Nixon is president. A sharp spike in crime rates (I believe largely in the DC area) is attributed to a corresponding rise in heroin abuse. Nixon wants the crime rate down, and so forms a drug abuse task force for the purpose of achieving that, by whatever means necessary. The task force yakes a treatment approach, dealing with heroin abuse as a medical problem. They start treatment programs, open walk-in clinics, gett people off the streets and on methadone, and the results are overwhelmingly positive. A similar program is instituted to help returning Viet Nam vets deal with their drug problems, and it too is a success.
Fast forward a decade or so. Carter is in the White House. While people are certainly continuing to use drugs, cocaine is still too expensive for the mass market and the drug “problem” is relatively under control. Then one night, a couple in Atlanta come home to find the remains of a party their son threw, in which they discover amongst the requisite thousands of empty beer cans a few … gasp … roaches.
Outraged at the permissive attitude Americans had taken about recreational drug use, the parents join with other like-minded parents to pressure the White House into abandoning its laissez-faire attitude toward marijuana and start cracking down. They are facilitated by the election of Ronald Reagan, whose Cabinet includes many social conservatives who despise the if-it-feels-good ethos of the 60s and are eager to take a hard-line approach. Sentences for cultivating and possessing marijuana start to climb. Law enforcement budgets are stepped up. Researchers are pressured to produce findings that marijuana causes grave physical and mental harm. Everything is going according to plan.
Then the shit hits the fan.
The Colombian cartels have by now created such a sophisticated apparatus for funneling cocaine into the US that the price starts to plummet. Dealers oblige their more demanding customers by selling them pre-freebased cocaine: crack. Cocaine begins turning the inner cities into war zones. Len Bias dies of a cocaine overdose. Public health centers, overwhelmed with crack addicts and overdose cases, beg Washington for aid.
They don’t get it, for two reasons: 1) Inner-city blacks by and large did not vote Republican (you do the math there); and more importantly, 2) To the Reagan administration — and particularly to its chief policy advisor on drugs, William Bennett, drug abuse is a moral failing, not a public health problem. To spend federal money rehabilitating people who were too weak to care for themselves properly in the first place would not only be unfair to the American taxpayer, it would be rewarding people for their own failure to “say no.” So the money that should have gone to treatment and recovery is instead put into interdiction: more law enforcement, more and better technology, the destruction of poppy fields by the US military, and a wholesale revamp of the criminal justice system: high mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, lots of new prisons (that remain overcrowded today), and new seizure laws that enable law enforcement agencies to keep the money and swag they confiscate from dealers, which needless to say leads to massive corruption and infighting within and between the agencies charged with combating drug smuggling.
That, in a nutshell, is the War on Drugs, and we are still very much in the middle of it. Most people know the whole thing is a sham that has led to untold corruption, financial waste, and shattered lives, but no one dares to speak against it, knowing he’ll immediately be crucified by the opposition as — say it with me now — “soft on drugs.” Sadly, that’s not going to change any time soon, to the ongoing harm of our society.