyone and then labeled a pusher.

The unaccountable en masse prosecution of anyone accused of drug trade involvement or drug use also serves as a mechanism to squash political pluralism and eliminate political opposition. Those who dare challenge President Duterte and his reprehensible policies are accused of drug trafficking charges and arrested themselves. The most prominent case is that of Senator Leila de Lima. But it includes many other lower-level politicians. Without disclosing credible evidence or convening a fair trial, President Duterte has ordered the arrest of scores of politicians accused of drug-trade links; three such accused mayors have died during police arrests, often with many other individuals dying in the shoot-outs. The latest such incident occurred on July 30, 2017 when Reynaldo Parojinog, mayor of Ozamiz in the southern Philippines, was killed during a police raid on his house, along with Parojinog’s wife and at least five other people.

Another crucial goal of drug policy should be to enhance public health and limit the spread of diseases linked to drug use. The worst possible policy is to push addicts into the shadows, ostracize them, and increase the chance of overdoses as well as a rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and hepatitis. In prisons, users will not get adequate treatment for either their addiction or their communicable disease. That is the reason why other countries that initially adopted similar draconian wars on drugs (such as Thailand in 2001 16 and Vietnam in the same decade 17 ) eventually tried to backpedal from them, despite the initial popularity of such policies with publics in East Asia. Even though throughout East Asia, tough drug policies toward drug use and the illegal drug trade remain government default policies and often receive widespread support, countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and even Myanmar have gradually begun to experiment with or are exploring HARM reduction approaches, such as safe needle exchange programs and methadone maintenance, as the ineffective and counterproductive nature and human rights costs of the harsh war on drugs campaign become evident.

Moreover, frightening and stigmatizing drug users and pushing use deeper underground will only exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. Even prior to the Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, the rate of HIV infections in the Philippines has been soaring due to inadequate awareness and failure to support safe sex practices, such as access to condoms. Along with Afghanistan, the Philippine HIV infection rate is the highest in Asia, increasing 50 percent between 2010 and 2015. 18 Among high-risk groups, including injection- drug users, gay men, transgender women, and female prostitutes, the rate of new infections jumped by 230 percent between 2011and 2015. Duterte’s war on drugs will only intensify these worrisome trends among drug users.

Further, as Central America has painfully learned in its struggles against street gangs, mass incarceration policies turn prisons into recruiting grounds for organized crime. Given persisting jihadi terrorism in the Philippines, mass imprisonment of low-level dealers and drug traffickers which mix them with terrorists in prisons can result in the establishment of dangerous alliances between terrorists and criminals, as has happened in Indonesia.

The mass killings and imprisonment in the Philippines will not dry up demand for drugs: the many people who will end up in overcrowded prisons and poorly-designed treatment centers (as is already happening) will likely remain addicted to drugs, or become addicts. There is always drug smuggling into prisons and many prisons are major drug distribution and consumption spots.

Even when those who surrendered are placed into so-called treatment centers, instead of outright prisons, large problems remain. Many who surrendered do not necessarily have a drug abuse problem as they surrendered preemptively to avoid being killed if they for whatever reason ended up on the watch list. Those who do have a drug addiction problem mostly do not receive adequate care. Treatment for drug addiction is highly underdeveloped and underprovided in the Philippines, and China’s rushing in to build larger treatment facilities is unlikely to resolve this problem. In China itself, many so-called treatment centers often amounted to de facto prisons or force-labor detention centers, with highly questionable methods of treatment and very high relapse rates.

As long as there is demand, supply and retailing will persist, simply taking another form. Indeed, there is a high chance that Duterte’s hunting down of low-level pushers (and those accused of being pushers) will significantly increase organized crime in the Philippines and intensify corruption. The dealers and traffickers who will remain on the streets will only be those who can either violently oppose law enforcement and vigilante groups or bribe their way to the highest positions of power. By eliminating low-level, mostly non-violent dealers, Duterte is paradoxically and counterproductively setting up a situation where more organized and powerful drug traffickers and distribution will emerge.

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Inducing police to engage in de facto shoot-to-kill policies is enormously corrosive of law enforcement, not to mention the rule of law. There is a high chance that the policy will more than ever institutionalize top-level corruption, as only powerful drug traffickers will be able to bribe their way into upper-levels of the Philippine law enforcement system, and the government will stay in business. Moreover, corrupt top-level cops and government officials tasked with such witch-hunts will have the perfect opportunity to direct law enforcement against their drug business rivals as well as political enemies, and themselves become the top drug capos. Unaccountable police officers officially induced to engage in extrajudicial killings easily succumb to engaging in all kinds of criminality, being uniquely privileged to take over criminal markets. Those who should protect public safety and the rule of law themselves become criminals.

Such corrosion of the law enforcement agencies is well under way in the Philippines as a result of President Duterte’s war on drugs. Corruption and the lack of accountability in the Philippine police l preceded Duterte’s presidency, but have become exacerbated since, with the war on drugs blatant violations of rule of law and basic legal and human rights principles a direct driver. The issue surfaced visibly and in a way that the government of the Philippines could not simply ignore in January 2017 when Philippine drug squad police officers kidnapped a South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo and extorted his family for money. Jee was ultimately killed inside the police headquarters. President Duterte expressed outrage and for a month suspended the national police from participating in the war on drugs while some police purges took places. Rather than a serious effort to root out corruption, those purges served principally to tighten control over the police. The wrong-headed illegal policies of Duterte’s war on drugs were not examined or corrected. Nor were other accountability and rule of law practices reinforced. Thus when after a month the national police were was asked to resume their role in the war on the drugs, the perverted system slid back into the same human rights violations and other highly detrimental processes and outcomes.

WHAT COUNTERNARCOTICS POLICIES THE PHILIPPINES SHOULD ADOPT

The Philippines should adopt radically different approaches: The shoot-to-kill directives to police and calls for extrajudicial killings should stop immediately, as should dragnets against low-level pushers and users. If such orders are  issued, prosecutions of any new extrajudicial killings and investigations of encounter killings must follow. In the short term, the existence of pervasive culpability may prevent the adoption of any policy that would seek to investigate and prosecute police and government officials and members of neighborhood councils who have been involved in the state-sanctioned slaughter. If political leadership in the Philippines changes, however, standing up a truth commission will be paramount. In the meantime, however, all existing arrested drug suspects need to be given fair trials or released.

Law-enforcement and rule of law components of drug policy designs need to make reducing criminal violence and violent militancy among their highest objectives. The Philippines should build up real intelligence on the drug trafficking networks that President Duterte alleges exist in the Philippines and target their middle operational layers, rather than low-level dealers, as well as their corruption networks in the government and law enforcement. However, the latter must not be used to cover up eliminating rival politicians and independent political voices.

To deal with addiction, the Philippines should adopt enlightened harm-reduction measures, including methadone maintenance, safe-needle exchange, and access to effective treatment. No doubt, these are difficult and elusive for methamphetamines, the drug of choice in the Philippines. Meth addiction is very difficult to treat and is associated with high morbidity levels. Instead of turning his country into a lawless Wild East, President Duterte should make the Philippines the center of collaborative East Asian research on how to develop effective public health approaches to methamphetamine addiction.

IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICY

It is imperative that the United States strongly and unequivocally condemns the war on drugs in the Philippines and deploys sanctions until state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings and other state-authorized rule of law violations are ended. The United States should adopt such a position even if President Duterte again threatens the U.S.-Philippines naval bases agreements meant to provide the Philippines and other countries with protection against China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea. President Duterte’s pro-China preferences will not be moderated by the United States being cowed into condoning egregious violations of human rights. In fact, a healthy U.S.-Philippine long-term relationship will be undermined by U.S. silence on state-sanctioned murder.

However, the United States must recognize that drug use in the Philippines and East Asia more broadly constitute serious threats to society. Although internationally condemned for the war on drugs, President Duterte remains highly popular in the Philippines, with 80 percent of Filipinos still expressing “much trust” for him after a year of his war on drugs and 9,000 people dead. 19 Unlike in Latin America, throughout East Asia, drug use is highly disapproved of, with little empathy for users and only very weak support for drug policy reform. Throughout the region, as well as in the Philippines, tough-on-drugs approaches, despite their ineffective outcomes and human rights violations, often remain popular. Fostering an honest and complete public discussion about the pros and cons of various drug policy approaches is a necessary element in creating public demand for accountability of drug policy in the Philippines.

Equally important is to develop better public health approaches to dealing with methamphetamine addiction. It is devastating throughout East Asia as well as in the United States, though opiate abuse mortality rates now eclipse methamphetamine drug abuse problems. Meth addiction is very hard to treat and often results in severe morbidity. Yet harm reduction approaches have been predominately geared toward opiate and heroin addictions, with substitution treatments, such as methadone, not easily available for meth and other harm reduction approaches also not directly applicable.

What has been happening in the Philippines is tragic and unconscionable. But if the United States can at least take a leading role in developing harm reduction and effective treatment approaches toward methamphetamine abuse, its condemnation of unjustifiable and reprehensible policies, such as President Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines, will far more soundly resonate in East Asia, better stimulating local publics to demand accountability and respect for rule of law from their leaders.

• Neil Jerome Morales, “Philippines Blames IS-linked Abu Sayyaf for Bomb in Duterte’s Davao,” Reuters , September 2, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-blast-idUSKCN11824W?il=0.
• Rishi Iyengar, “The Killing Time: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs,” Time , August 24, 2016, http://time.com/4462352/rodrigo-duterte-drug-war-drugs-philippines-killing/.
• Jim Gomez, “Philippine President-Elect Urges Public to Kill Drug Dealers,” The Associated Press, June 5, 2016, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/58fc2315d488426ca2512fc9fc8d6427/philippine-president-elect-urges-public-kill-drug-dealers.
• Manuel Mogato and Clare Baldwin, “Special Report: Police Describe Kill Rewards, Staged Crime Scenes in Duterte’s Drug War,” Reuters , April 18, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-police-specialrep-idUSKBN17K1F4.
• Clare Baldwin , Andrew R.C. Marshall and Damir Sagolj , “Police Rack Up an Almost Perfectly Deadly Record in Philippine Drug War,” Reuters , http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/philippines-duterte-police/.
• See, for example, Human Rights Watch, “Philippines: Police Deceit in ‘Drug War’ Killings,” March 2, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/03/02/philippines-police-deceit-drug-war-killings ; and Amnesty International, “Philippines: The Police’s Murderous War on the Poor,” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/01/philippines-the-police-murderous-war-on-the-poor/.
• Reuters , April 18, 2017.
• Aurora Almendral, “The General Running Duterte’s Antidrug War,” The New York Times , June 2, 2017.
• “A Harvest of Lead,” The Economist , August 13, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21704793-rodrigo-duterte-living-up-his-promise-fight-crime-shooting-first-and-asking-questions.
• Reuters, April 18, 2017.
• Vanda Felbab-Brown and Harold Trinkunas, “UNGASS 2016 in Comparative Perspective: Improving the Prospects for Success,” The Brookings Institution, April 29, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/FelbabBrown-TrinkunasUNGASS-2016-final-2.pdf?la=en.
• See, for example, Paula Miraglia, “Drugs and Drug Trafficking in Brazil: Trends and Policies,” The Brookings Institution, April 29, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/Miraglia–Brazil-final.pdf?la=en .
• James Windle, “Drugs and Drug Policy in Thailand,” Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives and UNGASS 2016, The Brookings Institution, April 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/WindleThailand-final.pdf?la=en .
• James Windle, “Drugs and Drug Policy in Vietnam,” Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives and UNGASS 2016, The Brookings Institution, April 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/WindleVietnam-final.pdf.
• Aurora Almendral, “As H.I.V. Soars in the Philippines, Conservatives Kill School Condom Plan,” The New York Times , February 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/asia/as-hiv-soars-in-philippines-conservatives-kill-school-condom-plan.html?_r=0.
• Nicole Curato, “In the Philippines, All the President’s People,” The New York Times , May 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/opinion/philippines-rodrigo-duterte.html.

Foreign Policy

Southeast Asia

Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology

August 27, 2021

March 26, 2019

October 22, 2017

Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — War on Drugs — Ending The War On Drugs In America

Ending The War on Drugs in America

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The America’s Unjust Drug War Essay

Let us start with the most general and strongest thesis: “drugs are awful,” which could be reformulated as “drugs cause harm.” In his essay “Unjust Drug War,” Huemer challenges this thesis in terms of prohibiting drugs in terms of harm to humans (Huemer, b). If we believe that the state should prohibit those phenomena and processes that harm a person, then many situations that are legalized fall under this thesis. An interesting argument in support of drug legalization here is that drugs should be equated with alcohol. The US experience in banning alcohol in the first half of the 20th century has led nowhere, and, ultimately, any other drug will have to be allowed. Of course, alcohol is harmful, like other drugs, at least “light” ones, but unlike any drug, alcohol has taken root in society more than a century ago. History knows many attempts to eradicate alcohol, which later ended in failure.

In addition, the thought experiment shows the ethical inadmissibility of such a prohibition from the point of view of moral philosophy. Imagine that a person announces to everyone that no one in their village now has the right to use substances that she has identified as harmful. She then goes around the village and kidnaps those who use these substances, and then she locks them in cages for years. This behavior of mine will immediately seem unacceptable. However, offhand, her behavior is similar to the authorities’ policy related to the prohibition of drugs. This establishes the presumption of inadmissibility of the prohibition of narcotic drugs. Please note that her kidnapping will not be acceptable if she shows convincingly that these substances are indeed harmful for her peers. They will also not be acceptable if she demonstrates how some of them became unemployed. Since, at first glance, it is evident that such reasons are not sufficient to justify her actions, the government does not get the right to do the same.

Thus, drug prohibition is unjustified government interference with individual freedom of choice. A person is free to independently decide what and how to do, what to use, and in what amounts. “Light” drugs are no more harmful to human health than alcohol or tobacco, which are legal and widely used and regulated by the government, which uses the sale of alcohol and tobacco products to replenish the state budget by introducing a system of excise taxes.

The other side of the issue is harm to other people from certain actions. The argument outlined earlier also applies to this position. There are many other activities that lead or could potentially lead to harm to others and are not regulated by the government—for example, psychological abuse and manipulation. Thus, the argument for banning drugs because of harm to others is logically flawed. At the same time, crime and violence are increasing significantly due to the illegal sale and purchase of drugs. Legalization would logically terminate the need for such criminal behavior, transferring the entire shadow business to the legal field while discarding the need to commit crimes.

On the other hand, supporters of the prohibition of drugs appeal to the destruction of a person from a moral standpoint. As Huemer summarizes this position, “Democracies can flourish only when their citizens value their freedom and embrace personal responsibility. Drug use erodes the individual’s capacity to pursue both ideals. It diminishes the individual’s capacity to operate effectively in many of life’s spheres — as a student, a parent, a spouse, an employee — even as a coworker or fellow motorist” (Humer, b, para. 19). Here, Humer debates from the standpoint of moral philosophy and introduces the concept of “moral intuition.” He believes that moral intuition belongs to the intellectual vision before argumentation and may be in conflict with the generally accepted understanding of morality, which has come to us as a result of the development of social culture, religion, and ideology. Intuition can become distorted or cease to be felt altogether under the influence of ideological, religious, and cultural processing (Huemer, a). However nevertheless, moral intuition, according to Humer, is as reliable a tool for cognizing moral truth as a sensory perception for cognizing the physical world. In this sense, his position is rooted in the Kantian premise of human morality, preceding any other action. Thus, morality and moral intuition cannot be distorted by the subsequent use of narcotic substances since this logically contradicts the essence of morality.

Finally, my point of view on this issue is similar to that of Michael Huemer. Despite all the problems associated with drug use, their criminalization is not logically and ethically justified. Caring for citizens is selective and similar to parental prohibitions on a child. Obviously, parents forbid, say, smoking their child insofar as they care about them and wish for the best. However, such harsh prohibitions often lead to even worse child behavior outside the family.

Works Cited

Huemer, Michael, a. Ethical intuitionism . Springer, 2007.

Huemer, Michael, b. “America’s unjust drug war.” The New Prohibition (2004): 133-44.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 12). The America’s Unjust Drug War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-americas-unjust-drug-war/

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1. IvyPanda . "The America’s Unjust Drug War." July 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-americas-unjust-drug-war/.

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IvyPanda . "The America’s Unjust Drug War." July 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-americas-unjust-drug-war/.

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Is the war on drugs back on? | The Excerpt podcast

On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: It's been just over 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Since then, drug policy at the state level has mostly been progressing toward legalization, embracing liberal attitudes that aim to destigmatize drug use. But that experiment may soon be drawing to a close. In the wake of surging overdose deaths, Oregon has recently moved to recriminalize drug use and possession. Are we back to square one? Kassandra Frederique, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, joins The Excerpt to argue that policy makers simply didn't put the right safeguards in place.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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President George H. W. Bush:

All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. Drugs have strained our faith in our system of justice. Our courts, our prisons, our legal system are stretched to the breaking point. The social costs of drugs are mounting. In short, drugs are sapping our strength as a nation.

Dana Taylor:

That was then President George HW Bush speaking in his first televised address from the Oval Office back on September 5th, 1989. Fast-forward 35 years, and a lot has changed with regards to how we view drug use, but have we really evolved our policy since then? Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. In 2020, voters in Oregon approved Measure 110, making it the first state in the US to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs.

Today, the Oregon legislature has just passed a bill to reinstate criminal penalties for drug possession. Does the demise of Measure 110 signal a return to America's war on drugs? Here to discuss Oregon's Measure 110 and drug decriminalization is Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the US, working to end the drug war. Thanks for joining me, Kassandra.

 Kassandra Frederique:

Thank you so much for having me, Dana.

Measure 110, also known as the DATRA, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, was a significant win for drug decriminalization advocates. How did the drug policy shift in Oregon following its passage?

When Measure 110 passed, the point of it was to end the horrors of criminalization. So stopping the arresting of people with drug possession, because people recognized that arresting people for drug possession was not actually going to get people connected to the resources that they had or the resources that they needed. So when the measure passed, I think it had a rocky start in implementation, but the data and the research has shown that Measure 110 prevented tens of thousands of Oregonians from being shuttled into a horrific criminal legal system.

What we found, despite the rocky start of implementation that was created by the Oregonian bureaucracy, is that people did get connected to care. So in the first six months of implementation, Measure 110 increased services by 44%. It also improved the quality of care with 100% increase of people actually gaining access to everything from peer support to harm reduction services. And this includes 143% increase in people accessing substance use disorder treatment, as well as 296% increase in people accessing housing services, which was one of the biggest issues that people struggled with while Measure 110 was being implemented.

Your organization, the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, has said that Measure 110 has been scapegoated by drug war advocates. How so?

So, so much of what Oregonians express frustration around were the conditions on the street. There was chronic homelessness that was exploding. There was a density population of unsheltered individuals. There was a lot of public drug use. And people made the connection to Measure 110, despite the fact that a lot of the issues and conditions that people were witnessing on the street and experiencing were a result of decades of inaction around housing.

It was about the fact that in the larger country, fentanyl, which is a more fast-acting opioid, has just made it to the West Coast, including Oregon, and that, in general, people's ability to get access to support has long been hindered by the lack of infrastructure in Oregon. And when I say the lack of infrastructure of support, Measure 110's purpose was to supplement the Oregon infrastructure.

However, what we learned was that decades of divestment in that infrastructure, as well as the Oregon Health Authority not listening to advocates about ways to improve the citation process, the ways that they needed to increase training for law enforcement about what Measure 110 did and what it didn't do, made it really difficult and confusing for Oregonians to actually see what was in front of them.

According to the CDC, in the 12 months ending January of 2020, there were 621 overdose deaths reported in Oregon. Then in the 12 months ending January of 2023, there were 1,431 overdose deaths reported, a significant increase. Is it fair to tie that increase to the passage of Measure 110?

Absolutely not. And in fact, it's not just advocates that are saying that. RTI actually came out with a study, and they're not the only ones, that they looked at the same period. What they found was that there was not a shred of evidence that showed that Measure 110 actually increased crime, increased homelessness, or increase the overdose rate.

What people are attributing that astronomical increase to is the introduction of fentanyl into the West Coast drug supply. And we know this to be true because the pattern of growth that Oregon is experiencing is similar to the pattern of growth that we saw on the East Coast, in places like New York and Massachusetts, when fentanyl entered its drug supply. And so part of the thing that it's important to disentangle is that Measure 110 was coming into implementation at the same time that the Oregon drug supply was changing.

You mentioned RTI. Who is RTI?

RTI is a research institution that held a conference a few months ago that looked at all the issues around implementation. They're also one of the academic institutions that is running an evaluation on Measure 110, about what worked and what didn't work.

Measure 110 was also enacted, as you've said, to address concerns related to incarceration rates for people of color. What kind of movement have you seen there?

So here, one of the things that the Oregon officials that focus on criminal justice statistics have said is that the recriminalization of drug possession will increase the amount of Oregonians of color that are incarcerated, or arrested, or engaged by the criminal legal system. And so this is something that continues to be an area of concern for us because part of the impetus for pushing the end of criminalization or ending the arrest was because of the historic disproportionate law enforcement engagement in communities of color, specifically that of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Oregonians.

I know that funding from marijuana tax revenue was allocated to expand access to addiction treatment services. Have any of those programs been successful?

You're seeing a 296% increase in people getting access to housing services. That would not have occurred outside of Measure 110. The money that people are able to put into these services have been really important. And I think you know that because when the conversation of recriminalization came up, everyone, all the elected officials said that that funding has to remain in place.

Kassandra, is there any argument that substance abuse became more visible in Oregon, particularly in the Portland area, after Measure 110 passed?

I think this is a great conversation. Public drug use happens because people usually don't have access to shelter or a home. Most people who use drugs have homes and don't use drugs in the street, and most people who are unhoused don't use drugs. There is a growing population of people who are unhoused, who are using drugs in the street, and the preeminent factor in that public drug use is that they don't have a home. And so I think if you're looking at the history of how homelessness rose in this time because of the eviction laws that were passed, because of the COVID eviction moratorium protections that were lifted during this time, you'll see that the unsheltered population rose, and those that are struggling and using drugs to cope with being unsheltered became more public and more visible. And those issues can't be attributed to Measure 110. They're attributed to the longstanding issues in Oregon around homelessness.

I want to turn now to the legalization of drugs versus the decriminalization was passed with Measure 110. You've advocated for legalization. What do you see as the upside of that?

I think in the moment that we're in right now, where our drug supply is continuously changing with more fast acting drugs, more powerful drugs, drugs that we have less scientific research around, it makes it more difficult for us to actually support people when the drug supply is shifting and shifting faster than we had in past years. And so, the conversation around the regulation of drugs is really about stabilizing the drug supply so that we can create the supports for people who use drugs.

In 1970, President Nixon signed the CSA, the Controlled Substances Act, into law. Was the signing of that act the beginning of the war on drugs.

The signing of the CSA was not the beginning of the war on drugs. Unfortunately, the war on drugs globally has been going on for a very long time. And in the United States, the first evidence of it here is in the late 1800s in California, where we passed the first drug laws, in part as a political tool to control Chinese migrants who had been working on the railroad. And so, we have had a long-standing strategy around drug criminalization and drug prohibition that has honestly set up the situation that we're in today.

What do you see as the specific failures of the war on drugs?

The war on drugs, as we see it, has really focused on criminalization. And that criminalization is not just something that we see in our criminal legal system. That strategy of criminalization, of surveillance, of stigma has infiltrated all our systems, and it's made it more difficult for us to give access to support for people who need it. It's also heavily relied on the legal system, which has incurred incredible amounts of incarceration, criminalization, deportation.

It's also really ripped apart families. People often don't speak to the ways that children are taken away from their parents, forcing other loved ones to be caretakers, and the disruption that is happening in the psychic impacts of what that looks like. And I think most urgently what we're seeing now is that our strategy of prohibition has made the drug supply more toxic and made it more difficult to manage, which has made it even more difficult for us to create the healthcare infrastructure to support people who are struggling with their use.

The Drug Policy Alliance has spent the last two decades in the pursuit of alternatives to criminalization. How do we stem the tide on the abuse of drugs like fentanyl?

Part of the things that we really need to focus on is what are the supports that are necessary for people? How are we giving people access to public education about fentanyl? How are we giving public education about all drugs? How we're giving public education around testing materials, giving people the opportunity to have testing materials so that they can know what is in their drug supply before they use them. How are we increasing access to different kinds of addiction services? So not just inpatient and outpatient treatment, as people traditionally have known. But what are the additional supports that can lead to someone stabilizing their use? And I think we have to look at our healthcare system, which has also really been impacted.

Kassandra, as you know, there are people who are opposed to Measure 110 and have been since the beginning. What do you see as the path forward that will benefit all of the communities that are grappling with drug addiction and the people living there?

I think we have to remind people that criminalization is not an appropriate way to deal with drug use. We know that because overdose has gone up in the hundredfold inside jails and prisons. We know that because when people come out of a jail in prison, they are 27 times more likely than the general public to have an overdose. People are frustrated, and I can appreciate that. I'm frustrated as well. My family members are frustrated with that as well. I'm living in the same wall that everyone else is, I'm experiencing the same wall that everyone else is, and I just truly believe that criminalization is not a pathway forward for us to get the things that we say that we want.

Kassandra, thank you for being on The Excerpt.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is the war on drugs back on? | The Excerpt podcast

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The Protesters and the President

Over the past week, thousands of students protesting the war in gaza have been arrested..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Free, free, Palestine!

Free, free Palestine!

Free, free, free Palestine!

Over the past week, what had begun as a smattering of pro-Palestinian protests on America’s college campuses exploded into a nationwide movement —

United, we’ll never be defeated!

— as students at dozens of universities held demonstrations, set up encampments, and at times seized academic buildings.

[PROTESTERS CLAMORING]:

response, administrators at many of those colleges decided to crack down —

Do not throw things at our officers. We will use chemical munitions that include gas.

— calling in local police to carry out mass detentions and arrests. From Arizona State —

In the name of the state of Arizona, I declare this gathering to be a violation of —

— to the University of Georgia —

— to City College of New York.

[PROTESTERS CHANTING, “BACK OFF”]:

As of Thursday, police had arrested 2,000 students on more than 40 campuses. A situation so startling that President Biden could no longer ignore it.

Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.

Today, my colleagues Jonathan Wolfe and Peter Baker on a history-making week. It’s Friday, May 3.

Jonathan, as this tumultuous week on college campuses comes to an end, it feels like the most extraordinary scenes played out on the campus of the University of California Los Angeles, where you have been reporting. What is the story of how that protest started and ultimately became so explosive?

So late last week, pro-Palestinian protesters set up an encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles.

From the river to the sea!

Palestine will be free!

Palestine —

It was right in front of Royce Hall, which I don’t know if you are familiar with UCLA, but it’s a very famous, red brick building. It’s on all the brochures. And there was two things that stood out about this encampment. And the first thing was that they barricaded the encampment.

The encampment, complete with tents and barricades, has been set up in the middle of the Westwood campus. The protesters demand —

They have metal grates. They had wooden pallets. And they separated themselves from the campus.

This is kind of interesting. There are controlling access, as we’ve been talking about. They are trying to control who is allowed in, who is allowed out.

They sort of policed the area. So they only would let people that were part of their community, they said, inside.

I’m a UCLA student. I deserve to go here. We paid tuition. This is our school. And they’re not letting me walk in. Why can’t I go? Will you let me go in?

We’re not engaging with that.

Then you can move. Will you move?

And the second thing that stood out about this camp was that it immediately attracted pro-Israel counterprotesters.

And what did the leadership of UCLA say about all of this, the encampment and these counterprotesters?

So the University of California’s approach was pretty unique. They had a really hands-off approach. And they allowed the pro-Palestinian protesters to set up an encampment. They allowed the counterprotesters to happen. I mean, this is a public university, so anyone who wants to can just enter the campus.

So when do things start to escalate?

So there were definitely fights and scuffles through the weekend. But a turning point was really Sunday —

[SINGING IN HEBREW]:

— when this group called the Israeli American Council, they’re a nonprofit organization, organized a rally on campus. The Israeli American Council has really been against these pro-Palestinian protests. They say that they’re antisemitic. So this nonprofit group sets up a stage with a screen really just a few yards from the pro-Palestinian encampment.

We are grateful that this past Friday, the University of California, stated that they will continue to oppose any calls for boycott and divestment from Israel!

[PROTESTERS CHEERING]

And they host speakers and they held prayers.

Jewish students, you’re not alone! Oh, you’re not alone! We are right here with you! And we’re right here with you in until —

[WORDLESS SINGING]:

And then lots of other people start showing up. And the proximity between protesters and counterprotesters and even some agitators, makes it really clear that something was about to happen.

And what was that? What ended up happening?

On Monday night, a group of about 60 counterprotesters tried to breach the encampment there. And the campus police had to break it up. And things escalated again on Tuesday.

They stormed the barricades and it’s a complete riot.

[PROTESTER SHOUTING]:

Put it down! Put it down! Put it down!

I went to report on what happened just a few hours after it ended.

And I spoke to a lot of protesters. And I met one demonstrator, Marie.

Yeah, my first name is Marie. M-A-R-I-E. Last name, Salem.

And Marie described what happened.

So can you just tell me a little bit about what happened last night?

Last night, we were approached by over a hundred counterprotesters who were very mobilized and ready to break into camp. They proceeded to try to breach our barricades extremely violently.

Marie said it started getting out of hand when counterprotesters started setting off fireworks towards the camp.

They had bear spray. They had Mace. They were throwing wood and spears. Throwing water bottles, continuing fireworks.

So she said that they were terrified. It was just all hands on deck. Everyone was guarding the barricades.

Every time someone experienced the bear spray or Mace or was hit and bleeding, we had some medics in the front line. And then we had people —

And they said that they were just trying to take care of people who were injured.

I mean, at any given moment, there was 5 to 10 people being treated.

So what she described to me sounded more like a battlefield than a college campus.

And it was just a complete terror and complete abandonment of the university, as we also watched private security watch this the entire time on the stairs. And some LAPD were stationed about a football field length back from these counterprotesters, and did not make a single arrest, did not attempt to stop any violence, did not attempt to get in between the two groups. No attempt.

I should say, I spoke to a state authorities and eyewitnesses and they confirmed Marie’s account about what happened that night, both in terms of the violence that took place at the encampment and how law enforcement responded. So in the end, people ended up fighting for hours before the police intervened.

[SOMBER MUSIC]

So in her mind, UCLA’s hands-off approach, which seemed to have prevailed throughout this entire period, ends up being way too hands off in a moment when students were in jeopardy.

That’s right. And so at this point, the protesters in the encampment started preparing for two possibilities. One was that this group of counterprotesters would return and attack them. And the second one was that the police would come and try to break up this encampment.

So they started building up the barricades. They start reinforcing them with wood. And during the day, hundreds of people came and brought them supplies. They brought food.

They brought helmets, goggles, earplugs, saline solution, all sorts of things these people could use to defend themselves. And so they’re really getting ready to burrow in. And in the end, it was the police who came.

[PROTESTERS SHOUTING]:

So Wednesday at 7:00 PM, they made an announcement on top of Royce Hall, which overlooks the encampment —

— administrative criminal actions up to and including arrest. Please leave the area immediately.

And they told people in the encampment that they needed to leave or face arrest.

[DRUM BEATING]: [PROTESTERS CHANTING]

And so as night falls, they put on all this gear that they’ve been collecting, the goggles, the masks and the earplugs, and they wait for the police.

[DRUM BEATING]:

And so the police arrive and station themselves right in front of the encampment. And then at a certain point, they storm the back stairs of the encampment.

[PROTESTERS CHANTING]:

And this is the stairs that the protesters have been using to enter and exit the camp. And they set up a line. And the protesters do this really surprising thing.

The people united!

They open up umbrellas. They have these strobe lights. And they’re flashing them at the police, who just slowly back out of the camp.

[PROTESTERS CHEERING]:

And so at this point, they’re feeling really great. They’re like, we did it. We pushed them out of their camp. And when the cops try to push again on those same set of stairs —

[PROTESTER SHOUTS]:

Hold your ground!

— the protesters organized themselves with all these shields that they had built earlier. And they go and confront them. And so there’s this moment where the police are trying to push up the stairs. And the protesters are literally pushing them back.

Push them back! Push them back!

Push them back!

And at a certain point, dozens of the police officers who were there, basically just turn around and leave.

So how does this eventually come to an end?

So at a certain point, the police push in again. Most of the conflict is centered at the front of these barricades. And the police just start tearing them apart.

[METAL CLANGING]

[CLAMORING]

They removed the front barricade. And in its place is this group of protesters who have linked arms and they’re hanging on to each other. And the police are trying to pull protesters one by one away from this group.

He’s just a student! Back off!

But they’re having a really hard time because there’s so many protesters. And they’re all just hanging on to each other.

We’re moving back now.

So at a certain point, one of the police officers started firing something into the crowd. We don’t exactly know what it was. But it really spooked the protesters.

Stop shooting at kids! Fuck you! Fuck them!

They started falling back. Everyone was really scared. The protesters were yelling, don’t shoot us. And at that point, the police just stormed the camp.

Get back. Get back.

Back up now!

And so after about four hours of this, the police pushed the protesters out of the encampment. They had arrested about 200 protesters. And this was finally over.

And I’m just curious, Jonathan, because you’re standing right there, you are bearing witness to this all, what you were thinking, what your impressions of this were.

I mean, I was stunned. These are mostly teenagers. This is a college campus, an institution of higher learning. And what I saw in front of me looked like a war zone.

[TENSE MUSIC]

The massive barricade, the police coming in with riot gear, and all this violence was happening in front of these red brick buildings that are famous for symbolizing a really open college campus. And everything about it was just totally surreal.

Well, Jonathan, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Peter, around 10:00 AM on Thursday morning as the smoke is literally still clearing at the University of California Los Angeles, you get word that President Biden is going to speak.

Right, exactly. It wasn’t on his public schedule. He was about to head to Andrews Air Force base in order to take a trip. And then suddenly, we got the notice that he was going to be addressing the cameras in the Roosevelt Room.

They didn’t tell us what he was going to talk about. But it was pretty clear, I think. Everybody understood that it was going to be about these campus protests, about the growing violence and the clashes with police, and the arrests that the entire country had been watching on TV every night for the past week, and I think that we were watching just that morning with UCLA. And it reached the point where he just had to say something.

And why, in his estimation and those of his advisors, was this the moment that Biden had to say something?

Well, it kind of reached a boiling point. It kind of reached the impression of a national crisis. And you expect to hear your president address it in this kind of a moment, particularly because it’s about his own policy. His policy toward Israel is at the heart of these protests. And he was getting a lot of grief. He was getting a lot of grief from Republicans who were chiding him for not speaking out personally. He hadn’t said anything in about 10 days.

He’s getting a lot of pressure from Democrats, too, who wanted him to come out and be more forceful. It wasn’t enough, in their view, to leave it to his spokespeople to say something. Moderate Democrats felt he needed to come out and take some leadership on this.

And so at the appointed moment, Peter, what does Biden actually say in the Roosevelt Room of the White House?

Good morning.

Before I head to North Carolina, I wanted to speak for a few moments about what’s going on, on our college campuses here.

Well, it comes in the Roosevelt Room and he talks to the camera. And he talks about the two clashing imperatives of American principle.

The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.

One is freedom of speech. The other is the rule of law.

In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues. But, but, neither are we a lawless country.

In other words, what he’s saying is, yes, I support the right of these protesters to come out and object to even my own policy, in effect, is what he’s saying. But it shouldn’t trail into violence.

Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses —

It shouldn’t trail into taking over buildings and obstructing students from going to class or canceling their graduations.

Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.

And he leans very heavily into this idea that what he’s seeing these days goes beyond the line.

I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions. In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes.

It has crossed into harassment and expressions of hate in a way that goes against the national character.

As president, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong and standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you, the American people, and my obligation to the Constitution. Thank you very much.

Right, as I watched the speech, I heard his overriding message to basically be, I, the president of the United States, am drawing a line. These protests and counterprotests, the seizing and defacing of campus buildings, class disruption, all of it, name calling, it’s getting out of hand. That there’s a right way to do this. And what I’m seeing is the wrong way to do it and it has to stop.

That’s exactly right. And as he’s wrapping up, reporters, of course, ask questions. And the first question is —

Mr. President, have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?

— will this change your policy toward the war in Gaza? Which, of course, is exactly what the protesters want. That’s the point.

And he basically says —

— no. Just one word, no.

Right. And that felt kind of important, as brief and fleeting as it was, because at the end of the day, what he’s saying to these protesters is, I’m not going to do what you want. And basically, your protests are never going to work. I’m not going to change the US’s involvement in this war.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. He is saying, I’m not going to be swayed by angry people in the streets. I’m going to do what I think is right when it comes to foreign policy. Now, what he thinks is that they’re not giving him enough credit for trying to achieve what they want, which is an end of the war.

He has been pressuring Israel and Hamas to come to a deal for a ceasefire that will, hopefully, in his view, would then lead to a more enduring end of hostilities. But, of course, this deal hasn’t gone anywhere. Hamas, in particular, seems to be resisting it. And so the president is left with a policy of arming Israel without having found a way yet to stop the war.

Right. I wonder, though, Peter, if we’re being honest, don’t these protests, despite what Biden is saying there, inevitably exert a kind of power over him? Becoming one of many pressures, but a pressure nonetheless that does influence how he thinks about these moments. I mean, here he is at the White House devoting an entire conversation to the nation to these campus protests.

Well, look, he knows this feeds into the political environment in which he’s running for re-election, in which he basically has people who otherwise might be his supporters on the left disenchanted with him. And he knows that there’s a cost to be paid. And that certainly, obviously, is in his head as he’s thinking about what to do.

But I think his view of the war is changing by the day for all sorts of reasons. And most of them having to do with realities on the ground. He has decided that Israel has gone far enough, if not too far, in the way it has conducted this operation in Gaza.

He is upset about the humanitarian crisis there. And he’s looking for a way to wrap all this up into a move that would move to peacemaking, beginning to get the region to a different stage, maybe have a deal with the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for some sort of a two-state solution that would eventually resolve the Palestinian issue at its core.

So I think it’s probably fair to say that the protests won’t move him in an immediate kind of sense. But they obviously play into the larger zeitgeist of the moment. And I also think it’s important to know who Joe Biden is at heart.

Explain that.

He’s not drawn to activism. He was around in 1968, the last time we saw this major conflagration at Columbia University, for instance. At the time, Joe Biden was a law student in Syracuse, about 250 miles away. And he was an institutionalist even then.

He was just focused on his studies. He was about to graduate. He was thinking about the law career. And he didn’t really have much of an affinity, I think, for his fellow students of that era, for their activist way of looking at things.

He tells a story in his memoir about walking down a street in Syracuse one day to go to the pizza shop with some friends. And they walk by the administration building. And they see people hanging out of the windows. They’re hanging SDS banners. That’s the Students for a Democratic Society, which was one of the big activist groups of the era.

And he says, they were taking over the building. And we looked up and said, look at those assholes. That’s how far apart from the antiwar movement I was. That’s him writing in his memoir.

So to a young Joe Biden, those who devote their time and their energy to protesting the war are, I don’t need to repeat the word twice, but they’re losers. They’re not worth his time.

Well, I think it’s the tactics they’re using more than the goals that he disagreed with. He would tell you he disagreed with the Vietnam War. He was for civil rights. But he thought that taking over a building was performative, was all about getting attention, and that there was a better way, in his view, to do it.

He was somebody who wanted to work inside the system. He said in an interview quite a few years back, he says, look, I was wearing sports coats in that era. He saw himself becoming part of the system, not somebody trying to tear it down.

And so how should we think about that Joe Biden, when we think about this Joe Biden? I mean, the Joe Biden who, as a young man, looked upon antiwar protesters with disdain and the one who is now president and his very own policies have inspired such ferocious campus protests?

Yeah, that Joe Biden, the 1968 Joe Biden, he could just throw on a sports coat, go to the pizza shop with his friends, make fun of the activists and call them names, and then that’s it. They didn’t have to affect his life. But that’s not what 2024 Joe Biden can do.

Now, wherever he goes, he’s dogged by this. He goes to speeches and people are shouting at him, Genocide Joe! Genocide Joe! He is the target of the same kind of a movement that he disdained in 1968. And so as much as he would like to ignore it or move on or focus on other things, I think this has become a defining image of his year and one of the defining images, perhaps, of his presidency. And 2024 Joe Biden can’t simply ignore it.

Well, Peter, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

Here’s what else you need to know today. During testimony on Thursday in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, jurors heard a recording secretly made by Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, in which Trump discusses a deal to buy a woman’s silence. In the recording, Trump asks Cohen about how one payment made by Trump to a woman named Karen McDougal would be financed. The recording could complicate efforts by Trump’s lawyers to distance him from the hush money deals at the center of the trial.

A final thing to know, tomorrow morning, we’ll be sending you the latest episode from our colleagues over at “The Interview.” This week, David Marchese talks with comedy star Marlon Wayans about his new stand-up special.

It’s a high that you get when you don’t know if this joke that I’m about to say is going to offend everybody. Are they going to walk out? Are they going to boo me? Are they going to hate this. And then you tell it, and everybody cracks up and you’re like, woo.

Today’s episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Luke Vander Ploeg, Alexandra Leigh Young, Nina Feldman, and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Michael Benoist. It contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

• May 10, 2024   •   27:42 Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand
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• May 8, 2024   •   28:28 A Plan to Remake the Middle East
• May 7, 2024   •   27:43 How Changing Ocean Temperatures Could Upend Life on Earth
• May 6, 2024   •   29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot
• May 3, 2024   •   25:33 The Protesters and the President
• May 2, 2024   •   29:13 Biden Loosens Up on Weed
• May 1, 2024   •   35:16 The New Abortion Fight Before the Supreme Court
• April 30, 2024   •   27:40 The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok
• April 29, 2024   •   47:53 Trump 2.0: What a Second Trump Presidency Would Bring
• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jonathan Wolfe and Peter Baker

Produced by Diana Nguyen ,  Luke Vander Ploeg ,  Alexandra Leigh Young ,  Nina Feldman and Carlos Prieto

Edited by Lisa Chow and Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Warning: this episode contains strong language.

Over the past week, students at dozens of universities held demonstrations, set up encampments and, at times, seized academic buildings. In response, administrators at many of those colleges decided to crack down and called in the local police to detain and arrest demonstrators.

As of Thursday, the police had arrested 2,000 people across more than 40 campuses, a situation so startling that President Biden could no longer ignore it.

Jonathan Wolfe, who has been covering the student protests for The Times, and Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, discuss the history-making week.

On today’s episode

Jonathan Wolfe , a senior staff editor on the newsletters team at The New York Times.

Peter Baker , the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times covering President Biden and his administration.

Background reading

As crews cleared the remnants of an encampment at U.C.L.A., students and faculty members wondered how the university could have handled protests over the war in Gaza so badly .

Biden denounced violence on campus , breaking his silence after a rash of arrests.

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The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

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Jonathan Wolfe is a senior staff editor on the newsletters team at The Times. More about Jonathan Wolfe

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

Luke Vander Ploeg is a senior producer on “The Daily” and a reporter for the National Desk covering the Midwest. More about Luke Vander Ploeg

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