What In the 1970s President Nixon launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the United States. He said: “If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative.” Following this (particularly in the Reagan presidency) was an escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. The drug war has led to unintended consequences that have increased violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration. Over the past 4 decades the US has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs. But the war has in some aspects failed to produce the intended results: even though made substances less accessible, drug use remains a very serious problem in the US. It also led to sever negative consequences, including the big strain on America’s criminal justice system and the proliferation of drug related violence around the world. America has a long history of trying to control drug use, laws passed in the early 20th century attempted to restrict drug production and sales. A large amount of this history is racially tinged, and possibly as a result, the war on the drugs hit minority communities the hardest. In response to the consequences, many drug policy experts and historians have called for reforms including: a larger focus on rehabilitation, the decriminalization of some currently illicit substances, and in some cases, even the legalization of all 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. The spending estimates don't account for the loss of potential taxes on currently illegal substances. According to the 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.
Is it working? The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific goal is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade, making drugs rarer and more expensive, and as a result making drug habits in the US unaffordable. Some data shows drugs getting cheaper, but drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making substances less accessible. The prices of most drugs have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin was down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine was 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. 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 crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013. On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. 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. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, possibly 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 solid 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 ways of mass production and distribution.
Enforcement Domestically: The federal government supplies local and state police governments 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. Some of the funding encourages 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. Internationally: The US regularly aids other countries in efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the 2000s provided military aid and training to Colombia to help the 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 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 people up for drug trafficking and 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."
US Criminal Justice System
The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from mass 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 were one of the largest contributors to mass incarceration.
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 have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the goal of reducing their incarcerated population.
Civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement 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' 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. The federal government also 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 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 money 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.
Racism In the US, the war on drugs mostly impacts minority, particularly black, communities. 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. Another 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 pharmacologically similar to crack, is 500 grams. As for broader racial disparities, federal programs that encourage local and state police departments to crack down on drugs may create incentives to go after minority communities. Some federal grants, for example, previously required police to make more drug arrests in order to obtain more funding for anti-drug efforts. Minority communities are easier for police departments to target because they tend to sell in the open, such as public street corners, and have less political and financial power than white Americans. In Chicago 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.
The disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates also have detrimental effects on minority communities. A 2014 study published in 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 path known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
How the drug war has contributed to violence worldwide. The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that pays for other, more violent, activities. This market supplies so much profit to drug trafficking organizations that they can rival developing countries' weak governments. In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have used their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain control over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of cartels, and as many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have also gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case. Even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this wouldn't necessarily reduce drug war violence on a global scale. Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, 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 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 in a major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants. 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 few decades it happened in Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.
Reform
The case for rehabilitation and 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. Drug courts, which even some conservatives support, are an example of the rehabilitation-focused approach. Instead of putting drug offenders into jail or prison, these courts send them to rehabilitation programs that focus on treating addiction as a medical, not criminal, problem. (Although, The Global Commission on Drug Policy 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 further steps toward rehabilitation, some of which acknowledge that not all addicts can be cured. 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 risk of overdose and without resorting to other crimes to obtain drugs, like robbery and burglary. Researchers credit the heroin-assisted treatment program in Switzerland, the first of its kind, with reductions in drug-related crimes and improvements in social functioning, like 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 lessen the social stigma surrounding drug use and lead to more people trying dangerous drugs.
The case for decriminalizing drugs. 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, citing the drug war's failure to significantly reduce drug use. To them, the answer is decriminalizing all drug possession while keeping sales and trafficking illegal; a plan that would, in theory, keep nonviolent drug users out of prison but still let law enforcement go after illicit drug suppliers. A 2009 report from the Cato Institute found that after Portugal decriminalized all drugs, people were more willing to seek out rehabilitation programs. Glenn Greenwald, who wrote the paper, said, "the most substantial barrier to offering treatment to the addict population was the addicts' fear of arrest. 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.
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. For example, in a January 2015 report about marijuana legalization for Vermont, some of the nation's top drug policy experts outlined several alternatives, including allowing possession and growing but not sales, 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, which are all benefits to public health. A similar model could be applied to other drugs. But some argue that the alcohol model is not a good comparison. 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. There are also 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, or they could limit drug use to special facilities, like supervised heroin-injection sites or special facilities in which people can legally use psychedelics. Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard University and the libertarian Cato Institute, supports full legalization, even if 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.