From my childhood I remember hearing about the "War on Drugs". President Nixon started it, Reagan resumed it, Bush senior gave it lip service, Clinton put a finger print on it, W. Bush did his part Obama went through the motions on it and T.Rump has revived it, but what the hell is it?
Insofar as I've researched it, Nixon STARTED the war on drugs not to go after those importing drugs into our country, but rather to punish those using them. Organized Crime had been smuggling drugs into the United States since the 1920s but J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI from it's inception in 1924 until his death in 1972) did very little to stop drug trafficking. In fact he said that the organized crime group known as the "Italian mafia" did NOT exist. Hoover only went after organized crime after Attorney General Robert Kennedy pressured him to do so, but the efforts to seriously hinder their drug trafficking never seemed to stop the flow of drugs.
The "war on drugs" which Nixon started was mostly his way at lashing out at his perceived enemies i.e. the counterculture and people of color. As all the aforementioned "war" did was give law enforcement greater leeway to prosecute persons of color (blacks and latinos) and "hippies" most didn't bat an eye at the way it was "fought". Those selling drugs on the streets, those possessing them and those consuming them were punished rather than those trafficking. During the 80s police were given paramilitary equipment and encouraged to treat areas where drugs were being sold like war zones and those selling them like "combatants".
American newscasts at the time oft showed police, clad in body armor, atop tanks whose guns had been turned into battering rams attacking men of color in economically disparaged areas of cities whose industries had long previously removed factories and the jobs they provided. Both those selling drugs and those using them got long prison sentences and were labeled societal pariahs, then something happened. In the early 2000's the drugs "changed" and so did the users.
In the 1920s organized criminals decided that drugs would only be sold in black and Hispanic areas, to that end most drug arrests were disproportionately among the aforementioned groups, but the 2000s saw the rise of methamphetamines, oxycodone and fentanyl. The drugs in question rather than flooding ghettoes made their way into suburbs, planned communities and even rural America. The new drug user was no longer a "hoodlum" but rather the "kid next door". Given the face of this user, the enforcement mechanism seemed to change almost overnight.
The focus went from brutalizing dealer and user alike to acknowledging addiction as an "illness", and those addicted as "victims". The United States opened and funded rehabilitation centers and spoke of understanding and compassion. Where was this "compassion" when the users weren't suburbanites or denizens of small towns?
President Trump's new war on drugs uses this same approach, but takes the extra step of declaring every other Spanish speaking country "narco-terrorists" and blowing up small boats from them on the open seas without any supporting evidence. I may be wrong, but the entire war on drugs concept seems to have been and still be simply an excuse to justify the dehumanization, brutalization, imprisonment & wholesale public execution of people of color. President Trump's blowing up boats in international waters on their way to ports in the Caribbean has been applauded by his most loyal supporters but called a violation of international law by everyone else. Being accused of a crime, then being executed without due process has long happened in the United States to men and women of color and it was called "lynching".
The victims of lynch-mobs were generally blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, Asians and on rare occasion poor European immigrants, but the underlying thread was always that it was a member of society who was looked down upon and considered societally expendable. Courts of law in the U.S. didn't prosecute a lynching successfully until 1964 and prior to that didn't even attempt to prosecute in most incidents. It's my assertion that those who approve of blowing up "suspected" drug traffickers without a shred of evidence or due process are the same people who presumed that paramilitary police forces clubbing urban youth in the 80s and 90s was more than justified and who more than likely would have stood gawking as a mob beat and tortured someone before "stringing them up" from the 1800s to the 1960s.
What's my point? There have always been drugs and the attitudes about addiction differ from culture to culture. In Afghanistan and in parts of Asia growing opium poppies & cannabis and making opium, heroin & hashish are perfectly legal. They consider addiction to the aforementioned to be a spiritual and personal "weakness" within the individual who is addicted. In the United States until the early 20th century, morphine, opium, hashish and cocaine were not only legal but could be purchased at pharmacies without prescription. Americans who became addicted were simply treated as if their addiction was their problem. Do I think drugs should be legal in the United States? I don't, but at the same time I think that if we provided economic opportunities in countries where drugs are produced, gave their governments greater incentives to prevent trafficking and enforced the laws we have on the books it would be far less of a problem.
The United States is the largest user of illegal drugs and we lead the world in deaths from drug use. The reality is that wealthy trafficker of drugs is far less likely to receive any kind of real punishment than those either transporting, selling his drugs on the street or using them and as long as that remains the case, vilifying persons of color as the source of our drug problem will ensure that nothing will change.
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