Is anyone actually winning the war on drugs?
By Katie Coleman
Jeff Sessions recently sent a memorandum to federal prosecutors that, in just under 500 words, manages to roll back the smart on crime reforms made by the previous administration. In other words, the war on drugs isn’t over.
If this war is drugs versus the United States, Americans are losing.
Richard Nixon fired the first shot in 1971 with the United States Controlled Substances Act. Ronald Reagan expanded the program, passing mandatory minimum sentences, removing sentencing discretion and implementing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988.
Bill Clinton's violent crime control and law enforcement act of 1994 increased funding to law enforcement and packed the prisons with the three strikes provision. These acts have not curbed drug abuse, but they have cost the United States over $1 trillion.
In 1970, the federal government spent approximately $500 million on drug control. In 1990, that number skyrocketed to $11 billion, and in 2010 we spent $20 billion. How much did we spend in 2015? $13 billion.
We have $13 billion to spend on incarcerating non-violent criminals, but congress had to cut funding to maternal healthcare? I question our country’s priorities.
In addition to federal spending, state governments also spend billions of dollars arresting and incarcerating citizens for possession. The war on drugs costs more than $51 billion annually, according to the Cato Institute.
Where does that money come from? Your taxes. That means a portion of your paycheck pays for the arrest and incarceration of people whose worst crime is smoking a doobie.
Is it working? Is all this spending stopping people from using drugs? Not according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 1970, the U.S. illicit drug addiction rate was 1.3 percent. In 2010, it was 1.4 percent. And yet, drug arrests are more than 10 times what they were in the 1970s. Why? Is it helping? Are first time-offenders coming out of jail fresh-faced and rehabilitated? Not that I’ve seen.
A lot of people are working or going to school before their first drug offense. Once they are arrested, their chance for success significantly decreases. From 2005-2010, 67.8 Percent of released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within three years, according to a Bureau of Justice recent study.
It is possible that one of the reasons the war on drugs is such a colossal failure is that it was never about stopping drug use. Nixon's domestic policy chief, John Erlichman, had this to say about why they initially decided to make drugs illegal:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
'We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Sadly, this was not the first time the government has passed racially biased laws. The 13th amendment states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment of a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Southern politicians who never wanted slavery to end started making arbitrary laws that were meant to get people of color locked up and working on a chain gang. For example, someone could be arrested for simply walking down the street after dark or for sitting down on a bus.
After the Civil Rights movement, this kind of unfair policing seemed to be on its way out. Then came the war on drugs. Black men are sent to state prisons for drug crimes thirteen times more than white men. Black men are sent to federal prison for drug crimes 57 times more than white men. Yet drug use is reported to be roughly the same among the two races.
The war on drugs is racially biased. It isn’t stopping drug use and it isn’t stopping drug-related crime, so let’s take some of the $50 billion we spend per year incarcerating contributing members of society and put it into education.