CONNOR HOFFMAN
Assistant News Editor
America declared war on drugs in 1970 with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Ever since that fateful date, we’ve been embroiled in one of our country’s biggest failures in its history.
The War on Drugs started during the Richard Nixon administration in the 1970s.
In June 1971, Nixon declared a war on drugs and identified drug abuse as “public enemy No. 1.” The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was created in 1973.
The 1980s also led to the strengthening of the War on Drugs. Nancy Reagan would start her “Just Say No” campaign to try to curb drug use. The crack cocaine epidemic would hit the country hard during this decade.
This war would continue through the 1990s. The 2000s brought us efforts by many to create a more sensible approach to the war.
President Barack Obama has been relatively lax on his drug policy. He has chosen to let states like Colorado and Washington legalize recreational marijuana. The federal government has the ability to overrule these recreational marijuana laws thanks to the CSA and the Supremacy Clause. Obama has not decided to enforce this, but rather to let the states decide how they want to treat marijuana.
The cost of this war was already at $15 billion by 2010, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
In order to further wage this war, the DEA has grown quite a lot. The DEA had 11,055 employees and a budget of $2 billion for the 2014 fiscal year, according to its website.
The War on Drugs has largely been a failure. For the last few decades, the government has decided to focus its energy on the drug supply rather than the demand.
If America had focused on curbing demand like other countries have, this country might have seriously cut into drug use.
The Netherlands and Amsterdam are a perfect example of how to do just that. It’s legalized marijuana because officials found that marijuana users would try harder drugs from their marijuana dealers, according to Open Society Foundations.
Prevention is one main technique that this country should focus on. A survey by the Substance Abuse Prevention Programs found that only one in eight youths aged 12 to 17 reported use of a drug prevention program. This number must seriously go up. America must also dedicate its efforts towards rehabilitation and drug addiction treatment rather than punishment.
This War on Drugs has led America to have one of the most incarcerated populations in the world, increasing this country’s incarcerated population from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010.
There’s even been recent reports released that the War on Drugs was created as a front to advance racist values.
“You understand what I’m 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,” said Nixon’s Domestic Policy Chief, John Ehrlichman, in a recent CNN article.
Marijuana criminalization is perhaps the worst part of this entire war. Marijuana has so much potential for this country and could bring in literally billions of dollars to our states to spend on education and other public projects.
Colorado’s a prime example of how drug legalization should work. It brought in $70 million in tax revenue from a sales tax on marijuana, according to TIME. This money is designed to go towards the state’s education funds.
This country must stop the War on Drugs. It’s a very complicated issue that cannot be solved with just one solution, which is why we need to stop or refocus this war to win in the long run.