Biden can no longer do what he and his predecessors have done: sit idly by, awaiting a perfect policy to replace the unmitigated failures of the War on Drugs.
A significant part of the electoral coalition that swept Mr. Biden to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually to the White House were Black, Latino, and Native Americans who have been harmed the most by the War on Drugs.
Part of that solution must be an embrace of full-scale criminal justice reform that works to inject fairness into a system that has, for centuries, disproportionately punished people of color, the poor, the undereducated, those without personal or political connections, and any others in our society who fall on hard times. Legalizing cannabis, focusing broader drug reform efforts around public health policy rather than inhumane criminalization, prioritizing law enforcement funds toward violent crime rather than petty crime, coordinating an intergovernmental effort to harmonize criminal justice reform through legislative and executive efforts, and reinvesting in the communities that our government has targeted and persecuted are a requirement for President Biden to be the humane and justice-oriented president he marketed himself to be in the campaign.
Eight months into this administration, Mr. Biden faces an embarrassing reality with regard to drug policy. Play Audio. More on Race in American Public Policy. The Avenue The monthly jobs report ignores Native Americans. How are they faring economically? Gabriel R. Sanchez , Robert Maxim , and Raymond Foxworth. They hold the key to our collective future Amy Liu and Alan Berube. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Critics also pointed to data showing that people of color were targeted and arrested on suspicion of drug use at higher rates than whites.
Overall, the policies led to a rapid rise in incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50, in to , in In , nearly half of the , people serving time in federal prisons in the United States had been incarcerated on drug-related charges, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Public support for the war on drugs has waned in recent decades. Some Americans and policymakers feel the campaign has been ineffective or has led to racial divide.
Between and , some 40 states took steps to soften their drug laws, lowering penalties and shortening mandatory minimum sentences, according to the Pew Research Center. In , Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act FSA , which reduced the discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine offenses from to The recent legalization of marijuana in several states and the District of Columbia has also led to a more tolerant political view on recreational drug use.
Technically, the War on Drugs is still being fought, but with less intensity and publicity than in its early years. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Drug trafficking in the United States dates back to the 19th century.
From opium to marijuana to cocaine, a variety of substances have been illegally imported, sold and distributed throughout U. Early Opium Trade in the United As with most anti-drug initiatives, Just Say No—which became an American catch phrase in the s—evoked both support and criticism from the public. The 80s Crack From the CIA allowing drug traffickers to flourish in exchange Drug overdoses, mostly from increasingly lethal opioids, now kill more people than guns and traffic accidents.
A recent Marijuana, also known as cannabis or pot, has a long history of human use. The history of cannabis cultivation in America dates back to the early colonists, For thousands of years, indigenous people in the Amazon Rainforest and Andes Mountains have chewed coca leaves to get an energetic high.
European scientists first isolated cocaine from coca German chemists originally synthesized MDMA, or ecstasy, for pharmaceutical purposes in Much of this is explained by what's known as the balloon effect : Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn't necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs.
Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.
The balloon effect has been documented in multiple instances, including Peru and Bolivia to Colombia in the s, the Netherlands Antilles to West Africa in the early s, and Colombia and Mexico to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the s and s. Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan.
Despite the efforts, Afghanistan's opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. The Monitoring the Future survey , which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In , four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, In , the rate was In , it was back up to Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal.
A study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means — one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.
But there's also evidence that the drug war is too punitive: A study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there's no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties.
So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs. Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.
The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferation of violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it's not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.
The US uses what's called the drug scheduling system. Under the Controlled Substances Act , there are five categories of controlled substances known as schedules, which weigh a drug's medical value and abuse potential. Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Medical value is typically evaluated through scientific research, particularly large-scale clinical trials similar to those used by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceuticals.
Potential for abuse isn't clearly defined by the Controlled Substances Act, but for the federal government, abuse is when individuals take a substance on their own initiative, leading to personal health hazards or dangers to society as a whole.
Under this system, Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 drugs have high potential for abuse but some medical value. As the rank goes down to Schedule 5, a drug's potential for abuse generally decreases. It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical group is the Schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and high potential for abuse.
The medical group is the Schedule 2 to 5 drugs, which have some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential from high to low. Marijuana and heroin are Schedule 1 drugs, so the federal government says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse.
Cocaine, meth, and opioid painkillers are Schedule 2 drugs, so they're considered to have some medical value and high potential for abuse. Steroids and testosterone products are Schedule 3, Xanax and Valium are Schedule 4, and cough preparations with limited amounts of codeine are Schedule 5. Congress specifically exempted alcohol and tobacco from the schedules in Although these schedules help shape criminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, they're not always the final word.
Congress, for instance, massively increased penalties against crack cocaine in in response to concerns about a crack epidemic and its potential link to crime. And state governments can set up their own criminal penalties and schedules for drugs as well.
Other countries, like the UK and Australia , use similar systems to the US, although their specific rankings for some drugs differ. On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs.
Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug dealing organizations. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins.
Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program , encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it — providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.
Although the focus is on criminal groups, casual users still get caught in the criminal justice system. Between and , Human Rights Watch found at least 80 percent of drug-related arrests were for possession, not sales. It seems, however, that arrests for possession don't typically turn into convictions and prison time. According to federal statistics , only 5. The overwhelming majority were in for trafficking, and a small few were in for an unspecified "other" category.
Bloomberg via Getty Images. Internationally, the US regularly aids other countries in their efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the s provided military aid and training to Colombia — in what's known as Plan Colombia — to help the Latin American country go after criminal organizations and paramilitaries funded through drug trafficking.
Federal officials argue that helping countries like Colombia attacks the source of illicit drugs, since such substances are often produced in Latin America and shipped north to the US. But the international efforts have consistently displaced , not eliminated, drug trafficking — and the violence that comes with it — to other countries. Given the struggles of the war on drugs to meet its goals , federal and state officials have begun moving away from harsh enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime stances.
Even some conservatives, like former Texas Governor Rick Perry , have embraced drug courts , which place drug offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of jail or prison.
The idea behind these reforms is to find a better balance between locking up more people for drug trafficking while moving genuinely problematic drug users to rehabilitation and treatment services that could help them. The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.
After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into the world's leader in incarceration. But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons — which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population — were violent offenders in , and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons — to the point that some states, such as California , have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.
In terms of police powers, civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' assets — cash in particular — and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them. But there have been many documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected — but couldn't prove — that there was some sort of illegal activity going on.
In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal — instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.
Similarly, the federal government helped militarize local and state police departments in an attempt to better equip them in the fight against drugs. The Pentagon's program , which gives surplus military-grade equipment to police, was created in the s as part of President George HW Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. Various groups have complained that these increases in police power are often abused and misused. The ACLU, for instance, argues that civil asset forfeitures threaten Americans' civil liberties and property rights, because police can often seize assets without even filing charges.
Such seizures also might encourage police to focus on drug crimes, since a raid can result in actual cash that goes back to the police department, while a violent crime conviction likely would not. The libertarian Cato Institute has also criticized the war on drugs for decades, because anti-drug efforts gave cover to a huge expansion of law enforcement's surveillance capabilities, including wiretaps and US mail searches. The militarization of police became a particular sticking point during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown.
After heavily armed police responded to largely peaceful protesters with armored vehicle that resemble tanks, tear gas, and sound cannons, law enforcement experts and journalists criticized the tactics. Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug war struggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies — which many describe as draconian — have been called into question.
If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US. The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities.
This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions. In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels.
As many as 80, people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since , including 43 students who vanished in in a widely publicized case. But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale.
Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.
In , for instance, the drug war significantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.
The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America explained. As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands in a major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.
Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events — a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime — is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened in Colombia , Mexico , Venezuela , and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.
The Wall Street Journal explained :. Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.
But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.
This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it. AFP via Getty Images.
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