America is still at war. The 50 year campaign that has entirely
reshaped American politics, society, and the economy as we
know it. The war on drugs.
America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug
abuse.
Drugs are menacing our society. They are threatening our values
and undercutting our institutions. They're killing
our children. Who's responsible? Let me tell you straight out.
Everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs, and
everyone who looks the other way.
They were to literally eradicate all of the social, economic, and
health ills associated by drugs and drug abuse. And so it
doesn't get much more ambitious than that.
It spanned multiple administrations and led to the
creation of a dedicated federal agency. Law enforcement was
given an unprecedented level of authority with measures like
mandatory sentencing and no knock warrants.
Forty years in prison. That's what my total sentence was with
no chance of parole.
And since 1971, America has spent over a trillion dollars
enforcing drug policies. Yet when it comes to whether it was
a success. Most experts agree.
The drug war is a failed policy at the things that they said
that would happen. People would stop using drugs, communities
would get back together, we'd be safer, they'd get drugs off the
street. Those things didn't happen.
Not only they didn't accomplish its primary objective, but it
also generated all kinds of highly counterproductive
Now that 50 years have passed since the start of the battle,
effects.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to
did the U.S. win the war on drugs? What was the true goal?
And was it successful? President Richard Nixon launched the war
on drugs in June of 1971.
wage a new all out offensive.
President Reagan continued the battle during his
administration.
Tonight, I can report to you that we've made much progress.
And by next year, our spending for drug law enforcement will
have more than tripled from its 1981 levels. This this is crack
cocaine, seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a
park just across the street from the White House. No one among us
is out of harm's way.
This is your brain. And this is heroin. This is what happens to
your brain after starting heroin any questions?
Claiming victory in the war on drugs has been notoriously
elusive for everyone from presidents to media strategists,
because it's difficult to agree on how exactly to define
success.
Whether the United States has won the war on drugs is really a
matter of who you ask. Policymakers who have a interest
in defending their past investments in the war on drugs
or in perpetuating it or expanding it often times say
that it's been successful. It's been successful in stopping the
importation of drugs into the United States, and that it has
been successful in terms of preventing access to those
drugs.
Supporters of the initiative often referred to a steep
decline in illicit drug use between 1979 and 2000. At its
peak in 1979, 14.1% of Americans 12 years or older, admitted to
using illicit drugs in the past month. By 1999, that number had
dropped by nearly half to just 6.7%.
Certainly aspects of the war on drugs has worked. Some drugs
have been prevented from coming into the United States. By
making things illegal, you raise the price of the product that's
illegal, and so that has certainly prevented access for
some people.
But all of that has changed in recent years, drug use in the
United States is climbing again, and more quickly than ever. In
2019, the number of illicit drug users rose back to 13% of
Americans 12 years or older, nearly reaching its peak from 40
years ago. If the goal of the war on drugs was to decrease
drug usage and prevent drug related deaths, it hasn't made
much progress.
We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic
in US history. Last year, probably 90,000 Americans died
as a result of drug overdose.
The federal government is spending more money than ever to
enforce drug policies. In 1981, the federal budget for Drug
Abuse Prevention and Control was just over a billion dollars. By
2020, that number had grown to 34.6 billion over 1,000%
increase when adjusted for inflation.
Just take the DEA for instance, in 47 years, the Drug
Enforcement Administration grew from a small organization with
just under 3,000 employees and a $65 million budget to a massive
agency that employs more than 10,000 employees with a budget
of $3.1 billion. According to the White House, the National
Drug Control budget is estimated to hit a historic level of $41
billion by 2022.
In the overall scheme of how much the US government spends,
it's not a huge amount. The bigger issue is that there's a
burden from an economic perspective, because when you
make something illegal, it has a series of consequences that that
affect all areas of life. For instance, there, there's the
foregone use of resources, that $50 billion that is going into
combating drugs cannot be used on other things. It can't be
used on education, it can't be used on health care, it can't be
kept by taxpayers who ultimately have to foot the bill for these
things.
The true costs of the war on drugs goes far beyond the budget
of enforcement. Over the years, drug policy has drastically
transformed the U.S. criminal justice system.
The war on drugs has resulted in mass incarceration, primarily as
a result of the draconian sentencing laws, that the war on
drugs has brought about primarily mandatory minimum
sentences, where it doesn't matter the role of the person in
the offense. All that matters is the amount of drugs, sentencing
should be based on the role of the person in defense.
And it's so frightening, you know, and devastating, because
you in there on a so called draconian sentence, it appears
no way out.
Of the almost 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the
United States, one in five are locked up for a drug offense.
Many users will not stop using in prison, which is the
predominant motivation for incarcerating people. And once
they are released from prison, they might also return to use
and in fact, their use might even more compounded by the
risks of overdose.
In 2019 alone, law enforcement made over 1.5 million arrests
related to drug violations. And while more arrests might seem
like a success on the surface, it doesn't quite paint the whole
picture.
It's hard, it's tough. You know when you first went to prison,
no one wanted to hear your story because they felt that you were
more or less just fabricating something. And your guilty of
such and you deserve to be where you are. That was hurtful and
painful.
The other really important aspect of this, and then this
shifts us into a discussion of some of the social costs is that
people that are arrested for drugs and then convicted, have a
record. And that record stays with them, often for their
entire life. And that can have real consequences on things like
educational opportunities for things like employment
opportunities, and so on. And so those economic costs, those
costs in terms of lost productivity, are significant.
It's also important to note that there are six times as many
arrests for drug possession as for drug sales, a gap that has
been increasing over time. In 2018, for instance, 40% of drug
arrests were due to marijuana. But 92% of those arrests were
made for possession.
The conversation about the war on drugs and our investment in
the criminalization has always been around this idea that if we
arrest people, we are going to get the bad guy, we are going to
get kingpin. And what data has shown us for the last five
decades is that that's not who we're getting. We're getting
people who use drugs, we're getting low level subsistence
sellers, we're not getting any of the boogeymen that the
government created.
Well, a lot of it has to do with this skewed mentality of law
enforcement and prosecutors that if they arrest the low level
person that they will tell on or inform the higher level people.
What you got in prison primarily is useless. Because what
happened is, in a great many of the cases, the users don't have
the information that the prosecutors want and need, so
they cut deals. And so what happened is the users, the
middle one ends up getting the kingpin sentence.
Mass incarceration leaves a heavy burden on both the federal
and state governments budgets. It costs an average of about 37
and a half thousand dollars annually to host an inmate in
federal correctional facilities, while cities like New York have
spent up to 447,000 per inmate. It's estimated that mass
incarceration costs the United States $182 billion every year,
according to the prison policy initiative.
Most of the drug use imprisonment takes place at the
state level, not at the federal level. And states found their
budgets enormously strapped by having to put funds toward
correctional facilities that grew into enormous complex. And
one unfortunate ways that states dealt with it was privatizing
correction, something that's a specific feature to the United
States. That has been very problematic and fraud policy,
partially driven by the tendency to address nonviolent drug
offenders. There's also a massive racial disparity when it
comes to drug incarcerations. Nearly 80% of the people in
federal prison and almost 60% of the people in state prison for
drug offenses are Black or Latino. In 2019, despite making
up just 13.4% of the U.S. population, Black people made up
more than a quarter of the drug related arrests. Meanwhile, in
2019, more White American adults reported using illicit drugs at
some point in their life than Black American adults.
You look around and all you see if people called on you
everybody recognized that even the staff do, their staffs would
even say the same thing.
That is really what has had a large part in fueling what we
now call today, mass incarceration, which has also
been called The New Jim Crow.
So how exactly can we fix the war on drugs? Is it winnable,
many experts agree that the U.S. is on the right path. By
changing the national attitude to a strategy of
decriminalization.
You decriminalize drugs if you made them legal. On the supply
side, the profit that is attached to drugs now that are
illegal, the extra normal or supernormal profit would be
reduced, which would automatically remove many of the
problems that people point out in terms of violence, with the
drug cartels and so on. On the demand side, you would remove
the stigma that is attached with using drugs, and the stigma that
is attached with being an addict.
I feel that the decriminalization of marijuana
is one big step towards the end of mandatory sentences,
particularly in the federal system, people incarcerated for
marijuana offenses were disproportionate to even all of
the drugs in the system.
In the spring of 2021, New York became the 15th state, along
with the District of Columbia to legalize marijuana for
recreational use. Oregon in February became the first state
to decriminalize the possession of any small amount of drugs.
I think decriminalization is a bold step forward. It's about
recognizing that 50 years ago, we decided to use a criminal
justice approach. And decriminalization would mean
that we would be retracting from that approach.
However, some experts warn that decriminalization is a tricky
balancing act.
It's in my view, a good policy overall, but one that needs to
be carefully worked out. It's generating violence in the drug
market in a way that the city didn't see before. And it's also
generating visible drug use that is often deeply troubling for
surrounding communities. So how one goes about
decriminalization, what policy it's coupled with what kind of
assistance to users, what kind of enforcement policies are all
very important dimensions.
The allocation of budget is another area that needs
attention. For a long time, the U.S. has spent the majority of
its budget in supply reduction, that is punishing and
eradicating the use of drugs through means of criminal
justice, rather than demand reduction that involves
education, prevention, and treating people who use drugs.
What we need, in terms of fixing this issue, dealing with the war
on drugs is not to pour more money and resources into
fighting a war that we can never win. But rather, putting
resources into what I call transformative change.
It doesn't take that type of punishment in order to deter a
person. Many of the ones shouldn't be in there, don't
deserve to be in there. If anything, there's ones that
deserve to be in a drug rehab center, a drug treatment center.
In 2016, the Obama administration for the first
time in the modern war on drugs allocated more funding and
treatment and prevention than law enforcement. The Biden
administration in 2021, has allocated a little over 5.3
billion more on reducing demand over reducing supply. It's a
move in the right direction, but there's still lots more work to
be done.
We can put that money in actually bolstering drug
education across the country that's based in science as
opposed to stigma the money we spend on the enforcement drugs
is futile, because it's not actually making us safer. And
it's actually it's, it's criminalizing communities, but
it's also making us less safe because we don't have money for
the things that would actually help us.
Will these changes really lead to a victory in the war on
drugs? Probably not. America's battle against illicit
substances is an ongoing one, and it's most likely here to
stay.
All of these vested interests want to expand the amount of
money that's spent combating drugs. And so from that
standpoint, I see more of the same. I don't think the war on
drugs is going anywhere anytime soon as a political program and
as a political talking point.