Just a few weeks after famous rapper Jay Z released a short film critiquing the War on Drugs and the highly-anticipated second season of Netflix original "Narcos," detailing the attempts to capture Pablo Escobar in Colombia, were released, the war on drugs has once again returned to being one of the focal points of pop culture. This reemergence of the topic of the War on Drugs has also brought about the reappearance of much of the criticism on the war. Ultimately, over the last 40 years, the War on Drugs has had continued resistance and more evidence has surfaced showing that it has essentially been a failure, yet it is still one of the most expansive policies of the American government today.
Although the real War of Drugs, in the way that it is perceived today, didn't fully develop until the ever-glorified Reagan presidency, the roots of the criminalization of drugs began to take effect much earlier. Richard Nixon was essentially the creator of the way many people today have an anti-drug sentiment, and although the cause of his War on Drugs was much different than that of Ronald Reagan's, the end result was essentially the same. Nixon claimed that he feared for students who had increasingly high levels of drug use, but his goals were actually far more political. Nixon saw the anti-war and black communities as his largest political threats, but there was no way he could directly persecute them for their race and beliefs. To prevent their views from spreading he devised the War on Drugs and as a way to justify the disruption of meetings and increased arrests in these communities. After Jimmy Carter came into presidency, many drugs were decriminalized, but the previous anti-drug fervor reemerged during the Reagan presidency. Both Ronald and Nancy Reagan launched an anti-drug campaign that galvanized the public, but at the expense of a large increase in incarceration, which continued under the Clinton Presidency. Essentially, both Nixon and Reagan created legislation targeting the general public, but eventually targeted only a few minorities.
Despite the intentions of the War on Drugs, the added devotion and harsher sentences for drug charges has to end because of the vast social and economic impacts. Even if the conflict was only domestic, it would still be adversely damaging, but the war also has many foreign ties, such as the example of Pablo Escobar, and the American attempt to capture him. On top of this over 100,000 people have died in the war in Mexico against drugs. Moreover, the War on Drugs has a history of specifically targeting minorities, from the Nixon to Reagan to Clinton eras. It has been proven that the rates of drug sales between different races is about the same, yet people in Black and Latino communities are more likely to be arrested for drug charges than people of other races. This puts communities that are already at a disadvantage at a further disadvantage, by destroying families and business. Furthermore, the war has cost the U.S. over $51 billion yearly, while states like California lose over $1 billion in money that they could make off just regulated marijuana use.
Ultimately, we can only sit and hope that whoever gets elected next is able to end the War on Drugs and the unnecessary foreign entanglements, racial discrimination and disastrous loss of money that are associated with it.
