War On Drugs - Blog Posts
The war on drugs main consequence was to incarcerate huge numbers of people. There are 2,400,000 people in jail in the U.S. There are 7 times as many people in jail now as in the early seventies. About 1 in every 100 American adults is in jail. About half are there for drug offenses, many just possession.
It’s wild.
We tried prohibition with alcohol. It led to gang violence, people drinking poorly distilled liquor with methanol and getting sick or going blind, and so on. We tried it for ten years and were like, “Hey, maybe this just doesn’t fucking work at all.” And then we tried it with drugs.
Opium (not opiates, mind, but opium specifically) is the only drug whose usage decreased after prohibition, likely because other opiates including morphine and heroin were available. Everything else, usage has increased, and though most have peaked, none are close to their pre-prohibition usage status.
Prohibition has not made us safer and will not make us safer. Ascribing a level of rebelliousness to drugs, teaching kids lies about drugs that make them likely to doubt our word on all drugs rather than teaching them the actual potential harms and being honest, jailing people for ingesting substances on their own terms without harming anyone else (and again, if they do harm anyone else, they should be arrested for that, of course), not regulating the content of the drugs people buy and consume, pressuring people to hide their habits rather than seek help, forcing them into a position of isolation that progresses rather than impedes addiction, creating financial incentive for gangs to sell drugs and war over selling territory–none of these are things that benefit us. Responsibility for casual users and rehabilitation for problem users, honesty about all substances, proper education, healthy discussions, these are things that will make a difference.
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The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison.
Someone explain why we have 51 years of this War on Drugs preceded by 200,000 years of eating, licking, snorting, and smoking whatever the hell we wanted?