Nixon started War on Drugs but its failures are ours
By David Farber / Special To The Washington Post
As declarations of war go, it was pretty low key. On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon held a news briefing in the West Wing of the White House. In his usual dark suit and striped tie, speaking comfortably from notes, the president branded Americans’ rising tide of drug abuse “public enemy number one.”
He continued: “In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. … This will be a worldwide offensive. … It will be government-wide … and it will be nationwide.” To fund this new war, Nixon declared, he would ask Congress to appropriate a minimum of $350 million. (In 1969, when Nixon first took the oath of office, the nation’s entire federal drug budget was just $81 million.) Fifty years later, the United States has expended approximately $1 trillion waging war on illegal drugs.
That money has bought some 30 million arrests and millions of imprisonments. Today, nearly 500,000 Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses; the federal government expends well over $9 million every day, more than $3 billion a year, just to lock up drug offenders. States and localities, combined, pay far more. Black Americans are almost six times as likely as white Americans to have been incarcerated on drug charges, even as white and Black Americans use illegal drugs at around the same rate. The War on Drugs — a civil war waged by U.S. authorities against the tens of millions of Americans — is another of America’s “longest wars,” in which the light at the end of the tunnel remains dim.
It would fit conventional wisdom to fault Nixon for the grotesque policy mistakes of the ongoing war on drugs. But we can’t blame Nixon for this one. His war was targeted primarily at the scourge of heroin addiction that was ravaging New York City and affecting U.S. troops in Vietnam, who had easy access to the drug in Southeast Asia. Nixon-the-pragmatist appointed drug rehabilitation experts, not anti-drug moralists, to lead his fight.
Elected officials, however, quickly realized the War on Drugs was good politics. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, known as a moderate Republican, was among the first to successfully push for draconian drug laws, in 1973, as a way to demonstrate his law-and-order credentials in hopes of finally attaining the presidency. Others followed suit.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-nixon-started-war-on-drugs-but-its-failures-are-ours/
Nixon's war on drugs has failed for half a century. It’s time to end it: Alexander Soros
Fifty years ago this month, the United States launched a war on its own people. President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Since then, our criminal approach to drugs has devastated lives, destroyed communities, and led to the largest prison population in the world.
Over the past half-century, the drug war has driven a well-documented surge in police budgets and incarceration. Law enforcement agencies now make more than 1.6 million arrests each year for drug possession alone. Human Rights Watch documents that every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use. From its inception, the war on drugs, has fueled institutional and structural racism and fuels the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and police brutality.
Drug policies hinder racial equity
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people are almost four times as likely as white people to be arrested on marijuana charges, despite similar rates of consumption. The war on drugs has turned even the suspicion of substance use into an excuse for deadly force. A no-knock search warrant — a tactic frequently justified by the assertion that drug suspects pose an inherent danger — led to the killing of Breonna Taylor. As George Floyd was being murdered, an officer nonchalantly told onlookers, “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids.”
The U.S. has exported these violent and regressive policies across the globe, promoting an international framework of drug prohibition and tying military aid and intervention to the war on drugs. In these countries, as in the U.S., criminalization has done nothing to curb supply or demand. Instead, it’s just fueled black market-related violence. Since 2006, Mexico’s war on drug cartels has led to more than 150,000 deaths associated with the drug trade and more than 32,000 disappearances.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nixons-war-drugs-failed-half-100009809.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
