Global Drug War on the United States

The Global Drug War affects the United States on many levels, including historical, social, and economic levels. Starting in the early 1970s under the Nixon administration, the war on drugs was in part based on increasing drug use of troops returning from Vietnam, especially heroin (Eremin & Petrovich-Belkin, 2019). Nixon’s statement that drug abuse was ‘public enemy number one’ signaled that the administration was going to introduce a series of police interventions to discourage the use of drugs. The DEA was created in 1973, which signified the intensification of the federal war on drug trafficking and drug abuse; this in return brought about the paramilitarization of law enforcement agencies and the outlawing of drug dependency (Ricart, 2020). 

The effects of these policies have been disastrous. For half a century, the War on Drugs has been responsible for mass incarceration spikes, targeting people of color most of the time. Currently, according to Grossi (2020), about 50% of federal inmates are those convicted of drug offenses, and Black Americans are the most impacted considering the race. The African Americans are more than three times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession even though the usage rate is almost similar to that of the whites (Grossi, 2020). This structural racism is explained further on how the War on Drugs has sustained poverty and marginalization within poor populations and how it all upheld racial bias.

The global dimensions of the War on Drugs have wider ramifications outside the boundaries of the U.S. For example, the U.S. has financed and supported anti-drug campaigns in countries like Colombia and Mexico, often at the expense of comprehensive public health strategies for military solutions (Flores-Macías, 2018). This has only led to a negligible decrease in the trafficking and consumption of drugs while causing human rights abuses and increased violence in those areas, since local governments are often outgunned by well-funded drug cartels. The militarization of foreign drug enforcement is part of a broader trend in which U.S. foreign policy and domestic drug policy are increasingly intertwined, often at the expense of humanitarian concerns for geopolitical interests.

The opioid crisis, in addition to this, casts another dimension towards this narrative (Abadinsky, 2018). While the War on Drugs traditionally has been concerned with such substances as cocaine and heroin, prescription opioid problems have intertwined with those subjects. Oversupply of opioids fed by pharmaceutical lobbying and ineffective regulation contributed to opioid dependency and death in predominantly white neighborhoods (Humphreys et al., 2022). This shift illustrates a critical failure in drug policy: although measures against illicit drugs have remained very strict, legal drugs have caused enormous health problems without the corresponding controls.

There has been an increasing concern for reforms in the recent past. The Biden administration’s focus on increasing the use of harm reduction measures and racial justice is quite different from previous administrations, where the trend was to incarcerate rather than treat the affected individuals (White House, 2021). But to undo several years of the damage will be possible only through radical transformations, not only in the domestic policy but also in the foreign policy concerning the international drug control.

Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the Global Drug War has shaped society in many ways by leaving the historical legacy of systematic inequality and public health issues to the United States, as well as creating international consequences that are still present nowadays. On this note, the U.S must learn from previous mistakes before embracing new, fairer, and public health-based ideas in these discussions around drugs, finding more socially and justly oriented ways to prevent enforcement-based policies.

References

Abadinsky, H. (2018). Drug use and abuse: Drug Use and Abuse: A Comprehensive

Introduction. Wadsworth, 9ed.

Eremin, A. A., & Petrovich-Belkin, O. K. (2019). The ‘War on Drugs’ Concept as the Basis for

Combating Drugs in the Western Hemisphere. Central European Journal of International & Security Studies, 13(2). 

Flores-Macías, G. (2018). The consequences of militarizing anti-drug efforts for state capacity in Latin America: Evidence from Mexico. Comparative Politics, 51(1), 1-20. 

Grossi, J. (2020). The Relationship between the War on Drugs and Crime. Available at SSRN 3591798.

Humphreys, K., Shover, C. L., Andrews, C. M., Bohnert, A. S., Brandeau, M. L., Caulkins, J. P., … & Timko, C. (2022). Responding to the opioid crisis in North America and beyond: recommendations of the Stanford–Lancet Commission. The Lancet, 399(10324), 555-604.

Ricart, C. A. P. (2020). Taking the War on Drugs Down South: The Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico (1973–1980). The Journal of Alcohol and Drugs, 31(1), 1-22.

White House. (2021). Executive Office of the President Office of National Drug Control Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BidenHarris-Statement-of-Drug-Policy-Priorities-April-1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2TBk34U_XRqlqK_pAYnUd_9f7zY3IbCQI9KxI6S5eYeRJdFzl9B09hZ84