The war on drugs began in the United States in 1971 when President Richard Nixon declared war. President Nixon increased the number of federal drug control agencies, increased mandatory sentences for drug offenders, and utilized no-knock warrants in attempt to get the problem under control. It has been over forty years since President Nixon declared a war on drugs. Did America win the war on drugs? Is it time to legalize illicit drugs in this country? What are other countries doing in reference to drugs? The author will examine the history of the war on drugs in this country, how other countries deal with drugs, list the positive and negative aspect of legalizing illicit drugs, and offer his opinion as to whether drugs should be decriminalized or not.
History
The recognition that there was a drug problem in the United States goes back to the 1800’s when the first anti-drug laws were established. These drug laws were established in part because of the specific ethnic groups that were associated with particular drugs, the Chinese opium, the Blacks cocaine, and the Mexicans marijuana. “The first anti-opium laws in the1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws, in the south in the 1900s, were directed at black men. The anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans” (www.drugpolicy.org).
The so called “war on drugs” was declared in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. President Nixon significantly increased the manpower of several federal drug control agencies, as well as their presence on the front line. President Nixon used tactics such as mandatory sentencing for drug offenders, and no-knock w...
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...h year needs to stop.
Works Cited
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A “drug-free society” has never existed, and probably will never exist, regardless of the many drug laws in place. Over the past 100 years, the government has made numerous efforts to control access to certain drugs that are too dangerous or too likely to produce dependence. Many refer to the development of drug laws as a “war on drugs,” because of the vast growth of expenditures and wide range of drugs now controlled. The concept of a “war on drugs” reflects the perspective that some drugs are evil and war must be conducted against the substances
In this paper I will evaluate America's War on Drugs. More specifically, I will outline our nation's general drug history and look critically at how Congress has influenced our current ineffective drug policy. Through this analysis I hope to show that drug prohibition policies in the United States, for the most part, have failed. Additionally, I will highlight and evaluate the influences acting on individual legislators' decisions to continue support for these ineffective policies as a more general demonstration of Congress' role in the formation of our nation's drug policy strategy. Finally, I will conclude this analysis by outlining the changes I feel necessary for future progress to be made. Primary among these changes are a general promotion of drug education and the elimination of our current system's many de-legitimating hypocrisies.
FITZPATRICK, Michael (2001). “The Lessons of the Drugs War”, Spiked,. Online at: , consulted on March 30th, 2004.
Bush's “war on drugs”, an extension to Reagon's former battle, had “crowded the courts, filled the prisons, corrupted law officers, compromised ... civil liberties, and criminalized substantial sectors of American society.” 1 In comparison to the leniency experienced in the late 1960s under Nixon where a “specific sub-culture of some 68,088 identifiable heroin addicts” who, subject to arrest for the possession of the heroin, and successfully convicted, were “sentenced to treatment at the federal hospital in Lexington, Kentucy.”2
It is also very important for people to know about this topic because the issue is not only about drugs but also the growth of inequality between the rich and poor, black and white, upper class and lower class in this country. The war of drugs deals with issues about why they were passed through congress and if there were motives that deals connect directly to black communities. The issues where brought about in Dan Baum book entitled “Smoke and Mirrors” where John Erlichmann, the chief domestic affair advisor talk about how the Drug War fever has been escalated and manipulated from its modest beginnings at the start of the Nixon administration and clarifies the various interests which that escalation has served. He talks about the Drug War on “blacks” and “hippies” but politicians could not say that so had to say the War on “heroin” and “Marijuana”. He also said that “We knew drugs were not the health problem we were making it out to be, but there were political benefits to be gained." This shows that there is more to the war of drugs that the government is letting on.
The topic of alternate policies to the U.S. Drug War has always been an interesting and thought provoking topic for me. Over nearly the past four decades, the U.S. government, along with state and local agencies, have spent billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man hours, and many lives with little to show for stopping the flow of drugs into or the use of drugs in this country. The only true outcome from these expenditures and all of this enforcement are more robust resupply networks, more refined and potent drugs, deepening psychological issues, and alienating specific aspects of American society.
“[The war on drugs] has created a multibillion-dollar black market, enriched organized crime groups and promoted the corruption of government officials throughout the world,” noted Eric Schlosser in his essay, “A People’s Democratic Platform”, which presents a case for decriminalizing controlled substances. Government policies regarding drugs are more focused towards illegalization rather than revitalization. Schlosser identifies a few of the crippling side effects of the current drug policy put in place by the Richard Nixon administration in the 1970s to prohibit drug use and the violence and destruction that ensue from it (Schlosser 3). Ironically, not only is drug use as prevalent as ever, drug-related crime has also become a staple of our society. In fact, the policy of the criminalization of drugs has fostered a steady increase in crime over the past several decades. This research will aim to critically analyze the impact of government statutes regarding drugs on the society as a whole.
Rosenfield, Jim. "The War on Drugs is a Great Success." The Ostrich File. Volume 6, March 20, 1996. (Online).
The War on Drugs has played a significant role in the mass incarceration seen today. The War on Drugs refers to heightened law enforcement activity and harsher punishments in order to eliminate illegal drug use. It started in the 1970’s when President Richard Nixon proclaimed that “public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse,” and “to fight and defeat this enemy is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.” Since then the number of people admitted to prison for drug related crimes has risen about 1000 percent (politifact.com). “Most Americans can now agree that the war on drugs was not an effective approach to either addressing drug related crime, and that its policies worsened racial disparities in incarceration (Nellis).”
At even the national level, the “war on drugs” was just as detrimental. Reagan's narcotics policy had doubled both drug arrests and the prison population in the US. Under him, the media propaganda helped ignite public concern – sometimes bordering hysteria – which effectively created “a mandate for a massive campaign against drugs –an intensified federal enforcement effort, harsher prison sentences, and omnipresent narcotics surveillance of ordinary Americans.” Bush's “war on drugs”, an
Moore, L. D., & Elkavich, A. (2008). Who's Using and Who's Doing Time: Incarceration, the War on Drugs, and Public Health. American Journal Of Public Health, 98(5), 782-786.
The war on drugs has been going on for some time. The war on drugs refers to the government’s attempts to stop the circulation of drugs. This includes the production, selling, and transport of illegal drugs, in order to reduce drug abuse. This war has been going on since the 1900’s. The bureau of justice reported that fifty five percent of federal prisoners and twenty one percent of state level prisoners are incarcerated on the basis of drug related offenses( ). That amounts to about half a million people for scale that’s more people than live in Wyoming. The war on drugs has been going on for thirty years now. The war has made a significant impact on society, the economy and has made a lot of history gaining spotlight time along the
The drug problem in the U.S. and around the world is an important issue and seems to be a difficult problem to tackle across the board. The inflow of drugs has become one of the largest growths in transnational crime operations; illicit drug use in the United States makes it very difficult for nation states police and customs forces to get a handle on the issues. War on drugs, drug trafficking has long been an issue for the United States. There has been a proclamation of “war on drugs” for the past 44 years.
The drug policy “War on Drugs” implemented by the criminal justice system the in United States has failed to address the war with the use of drugs in America. The United States of America has fought for over a century, and four presidents have staged this war that has yet to produce significant results. It is a war that the US was losing and drug abusers were all over hospitals, courts, and prisons. The use of drugs has ended in violent crimes that have always resulted into damaging neighborhoods in this country, and many children have been lost and abandoned due to drug abuse (Friman, 2008).
At a press conference in the White House, President Richard J. Nixon officially declared war on drugs. He stated, “drug abuse is public enemy, number one in the United States.”