War on Drugs

The War on Drugs began in 1971 as a comprehensive domestic and foreign campaign by the US government to stop the production, distribution, and use of illegal drugs. The campaign has been deemed largely a failure and has been criticized for its handling of foreign affairs. Consequently, in 2009 the US government began refraining from using the term to describe its antidrug policies.

Background

There are two early, especially potent images from the campaign of the War on Drugs: the determined US first lady Nancy Reagan in her red dress and pearls leading the charge to a drug-free America (through the Just Say No campaign) and the infamous television commercial showing two eggs frying and an ominously voiced narrator warning that the frying eggs are what the brain looks like on drugs. These images are part of a one-hundred-year struggle between illicit drugs and the US government.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there was no recognized drug problem in the United States. Cocaine, heroin, laudanum, opium, tobacco, and alcohol, for example, were legal. After the beginning of the twentieth century, drug addiction and alcohol abuse were seen as personal issues, not concerns for the federal government. At the core of early antidrug thinking were widespread racist beliefs about certain drugs and their potential effects on marginalized groups. However, there were also legitimate concerns. The drug laudanum, for example, caused increasing rates of addiction among middle-class women who were prescribed the drug for menstrual cramps. Some regulations were necessary. The government’s first attempt at regulation, restriction, and revenue was the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.

The next attempt to control substance use was the 1919 National Prohibition Act, which made it illegal to manufacture, sell, and consume alcohol. Despite the government’s attempt to control the public’s thirst for alcohol during Prohibition, more people began to drink, deaths from alcohol poisoning increased, and the law ushered in a golden age of crime that initiated the careers of some of the country's most infamous gangsters. There were profits to be made in bootlegging, sex work, and illegal gambling houses, where the choice beverage was alcohol. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

Attention to drug use waxed and waned throughout the next few decades, as politics dictated. In 1937, marijuana became a political issue and candidates used sentiment against marijuana in their campaigns. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed, which attempted to control the use, possession, and sale of marijuana through taxing any entity or individual that dealt commercially with the product. President Franklin D. Roosevelt showed some interest in the drug issue, as did President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but it was not until the 1960s that the issue of drugs and politics become critically enmeshed.

By the 1960s, drug use had become more acceptable, especially among White, middle-class youths and particularly among those protesting the Vietnam War. The government was ineffectual at controlling drug use. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 to consolidate several government agencies in an attempt to get some results. In 1969, Operation Intercept was formed at the Mexican border, which involved a plan to search every car entering the United States. The goal was to disrupt the Mexican drug trade, but the operation failed and was abandoned after less than three weeks.

In 1971, US president Richard M. Nixon, inspired by the ordeal of Vietnam veterans returning to the United States addicted to drugs, launched the antidrug campaign called the War on Drugs. Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one.” One of the first steps of the War on Drugs was Operation Golden Flow, which administered urine tests to all those in armed services; only 4.5 percent were positive. The operation was declared a success. Nixon then founded one of his most enduring legacies, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, in 1973 to work as a “super agency” to oversee all federal-level work related to illegal drugs in the United States.

US president George H. W. Bush took the War on Drugs to a different level. He tasked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military in foreign antidrug “missions” and created the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to centralize all drug-related activity. The director of the ONDCP was known colloquially as the “drug czar.”

The War on Drugs continued through the 1990s, with President Bill Clinton furthering many of its policies even as he personally endorsed reform regarding drugs and criminal justice. President George W. Bush also carried on the War on Drugs, but in the twenty-first century, public support for the strict policies that had emerged in the 1980s began to decline. Increasing attention was given to such policies' failure to curb drug use, including the rise of the opioid epidemic, and to alleged racial and social injustices caused by harsh antidrug programs. In 2009, under the administration of US president Barack Obama, the director of the ONDCP, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said that the phrase war on drugs would no longer be used because it was now believed to be counterproductive.

While in some ways 2009 marked the end of the official War on Drugs, at least in name, many of its policies persisted. While some changes were made, such as the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act that lowered the discrepancy in crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentencing, the US government remained actively involved in prosecuting those using and dealing drugs. Public opinion, however, continued to move toward tolerance, as evident in the legalization of marijuana by several states in the 2010s. This opened the door to potential conflict with the federal government, which still viewed marijuana use and possession as criminal. This division was exacerbated when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, as his administration, including attorney general Jeff Sessions, took hardline stances on many drug policy issues. At the same time, President Joe Biden's administration's national drug control strategy released in 2022 instead stressed a focus on harm-reduction services investments.

With the shift away from the War on Drugs framework came considerable attention to its legacy from the 1970s to the 2010s. Although its strict approach continued to find favor with some politicians and law enforcement officials, the widespread view of the policy was largely that it had failed. In 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy presented a report on the previous fifty years of the drug war both internationally and domestically, deeming it a failure and calling for major reforms. Many other organizations, such as the Drug Policy Alliance, and individual analysts and politicians similarly cast the War on Drugs as proven ineffective. These criticisms came from both ends of the political spectrum, including from some liberals and libertarians who called for decriminalization of all or most drugs and from moderates.

Mission and Goals

The mission of the War on Drugs was to reduce the production, distribution, and usage of all illegal drugs. Domestically, this mission stayed consistent, even after the term "War on Drugs" was phased out of official government policy. Manufacturers, dealers, and users remained targets of arrest and imprisonment.

From the administration of US president Ronald Reagan onward, the War on Drugs faced a great deal of criticism for, among other actions, its harsh sentencing of offenders who were “holding,” that is, arrested and imprisoned for possession of small amounts of drugs. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, of persons arrested for drug use in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, about one half were arrested for marijuana possession, not for distribution. In 2015, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, almost 700,000 people were incarcerated in the United States for violating marijuana laws; almost 90 percent were arrested on possession charges only. Four years later, with several states having legalized the recreational use of marijuana, the number of arrests dropped to 350,149. Arrests for all drug violations topped 1.1 million.

Many opponents of this harsh sentencing policy have argued that not all drugs and, hence, legal punishments, are handled equally by the law. For example, possession of small amounts of marijuana (such as a few marijuana cigarettes, or joints) should not be considered as equally severe as possession of heroin or cocaine, which are much more potent and, many would argue, dangerous drugs. Thus, the penalties, critics have contended, should be relative to the crime. Prison sentences for possession or distribution of “hard” drugs such as heroin and cocaine should be lengthier than prison sentences for “softer” drugs such as marijuana.

Critics of the War on Drugs have also pointed to the ways in which these harsh sentencing policies have disproportionately affected Black Americans and Hispanic Americans. This disparity can be seen in statistics compiled both before and after the War on Drugs framework was phased out in 2009. According to 2001 data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), White people accounted for 76 percent of current drug users but made up only 10 percent of those serving time for a drug-related offense. Black Americans, on the other hand, represented 13.5 percent of drug users and Hispanic Americans less than 9 percent, yet Black and Hispanic Americans made up more than 90 percent of all persons jailed for a drug-related charge. In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 2.8 percent of White people used illicit drugs, compared to 2.3 percent of Black Americans and 2.4 percent of Hispanic Americans. The Bureau for Judicial Statistics reported that of the 210,200 individuals incarcerated for drug-related offenses in 2012, 30.8 percent were White; 37.7 percent were Black American, and 20 percent were Hispanic American. Analysts have noted that the disparity is caused by factors such as stricter approaches to policing in communities predominantly populated by people of color and institutional racism. A clear example lies in the disparity in federal penalties for different types of cocaine: penalties for using crack cocaine (more common among marginalized groups during the 1980s) have historically been much harsher than those for powder cocaine (more commonly used among White people).

The 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and health found that White people and Black people continued to use drugs at comparable rates, with considerably larger total numbers of White drug users, yet Black people faced six times the imprisonment rate on drug charges. The study noted that Black people made up 24 percent of those arrested on drug charges, despite accounting for 13 percent of the US population. However, these trends began to turn around into the early 2020s. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2022, while drug arrests remained high, the number of people admitted to prisons on drug offenses fell by about one-third. Drug arrests of Black people deceased by 37 percent, three times that of White people.

Another issue concerns prison reform, specifically for people who commit drug-related crimes. Many persons involved in reforming the prison system, including some who run prisons, do not believe people who use drugs should be incarcerated with violent criminals. Instead, they believe that people who use drugs should be kept separate from the general population and should receive treatment for their addictions and substance use disorders. Many prisons are taking steps to work with incarcerated men and women to help them through detoxification and to find placement in an appropriate treatment center or sober living facility following their release. Many other prisons incorporate recovery programs and hold twelve-step meetings for prisoners.

At the international level, the antidrug actions of the United States in regard to the War on Drugs began to change in the late 1970s, when drug cartels from Central America, South America, and Mexico began to blur the lines of what action should be taken, and against whom. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the message to the public appeared to be clear: “Say nope to dope.” However, the government had another agenda when it came to foreign policy, an agenda that ran counter to the domestic War on Drugs.

Major foreign drug arrests had already taken place in Marseilles, France (for example, the French connection bust in 1972), and in Colombia, with the 1975 seizure of 600 kilograms of cocaine. This Colombian bust was the largest drug seizure ever made at the time, and came to be known as the “Medellin massacre” following the brutal reprisals of the Medellin drug cartel, which murdered forty people in revenge. However, despite these major drug arrests, the rise of the Medellin cartel dominated the drug scene of the 1980s. The vast majority of those working to control the Medellin cartel worked in earnest, but the CIA had another agenda. This is where the War on Drugs and the Cold War came in direct conflict.

The battlefield where this war took place was primarily Nicaragua, where the leftist Sandinistas were in a long-term battle with the pro-right Contras. During various operations, the CIA funded the Contras with full knowledge that the Contras had direct connections to people trafficking in drugs such as Panamanian president Manual Noriega. In the 1980s, all of these secret connections exploded, as the Medellin cartel was in disarray and Noriega was sent to prison in Miami, Florida, for drug trafficking.

During this time, too, the infamous Iran-Contra affair was uncovered. The affair was revealed to be a complicated arms-for-hostages negotiation with Iran, with the ultimate US goal of delivering profits to the known drug-running Contras. The Iran-Contra affair was a low point in public support for the War on Drugs.

Beginning in about 1990, the tone of the War on Drugs changed, both by the government and by society in general. Many people have come to accept the concept that drug addiction is a chronic brain disease instead of the result of moral or character deficits, and the majority of Americans no longer demonize drug use. The movement to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, for example, is no longer at the fringe but is a legitimate political movement that has even found a place on voting ballots in several US states. The widespread public negative perception of the War on Drugs has been furthered by the increasing visibility of organizations and politicians who have criticized the operation, with the mass media spreading the view that 1980s-style antidrug efforts are examples of failed policy.

With the tone of the War on Drugs having similarly transformed over the years worldwide, by the twenty-first century many international figures had come to publicly criticize the campaign's global influence while also calling for change. In 2024, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk denounced the US-led global War on Drugs as a "clear failure" and emphasized a need for a transition away from punitive, criminalizing measures toward policies promoting harm reduction.

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