War On Drugs Research Paper

Do Not Do Drugs!!!! Drugs are bad, drugs will ruin your life, only criminals’ use drugs, drug addicts are worthless—these are thoughts that are ingrained into American society, giving rise to the War on Drugs. Drugs are in every society and neighborhood in America, but the justice system keeps this hidden from view, disguising it through racial and social status profiling. The rate of incarcerations for non-violent crimes, mainly due to the War on Drugs that was implicated in the Nixon Era, has soared immensely over the last decade. The justice system, that was established to protect and serve the public society, emerged with the War on Drugs: an effort to control illicit drugs through incarcerating those for sales, distribution, and use

The mass incarceration of criminals for drug related crimes has a trickledown effect. Society fails to see that the stigma placed on a criminal leads to a life of poverty, a struggle for existence, the inability for vertical movement in society, and overall the ability to be a law-abiding productive citizen. The concentrated efforts to control drugs, fueled by the media and politics, forced our government to declare war. A war on race, the poor, the underprivileged, the under-educated, the already oppressed, not drugs. This war created tougher laws, and because these laws are not enforced with equality, the poor and minorities, those who are unable to financially or socially emigrate from those environments labeled as drug areas, are deemed criminals, and are the focus of Americas war on drugs(Moore, 2008). Racial profiling most definitely exists in the American justice system. Urban areas are viewed as potential drug havens and have high incarceration rates due to the ease of profiling in those areas while suburban crime, often crime and drug activity in white wealthy neighborhoods, goes unreported. During the War on Drugs, law enforcement disproportionally policed minority communities and the urban areas even though data suggested that was not the greatest drug threat. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse conducted a study in 2000 with results that showed that white students used cocaine, heroin, and crack cocaine at a higher rate than blacks, and were also more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American students(Thompson, pg. 708). The percentage of drug crimes as well as arrest records in the 1980’s show that African American males were