war on drugs research paper topics

102 War on Drugs Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best war on drugs topic ideas & essay examples, 🎓 good research topics about war on drugs, ⭐ simple & easy war on drugs essay titles, ❓ war on drugs research questions.

• Positive Results of the War on Drugs The present section argues that the War on Drugs yielded some significant results in the United States, mainly thanks to the country’s advantageous geographic position, in terms of reducing both production and consumption of drugs […]
• Drug War in “Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City” The “strengths of this theory make it effective towards describing the behaviors of many individuals in the society”. Many individuals engage in criminal activities due to lack of the required resources. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Drug Issue in “America’s Unjust Drug War” by Michael Huemer In a report on the unjust drug war in America, the author proposes that legislation on the use of recreational drugs is improper.
• The Failure of the Drug War The threat of imprisonment is not sufficient to keep citizens from partaking in the drug, nor is it effective in ensuring the drug is not available on the street.
• War on Drugs and Its Effects: Analytical Essay This has led to the formation of laws to govern drug trafficking and drug use in most countries that are determined to eradicate this problem.
• Prohibition: War on Drugs American Labor Leader Andrew Furuseth spoke before Congress in 1926 and noted that just after prohibition began, there was a large change in the working population, but he also added: “Two years afterwards I came […]
• The War on Drugs and the Incarceration of Black Women Considering the plight of black women in the war on drugs, this paper discusses the concept of war on drugs as the war against black women.
• War on Drugs and Prison Overcrowding Analysis In this way, it is possible to reduce the number of inmates in state prisons because studies have shown that low-level offenders make more than 55% of the total number of inmates in American prisons.
• America’s War on Drugs At the time, Nixon was concerned by the sudden surge of drug related arrests among young people and the relation that the trend had on the high rate of street crime at the time.
• Drug War Policies and Freiberg & Carson’s Models War on Drugs was a set of policies adopted by the Nixon administration in 1971, following a tremendous growth of the local illegal drug market in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
• War on Drugs in the Sicario Film First, the use of factual information in work increases confidence in the film’s authors and convinces the viewer of the truthfulness and accuracy of the narrative.
• The House I Live In: War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration Yet the way in which the comparison between the Holocaust and the War on Drugs makes the most sense is the fact that mass incarceration for drug-related offenses disproportionally targets one group of population.
• War on Drugs in “Sicario” (2015) Film On the positive side of things, the depiction of the War on Drugs in the movie is built around violence associated with it and the corruption of federal agents involved in the operations.
• The War on Drugs Is Lost: In Search of a New Method After forty years and a trillion dollars, the volume of drugs in the United States has remained relatively the same. In 2000, Portugal decriminalized all hard and soft drugs at the recommendation of a panel […]
• Prohibition & War on Drugs and Negative Effects The intention behind the Prohibition was to ban the consumption of alcohol to reduce the occurrence of crimes, spousal abuse, and increase the overall purity of US society.
• Literature Review: The War on Drugs However, the misguided notion that anything with the potential to cause harm is immoral has led to the limited effectiveness of punitive policies with regard to the reduction of the negative impacts of drug use.
• The America’s Unjust Drug War In addition, the thought experiment shows the ethical inadmissibility of such a prohibition from the point of view of moral philosophy.
• Techniques in “The Drug War and Class War” by Harrop The essay provides many instances of the use of emotive language and it helps the reader to understand the social and cultural relevance of the issue that the contemporary discrimination by produce student’s use of […]
• War on Drugs in the United States Satisfaction of rehabilitation costs, salaries, and payment of the government officials and employees involved in the operations and activities related to the war on drugs have been included in the estimation of the cost of […]
• War on Drugs and Terror and American Promise As a result, the people of the US have a reason to doubt that the war on terror is concerned with the safety of the world or even the safety of the American people.
• American Drug War from the Economic Perspective On the basis of this information, it can be presupposed that the reduction of demand is the best way to overcome the drug issue.
• American Drug War, Its Achievements and Failures The critics of this policy argue that the government is using more resources to control drugs, while only using few resources in drug victims’ treatment and rehabilitation.
• Ineffectiveness of the “War on Drugs” Campaign The American government has been using powerful measures and laws to deal with the problem. The main area of concern therefore focuses on the effectiveness of this fight against illicit drugs in the United States.
• Health Law: The Never-Ending War on Drugs The failure of the efforts to curb the trafficking and use of illicit drugs may be a new experience for many countries across the world, but not for the US.
• War on Drugs in Mexico The war on drugs is the most significant occurrence in Mexico in the last decade. These factors have led to the president to declare war on the drug use in order to improve the country’s […]
• The War on Drugs in the US In the US, the negative impacts of drug use became evident in the society at the end of the 19th century, when it was observed that psychotropic drugs such as cocaine and morphine led to […]
• Mexican Drug Cartels and the War on Drugs The examination of the current research on Mexican drug cartels and the War on Drugs helps to understand the causes of the outburst of violence, define the major tendencies of the Mexican War on Drugs […]
• Mexican Drug War: Political, Social, and Economy Damages The cartels use the law enforcement agents against rival cartels through bribes and leaking information on their activities to the police Origin of the Escalating Violence The violence in the county is as a result […]
• American Government’s War on Drugs Analyzing the success of the war on drugs in the society, it is important to understand the drug control rhetoric, which is aimed at realizing a drug-free society.
• Successes and the Failures of the “Drug War” In the past century, the use of illicit drugs reduced drastically owing to the drug war. The growing of the illicit drugs like Cannabis in the US has drastically reduced due to the drug war.
• Drug War in Afghanistan Over the last three decades, the NATO has been making various strategies to end the war and the drug business in Afghanistan because of the negative activities that the Taliban carries out not only in […]
• Mexican Politics, Culture and Drug Wars The 10-year civil war of Mexico that lasted from 1910 to 1920 is believed to be the key that opened up the doors to the new constitution of 1917.
• American Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs
• The Right Way of Handling the War on Drugs
• America Will Never Win the War on Drugs
• Underdeveloped Countries and the War on Drugs
• African Americans, Poverty, and the War on Drugs
• The Political and Economic Factors of the War on Drugs
• Crime and the War on Drugs
• Economics Theory and Crime: Why Is Law Enforcement Failing in the War on Drugs
• Choosing the Right Battlefield for the War on Drugs
• Legalize Marijuana: End the War on Drugs
• Criminology: Drug Policies and the War on Drugs
• Addiction and the War on Drugs
• Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America
• Drug Policies and the War on Drugs
• Joint Interagency Task Force and the War on Drugs
• Propaganda, Stereotypes, and the War on Drugs
• Overcrowded Prisons and the War on Drugs
• America Should End Its War on Drugs
• Drug Legalization and the War on Drugs
• Organized Crime and War on Drugs
• Favela Lives Matter: Youth From Urban Peripheries, Political Engagement and Alternatives to the War on Drugs
• Legalization and the War on Drugs
• Racial Bias and the Civil War on Drugs
• Criminal Justice Enforcement and the United War on Drugs
• America and the War on Drugs
• Budgetary Politics and the War on Drugs
• Ethics and the War on Drugs
• Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs
• End the Bogus War on Drugs
• Parents: First Line Defense in War on Drugs
• Functionalist and Interactionist Views on the War on Drugs
• High Crime Rates and War on Drugs
• Cannabis and the War on Drugs
• Mexican Drug Cartels and the War on Drugs
• Drug Use and Abuse During the War on Drugs
• Criminal Law and the War on Drugs
• The Market for Illegal Drugs and the War on Drugs
• Cocaine, Race, and the War on Drugs
• Ethnocentrism, Class Discrimination, and the Historical Shortcomings of America’s War on Drugs
• Colombia and the War on Drugs: How Short Is the Short Run
• Has the War on Drugs Been a Failure?
• Are You in Favor of War on Drug?
• What Can We Do to Stop the War on Drugs?
• What Is the Point of the War on Drugs?
• Is the War on Drugs Immoral?
• Has the War on Drugs Had Any Positive Effects?
• Is the War on Drugs Working?
• What Are Your Thoughts About the War on Drugs?
• Who Has Benefited From the Us Government’s “War on Drugs”?
• What Are the Negative Effects of War on Drugs?
• Why Did Ronald Reagan Declare War on Drugs?
• Is the “War on Drugs” Futile and a Waste of Resources?
• What Are the Strongest Arguments for and Against the War on Drugs?
• Why Did War on Drugs Fail?
• What Are Some Facts About the War on Drugs?
• Has the United States Lost the “War on Drugs?”
• Do You Think the War on Drugs Is a Joke?
• What Can You Say About War on Drugs?
• Why Do You Agree With the War on Drugs?
• Who Is Winning the War on Drugs?
• What Are the Good Effects of War on Drugs in the Philippines?
• Why Did Richard Nixon Begin the War on Drugs?
• What Is the Relationship Between the War on Drugs and Race?
• What War Will Replace the War on Drugs?
• What Are the Advantages of War on Drugs?
• What Is Hillary Clinton’s Stance on the “War on Drugs”?
• Is War on Drugs Justifiable?
• How Are We Doing on the War on Drugs?
• What Is the Disadvantage and Advantage on War on Drugs?
• What Is the Purpose of the Endless War on Drugs?
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129 War on Drugs Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

The war on drugs has been a controversial and ongoing battle for decades. From the criminalization of drug use to the rise of the opioid epidemic, there are countless topics to explore and discuss when it comes to this complex issue. If you're looking for inspiration for your next essay on the war on drugs, look no further. Here are 129 essay topic ideas and examples to help get you started:

• The history of the war on drugs in the United States
• The impact of the war on drugs on minority communities
• The role of the media in shaping public perception of the war on drugs
• The connection between drug addiction and mental health
• The effectiveness of drug education programs in schools
• The legalization of marijuana and its impact on the war on drugs
• The role of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid epidemic
• The relationship between poverty and drug addiction
• The impact of the war on drugs on incarceration rates
• The connection between drug trafficking and organized crime
• The role of law enforcement in the war on drugs
• The impact of drug addiction on families and communities
• The connection between drug addiction and homelessness
• The role of drug treatment programs in reducing recidivism rates
• The ethics of drug testing in the workplace
• The impact of drug addiction on the economy
• The connection between drug addiction and domestic violence
• The role of drug courts in the criminal justice system
• The impact of the war on drugs on public health
• The connection between drug addiction and human trafficking
• The relationship between drug addiction and child welfare
• The role of peer support groups in recovery from drug addiction
• The impact of drug addiction on academic performance
• The connection between drug addiction and risky sexual behavior
• The role of prescription drug monitoring programs in combating the opioid epidemic
• The ethics of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses
• The impact of drug addiction on the foster care system
• The connection between drug addiction and suicide rates
• The role of faith-based organizations in helping individuals recover from drug addiction
• The impact of drug addiction on healthcare costs
• The connection between drug addiction and gun violence
• The relationship between drug addiction and child abuse
• The role of harm reduction programs in reducing drug-related harm
• The impact of drug addiction on veterans
• The connection between drug addiction and mental illness
• The role of drug addiction in the spread of infectious diseases
• The ethics of drug testing welfare recipients
• The impact of drug addiction on emergency room visits
• The connection between drug addiction and incarceration rates
• The role of drug addiction in the spread of HIV/AIDS
• The impact of drug addiction on the criminal justice system
• The connection between drug addiction and unemployment rates
• The relationship between drug addiction and domestic terrorism
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of fentanyl overdoses
• The impact of drug addiction on child development
• The connection between drug addiction and human rights abuses
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of synthetic drugs
• The ethics of drug testing pregnant women for drug use
• The impact of drug addiction on the environment
• The connection between drug addiction and animal cruelty
• The relationship between drug addiction and cybercrime
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of drug-resistant bacteria
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of prescription drug abuse
• The ethics of drug testing athletes for performance-enhancing drugs
• The impact of drug addiction on the military
• The connection between drug addiction and elder abuse
• The relationship between drug addiction and school shootings
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of synthetic opioids
• The impact of drug addiction on the prison system
• The connection between drug addiction and cyberbullying
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of designer drugs
• The ethics of drug testing students for drug use
• The connection between drug addiction and gang violence
• The relationship between drug addiction and environmental degradation
• The role of drug addiction in the rise of drug-related deaths

These essay topic ideas and examples are just a starting point for exploring the many facets of the war on drugs. Whether you're interested in policy implications, public health issues, or social justice concerns, there is no shortage of angles to consider when writing about this important and complex topic.

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How the war on drugs impacts social determinants of health beyond the criminal legal system

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Research and Academic Engagement, Drug Policy Alliance, New York, NY, USA.
• 2 Drug Policy Alliance, New York, NY, USA.
• PMID: 35852299
• PMCID: PMC9302017
• DOI: 10.1080/07853890.2022.2100926

There is a growing recognition in the fields of public health and medicine that social determinants of health (SDOH) play a key role in driving health inequities and disparities among various groups, such that a focus upon individual-level medical interventions will have limited effects without the consideration of the macro-level factors that dictate how effectively individuals can manage their health. While the health impacts of mass incarceration have been explored, less attention has been paid to how the "war on drugs" in the United States exacerbates many of the factors that negatively impact health and wellbeing, disproportionately impacting low-income communities and people of colour who already experience structural challenges including discrimination, disinvestment, and racism. The U.S. war on drugs has subjected millions to criminalisation, incarceration, and lifelong criminal records, disrupting or altogether eliminating their access to adequate resources and supports to live healthy lives. This paper examines the ways that "drug war logic" has become embedded in key SDOH and systems, such as employment, education, housing, public benefits, family regulation (commonly referred to as the child welfare system), the drug treatment system, and the healthcare system. Rather than supporting the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities, the U.S. drug war has exacerbated harm in these systems through practices such as drug testing, mandatory reporting, zero-tolerance policies, and coerced treatment. We argue that, because the drug war has become embedded in these systems, medical practitioners can play a significant role in promoting individual and community health by reducing the impact of criminalisation upon healthcare service provision and by becoming engaged in policy reform efforts. KEY MESSAGESA drug war logic that prioritises and justifies drug prohibition, criminalisation, and punishment has fuelled the expansion of drug surveillance and control mechanisms in numerous facets of everyday life in the United States negatively impacting key social determinants of health, including housing, education, income, and employment.The U.S. drug war's frontline enforcers are no longer police alone but now include physicians, nurses, teachers, neighbours, social workers, employers, landlords, and others.Physicians and healthcare providers can play a significant role in promoting individual and community health by reducing the impact of criminalisation upon healthcare service provision and engaging in policy reform.

Keywords: Social determinants of health; child welfare; criminalisation; education; employment; health policy; public benefits; public policy; substance use treatment; surveillance; war on drugs.

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“It Ruined My Life”: The effects of the War on Drugs on people who inject drugs (PWID) in rural Puerto Rico

a Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 206 Benton Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA

b Department of Social Science, LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), 31-10 Thompson Ave, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA

C. Gelpi-Acosta

M. welch-lazoritz, k. dombrowski.

The War on Drugs has raised the incarceration rates of racial minorities for non-violent drug-related crimes, profoundly stigmatized drug users, and redirected resources from drug prevention and treatment to militarizing federal and local law enforcement. Yet, while some states consider shifting their punitive approach to drug use, to one based on drug treatment and rehabilitation, nothing suggests that these policy shifts are being replicated in Puerto Rico.

This paper utilizes data from 360 PWID residing in four rural towns in the mountainous area of central Puerto Rico. We initially recruited 315 PWID using respondent-driven sampling (RDS) and collected data about risk practices and conducted HIV and HCV testing. During a second phase, we conducted 34 micro-ethnographic assays, in which we randomly recruited 34 participants from the first phase and included their ego networks in this phase. Our ethnographic inquiry produced significant data regarding the effects of the war on drugs on the local drug trade, drug availability, and injectors’ social networks.

Findings suggest that repressive policing has been ineffective in preventing drug distribution and use among those in our study. This type of law enforcement approach has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of poor drug users in rural Puerto Rico, and mainly for nonviolent drug-related crimes. In addition, incarceration exposes PWID to a form of a cruel and unusual punishment: having to quit heroin “cold turkey” while the prison environment also represents a HIV/HCV risk. In turn, the war on drugs not only diverts resources from treatment but also shapes treatment ideologies, punishing non-compliant patients.

Shifting the emphasis from repression to treatment and rehabilitation is likely to have a positive impact on the health and overall quality of life of PWID and their communities.

Introduction

Carlos 1 , currently in his mid-30s, started injecting drugs in prison while serving a two-year sentence for marijuana possession. He said that he started smoking marijuana “late” (age 21), while attending college in Puerto Rico. It was during this time that he “caught a habit,” he said, and was charged with drug possession with intent to distribute after the police found a half-ounce of marijuana on him. His car was confiscated, and he received a two-year probation sentence. Carlos tried to quit his marijuana habit, but could not succeed. After failing his third drug test, a violation of the terms of his probation, he was sent to prison. Instead of going to the minimum-security prison he had hoped for, given his lack of a criminal record (aside from being caught with a relatively small amount of marijuana in his possession), he was sent to a medium-security prison for violating his probation terms. Carlos explained how he started injecting drugs while serving his sentence: “They call it the freezer because the air it is always on; it is freezing cold and closed.” Unable to find marijuana in the prison, he started selling drugs “to spend time and pocket some cash.” It was then that he started sniffing heroin. Soon after, heroin injectors started telling him that “it was better by the vein.” He bought one of the rare clean syringes available in jail and injected with somebody’s help. He then passed the syringe to others in his cell block, “over 20 inmates,” in his account. He explains that he tried to clean the syringe with bleach and water, but “could not avoid contacting HCV [hepatitis C virus]” because “everybody in jail has it.” He says that he knew he would become addicted to injecting drugs, but at that time he “just didn’t care.” Carlos explained, “I was full of resentment because the system was unfair to me. What they really did with that sentence was to fuck-up my life. After that, I stopped being one person and became another one.”

The War on Drugs, initiated by President Nixon more than four decades ago, provides a backdrop for understanding Carlos’s predicament. Focused on eliminating the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs, this policy has been criticized for being unable to attain these goals. Indeed, in the United States, the drug supply has not been disrupted and, in particular, heroin consumption is on the rise ( Cicero, Ellis, Surratt, & Kurtz, 2014 ; Jones, 2013 ; Lankenau et al., 2012 ). The repressive approach of the War on Drugs has, however, dramatically raised the incarceration rates of racial minorities for non-violent drug-related crimes ( Alexander, 2012 ; Williams, 1989 , 1992 ; Moore & Elkavich, 2008 ; Drucker, 2013 ), profoundly stigmatized drug users ( Greenwald, 2009 ; Weinberg 2000 , 2005 ; Denning, 2000 ), and redirected resources from drug prevention and treatment to militarizing federal and local law enforcement ( Kraska, 2007 ). Yet, while the War on Drugs is likely to endure with the new Trump administration, local and state challenges to this federal policy are becoming the norm, and are increasingly proving successful ( Dickinson, 2015 ).

The War on Drugs was initially challenged by the introduction of medical marijuana ( Hoffmann & Weber, 2010 ), followed by the legalization of recreational marijuana. Currently, 26 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana in some form ( Fuller, 2016 ). A study conducted by Cerda, Wall, Keyes, Galea, and Hasin (2012) suggests that while states that had legalized marijuana have a higher prevalence of users than those that do not, legalization does not seem to have increased overall drug use. Cohn, Johnson, Rose, Rath, and Villanti (2017) have more recently replicated previous studies and arrived at the same conclusion. In addition, in the past few years an epidemic of prescription drug use in the rural U.S. has led some states to consider shifting their punitive approach to drug use (incarceration) to one based on drug treatment and rehabilitation ( Seelye, 2015 ). While some have drawn attention to the racial disparities behind this policy shift, asserting that it favors Caucasian drug users while racial minorities continue to face incarceration-first approaches ( Chin, 2002 ), this policy shift still represents a clear challenge to the punishment approach.

Yet, nothing suggests that these policy shifts are being replicated in Puerto Rico. As of June 25, 2015, there were 12,381 people in Puerto Rican state prisons ( Martinez-Guzman, 2015 : 1). Of these, approximately 65% came from households with yearly incomes below $20,000 (2015, p. 51), and 16% are behind bars for drug offenses (2015, p. 70). In addition, 69% report having had substance use problems prior to incarceration, and a striking 80% of these have never received drug treatment (2015, p. 123). In 2016, the average yearly cost of housing an individual in a correctional facility was $28,259, and the yearly correctional budget currently nears $376 million dollars ( PR Gov, 2016a ). In addition, the approved 2017 budget for local law enforcement surpasses $754 million ( PR Gov, 2016b ). In contrast, only about $123 million have been allocated for drug replacement therapies such as methadone ( ASSMCA, 2009 ). Considering there are about 60,000 people in Puerto Rico with opiate misuse problems ( Hotz & Rios, 2013 ), and a significant portion of people with substance use problems are behind bars, funding priorities are clearly aligned with punishment instead of treatment and rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the way data are aggregated makes impossible to know which portions of the budget for drug repression and drug treatment are funded by the federal government and which ones are supported by the island.

In this manuscript, we present findings based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with people who inject drugs (PWID) in rural Puerto Rico. We examine the effects of the War on Drugs on a small group of PWID. Findings suggest that repressive policing has been ineffective in preventing drug distribution and use among those in our study. This type of law enforcement approach has, however, resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of poor drug users in rural Puerto Rico, and mainly for nonviolent drug-related crimes. In addition, aggressive policing has placed additional burdens on PWID, forcing them to travel (often by foot) to other locations to acquire the drugs they need and, through incarceration, exposing the vast majority of them to what is arguably a form of a cruel and unusual punishment: having to quit heroin “cold turkey.” Most correctional facilities do not offer drug replacement therapies. We argue that shifting the emphasis from repression to treatment and rehabilitation is likely to have a positive impact on the health and overall quality of life of PWID and their communities.

This research is part a larger longitudinal study, which received IRB approval through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (IRB# 20131113844FB) and the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine (IRB# A8480115). This paper utilizes data from 360 PWID residing in four rural towns in the mountainous area of central Puerto Rico, which are located about 30–40 miles from the capital, San Juan. Sites were selected because they were representative of rural PWID on the island ( López et al., 2015 ). In addition, these sites were chosen due to the presence of El Punto en la Montaña, the only syringe-exchange program operating in rural Puerto Rico, with which we established a close collaboration that facilitated data collection with this population ( Welch-Lazoritz et al., 2017 ).

The study is divided into three phases. The first phase consisted of an analysis of the sexual and injection risk behaviors of PWID residing in these municipalities, as well as the degree of access to health-promoting services. We initially recruited 315 PWID using respondent-driven sampling (RDS) by starting two seeds in each of the four municipalities (for a total of eight seeds and 307 recruits). Data collection was completed between April 2015 and December 2016. RDS has proven effective in recruiting hard-to-reach populations ( Abdul-Quander et al., 2006 ; Heckathorn, 2002 , 2007 ; Johnston, Chen, Silva-Santisteban, & Raymond, 2013 ). Participants who completed the survey were paid $25, and were also given the chance to become recruiters. After securing consent, they were provided with three referral coupons to recruit other PWID who had not previously participated in the study. Every eligible referral earned the recruiter an additional $10.

To be eligible, participants had to be 18 years of age or older, alert at the time of the interview, and had to have injected drugs at least once within the 30 days prior to the interview. Verification of current injection use was done through visual inspection of injection track marks, as well as through a questionnaire that measured knowledge of injection practices. The questionnaire, administered by the interviewers, was based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance study with injection drug users (Round 3). INSTI Rapid HIV antibody tests (Biolytical Laboratories) and OraQuick HCV Rapid antibody tests (OraSure Technologies) were used to assess HIV and HCV status. Every participant was compensated an additional $5 for each rapid test performed. Participants who tested positive for HCV or HIV were offered a referral and transportation to a primary care doctor for confirmatory testing.

During the second phase (December 2015–December 2016), we conducted 34 micro-ethnographic assays, in which we randomly recruited 34 participants from the first phase to serve ask key respondents, and we interviewed their full ego networks. Forty-four PWID that had not participated in Phase 1 were either acquiring or using intravenous drugs with at least one of the 34 key respondents recruited in this phase and were thus brought into the study. Demographic characteristics of participants in this phase mirror the characteristics of those already enrolled in Phase 1 and have been described extensively elsewhere ( Abadie, Welch-Lazoritz, Gelpi-Acosta, Reyes, & Dombrowski, 2016 ). In addition to interviewing them and testing these participants again, we employed ethnographic methods to map their risk practices. We shadowed participants for up to two weeks, following them through their daily routines, from “hustling” to make income to drug acquisition and use. This methodology enabled us to document who was acquiring and using drugs and with whom, as well as their injection risk practices. While during this phase we did not directly inquire into the effects of the War on Drugs on the everyday lives of the 34 ethnography participants and their ego networks, our ethnographic approach produced significant data regarding its effects on the local drug trade, drug availability, and injectors’ social networks. The data we present in this manuscript was obtained during this second phase. In-depth interviews were transcribed and translated. All personal identifiers were removed. Qualitative software was used to manage coding. Codes were developed to convey the wide arrange of themes and variables buried in the narratives of PWID. As it is practice in qualitative analysis, these codes were iteratively revised and regrouped until they eventually represented a set of higher-level axial codes comprehensively describing participants’ experiences regarding the effects of the war on drugs in their everyday life. Following Strauss’ grounded theory approach ( Strauss & Corbin, 1998 ), the interpretation of the data emerge inductively from the data, instead of imposing a pre-existing theoretical framework to fit the data.

The War on Drugs: the effects of this “cat and mouse” game on PWID and their communities

One of the most visible effects of the War on Drugs on the island is law enforcement’s repression of drug users through the aggressive pursuit of drug dealers. These policing efforts are based on the belief that limiting drug supply is the best way to tackle the drug problem ( Bertram, Blachman, Sharpe, & Andreas, 1996 ). These repressive policies have created a true “state of siege” in already poor and vulnerable communities. This is how Sandro, a participant who was a street-level drug dealer, remembers former Governor Pedro Rosselló’s “ mano dura ” (strong hand) platform from 1994–2000:

Rosselló’s mano dura on crime hit drug dealing in Puerto Rico hard. It stopped some puntos [drug-dealing spots] from opening, but also what it did is that it changed their location. For example, it stopped the punto at Berwin [a housing project in metropolitan San Juan] to the point that nothing could be sold there, but you could find drugs in the neighboring areas. But for that to happen, several months elapsed. It was not the case that Berwin stopped, and then the next week others were selling. They [police] also came here [my town], but not with the same intensity they did in the metropolitan area. He [Rosselló] used the National Guard to stop the drug trade and, of course, it worked for a while. In our town, you could see them roaming around and stopping by the punto and you wondered: God, what would I do now? The punto closes until they leave.

Massive operations aimed at entire neighborhoods continue to take place today, and with the same intensity. During the two years of fieldwork, we saw police cars parked day and night at the entrance of residential housing projects ( residenciales ) to prevent puntos from operating in these areas. We also witnessed weekly operations against certain drug spots, making the regular operation of this street-level drug trade difficult. In this way, the War on Drugs resembles a “cat and mouse” game, with one drug spot closing while others open to supply the market. As Sandro suggests, such efforts might effectively shut down the targeted venue, but instead of forcing rural PWID to quit their drug use altogether, these police operations only prompted PWID to find other sites to acquire drugs. Study participants complained about a reliable supply, and, to ensure they could acquire the daily dose needed to avoid withdrawal symptoms, they were forced to carpool, take the limited public transportation, or make other arrangements to access drugs in the metropolitan area. Others resorted to walking to different puntos .

Participants in our study provide further clues of how these police interventions are conducted. Just like in the continental U.S., the War on Drugs in Puerto Rico has militarized its police and introduced heavy weaponry and helicopters. In addition, law enforcement has made extensive use of cameras, some able to record activities from hundreds of yards away, others used by undercover agents who buy drugs directly at puntos . Chelo is a PWID who used to sell drugs at a punto . He explained, “Now they have a technology where they tape you, they have micro cameras they wear in their shirts, and anybody can incriminate you.” In addition, police recruit PWID to buy drugs from suspected puntos to record the transactions without calling attention to the police’s presence. And in an escalating drug war, the police have employed even more creative methods. For instance, our informants told us about an undercover policewoman pretending to be an “addicted nurse,” who was frequenting a local shooting gallery and asking unsuspecting users to buy doses for her. In doing so, she collected vital information about how the punto was run, and this led to many arrests. More recently, police scheduled an operation for Halloween day, allowing them to enter a punto while using masks and costumes. The images obtained through these means constitute part of the evidence that is used in court. Denny, one of our participants, was confronted with this type of evidence: “They told me, you were wearing this and this and once you paid for the drug, you put it in your trousers’ front pocket. I told myself: how the hell do they know that? I denied everything but then they showed me the images and I was right there!”

Despite the aggressive policing of puntos , injectors are usually left undisturbed when they are using drugs in open spaces like abandoned houses, bridge underpasses, or shooting galleries. According to our participants, while cops have been known to force participants to throw away their heroin (a practice they call “ la cura ,” meaning “the cure”) and injection equipment, this is very unusual. These spaces are often filthy, with used syringes and piled up garbage. Furthermore, injectors might have already used or had the drug mixed with their blood in their syringes, fear of HIV transmission would represent a powerful limit to police action. In addition, since these places are removed from the puntos where the drugs are acquired, this places a burden of proof on prosecutors in trying to bring criminal charges against drug dealers.

Most police raids result in the conviction of nonviolent street-level operatives. Some are PWID who entered the drug trade either as “look-outs,” alerting others to the presence of “suspicious” movements near a punto , such as cops or rival groups, or as “runners,” bringing purchased drugs to waiting customers. Often these raids end up also targeting the customers themselves, who are charged with “drug possession,” and in some cases, even “possession with intent to distribute” (a more serious charge that results in jail time.) Even the possession of a $5 bag of either cocaine or heroin can lead to prosecution, especially if there has been a previous conviction or if the person is violating probation by being in possession of drugs. While we did not inquire into participants’ experiences with the criminal justice system, we can confidently say that most of the participants in our study had spent some time in jail, usually for nonviolent crimes. Paradoxically, police operations sometimes contribute to increasing the drug-related violence they aim to address. When one punto is shut down and their “ bichotes ” jailed, rival groups might use this moment of vulnerability to invade the area in order to remove the competition and to establish themselves. A battle will then ensue for the control of territory to protect or expand the “market share.” Once established, the new “owner” might continue to resort to violence to further their control. As Sandro explains:

The owner of the punto left and it fell in the hands of other people. These new guys that came in used violence to impose themselves and earn respect. They did not hesitate in shooting you either in your leg or in the head. Yes, they were very abusive. One would shoot people for no reason whatsoever, and make comments suggesting that if you even considered selling drugs [as a competitor], no matter how little, that could get you shot. Even before you even sold a bag, just to prevent folks from doing it. And then folks saw that and thought: whoa!

We witnessed how in rural Puerto Rico aggressive policing renders nonviolent drug users and small-time drug dealers the most likely victims of the War on Drugs. In what follows, we present how the War on Drugs also translates into unbearable human suffering upon incarceration.

Cruel and inhuman punishment: quitting “cold turkey” in jail

When a PWID is incarcerated, in addition to the loss of personal freedom, they are cut off, even if temporarily, from the drugs they used outside. If they did not use drugs frequently, the heroin withdrawal effects might be mild and bearable. Once in the prison’s general population, they would either be able to acquire – albeit at a much higher price, typical of prisons – a low “maintenance” dose or quit altogether. But for those with heavier heroin habits, painful withdrawal symptoms are unavoidable. Vomiting, diarrhea, stomach and muscular pains, weakness, and ongoing nausea are some of the most frequent effects of heroin withdrawal. If a dose is not secured, these symptoms intensify over time. Since drug treatment provided in most Puerto Rican jails is very limited, users are forced to endure this period “cold turkey,” only with the help of a simple pain killer or a sleeping pill provided by the correctional officers. Of his experience, Pedro recalls:

I quit a 10-bag habit in that cold [air-conditioned unit]. I puked, shivered. I was calm, quiet, and suddenly I was jumping up and down! And then there are all the other symptoms that you get… a few days, it lasted like three days. In jail, you must quit cold turkey because they have you, 24 hours in, thrown on the floor sleeping on a thin mattress in the same cubicle where other users are also trying to quit. It’s not easy, I have seen folks, forgive me the expression, shitting on themselves. In jail, you are forced to quit. Their detox is to put you in that room and leave you there. “Are you ok?” they would ask. “Yeah ok, but I have a bit of diarrhea and can’t sleep,” I tried to explain to them. At night, sometimes the nurse makes a round and gives you a pill. You might get it for seven days. Sometimes the doctor sees you like that and says: “he’s discharged!” I have been there, I have been through it, and it is not easy. Man, it’s not easy.

As “cold turkey” was not grim enough, correctional facilities in Puerto Rico appear to purposely ignore the fact that people still inject drugs in prison. This mindset prevents the implementation of harm-reduction policies within prisons (such as clean syringes and other injection equipment for safer injecting). Inmates are forced to share contraband syringes or rely on “self-made” improvised “syringes” made by materials found or brought into jail. As Carlos’s testimony at the beginning of this manuscript illustrates, the same syringe might be shared by dozens of others. In this context, it is no surprise that a lack of clean syringes is fueling an HCV epidemic ( Abadie et al., 2016 ; Abadie, Welch-Lazoritz, Khan, & Dombrowski, 2017 ; Peña-Orellana, Hernández-Viver, Caraballo-Correa, & Albizu-García, 2011 ).

While syringes and safe injection equipment are hard to find in prisons drugs enter easily. In these jails, one participant told us, “there is everything, like in the street.” Drugs are sometimes smuggled in with the complicity of corrupt correctional officers. Pedro explained:

The very same prison guard [brings the drugs in]. [imitating a drug dealer outside prison] “Guard, I will give you $500 for you to drop this into the cell. Just drop it, I’ll take care of the rest.” There are guards who do it because their pay is low, or because they have a family to take care of, or they need the money. But they do it.

A market economy with high demand and logistical supply problems brings prices up. As a result, the prices charged for drugs inside prisons are much higher than on the streets. Prison customers make payments through their relatives outside the prison, employing electronic payment methods like Western Union or MoneyGram to deposit into designated accounts. Once the deposit is confirmed, the drug is delivered. Because this process can be complicated for some drug users, especially those who lack financial support from their families, those who are heroin-dependent find themselves in a particularly challenging predicament.

“Three strikes and you’re out”: a punitive approach in opioid treatment programs

The War on Drugs creates a punitive environment that also shapes drug treatment programs. There are two main modalities of drug replacement therapy to address opioid dependence. Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) has been around since the 1970s ( Dole & Nyswander, 1965 ) and, more recently, Suboxone has been in use since the mid-2000s. Both substances are available in the area where we conducted our research and are covered by “La Reforma,” or the local version of Medicaid. The availability of these drugs, however, is very limited. There is only one methadone clinic in the four municipalities where we conducted our study, and it is running at full capacity with a long waiting list. Participants in our study indicate that it might take several months to receive an appointment to start treatment.

Methadone is administered daily and comes in a liquid form that participants swallow at a clinic under strict supervision. If participants show compliance, they can receive weekly or even monthly supplies, avoiding the daily visits. Suboxone treatment comes in the form of a daily tablet and, as in MMT, participants can receive up to a monthly supply – also depending on compliance – allowing them to avoid daily clinic visits. But unlike methadone, those taking Suboxone are not supervised by clinicians when taking their daily dose. Once participants receive their pills, they can decide whether to adhere to the treatment completely, or play around, taking some pills and selling others. Prices for Suboxone (better known as “Subu” on the streets) vary. In jail, where there is typically no drug treatment available, a Subu pill can go for $40 or $50, or even more. On the streets, pricing depends on who is selling and who is buying. A friendly seller can may sell it for as little as $5 while others can demand $7 or $8. In comparison, a small bag of heroin in the area is sold for as little as $5.

Understaffed, underfunded, and unable to cope with the large demand for drug treatment, both methadone and Suboxone programs have established a series of procedures to control patient flow. In addition to waiting lists that delay entry into the program for months, these programs also adopt a “three strikes and you’re out” punitive strategy. To enroll, prospective participants must produce a positive heroin test, showing that they are active users. But once enrolled, they are expected to stop using illegal substances completely. A test showing “dirty urine” (urine with traces of an illicit substance other than opioids) prompts a warning, followed by a conversation with a social worker or other member of the staff about the participant’s commitment to the program. The participant is informed that after three positive drug test results, they will be “dropped” from the program. This is the case regardless of all the methadone literature that shows that secondary drug use among methadone program enrollees is common, and that such use is best addressed by enhanced support ( Deck & Carlson 2005 ; Magura & Rosenblum, 2001 ; Magura, Rosenblum, Fong, Villano, & Richman, 2002 ; Magura et al., 2009 ; Magura & Haddox, 2007 ; Gelpí-Acosta 2014 , 2015 ).

As Varas-Diaz, Santiago-Negron, Neilands, Cintron-Bou, and Malave-Rivera (2010) have suggested, the war on drugs have stigmatized PWID, in turn, affecting the way staff at these clinics perceive and deal with their clients. It might be that the limited resources of Puerto Rican drug treatment facilities pave the way for a false dichotomy between the “deserving” participant who follows the rules and stays “clean” and the “undeserving” participant who continues to test positive for drug use. In turn, participants adapt to the programs demands by displaying a series of routines that go from accommodation to resistance. According to Moore, similar scripts have been found among PWID in Australia ( Moore 2009 ). Indeed, our ethnography shows how rural PWID manage this reality. Papito, a user in his early 30s, tried to do a “trick” to mask dirty urine. He had been attending the local Suboxone treatment for more than a month. Papito had two tests showing traces of heroin use; one more, and he would be suspended and unable to receive treatment. Papito told me he planned to pull off “a trick” and needed to use the bathroom at our office. He had obtained a “clean” urine sample from somebody else and had emptied a toothpaste tube that he planned to fill with the urine. He had also created a hole in his front pocket in order to sneak the tube into the clinic. He then would pretend to urinate but instead he would pour the clean urine into the container and hand it to the waiting nurse, who would be also present in the bathroom with him. (Nurses supervise the process to make sure that nobody cheats with their samples.) He emerged a few minutes later and headed to the Suboxone treatment center just a few blocks away. Four hours later, Papito was done with his appointment and came to our office again. He was ecstatic because his “trick” had worked. “The social” [social worker] did not suspect anything and he was marked down for a clean urine sample. As a result, he received 14 pills, two per day, enough for one week. He was a bit disappointed because he had hoped to get a one-month supply. He told us that he wanted to “have fun” and inject for three weeks, when he felt like it, then “discipline himself” during the last week to get a clean result and obtain the next month’s supply. Suboxone helps him afford his drug use while also keeping him a little bit in check, a win-win situation for him. The center told him that he might be able to get the monthly supply, but only after producing repeated clean urine samples. Unable to produce subsequent “clean” samples he ended up dropping from the program.

After decades of implementing the “ mano dura ” War on Drugs in Puerto Rico, there is clear evidence that it has not succeeded in addressing the problematic use of illicit substances. Noting this failure, authors Santiago-Negron and Albizu-Garcia (2003) decry the unintended effects the misallocation of resources has had on public health policies in the Island. Drug use and drug markets continue to thrive with an estimation of 542 puntos island-wide. In Cidra alone, where the ethnography participant Papito resides, the underground drug market was recently valued at $40.2 million ( Torres, 2016 ).

Though enforcement seems to have had little effect on the availability of drugs, its impact on the health of drug users and their surrounding communities is likely to have been significant. Recent research has shown that self-organizing behaviors of PWID can create risk network structures with implications for the non-spreading of HIV and other injection related diseases ( Dombrowski et al., 2016 ; Khan, Dombrowski, Saad, McLean, & Friedman, 2013 ). In these cases, stable “network firewalls” ( Friedman et al., 2000 ) help prevent new, highly contagious infection outbreaks from reaching uninfected sections of the network, lowering the overall risk of infection despite non-zero HIV incidence and the ongoing practice of risk behaviors. The haphazard removal of people from the injection network results in large changes to the overall structure, putting at risk the “ firewall effect” seen in more stable networks, and generally raising the risk of HIV infection across the community. In this case, while enforcement does little to change the availability of drugs, it can severely impact the way drugs are used and with this, the overall health risks associate with drug use ( Dombrowski, Curtis, Friedman, & Khan, 2013 ; Duncan et al., forthcoming).

It is clear from this information that the emphasis on cutting the drug supply, instead of on addressing the treatment demand by treating drug misuse as a public health problem, has left drug treatment programs severely neglected. When combined with the extent of poverty present in Puerto Rico, this creates a serious problem. Per capita income is estimated at $11,394, which is half of that in the poorest U.S. states like Mississippi or West Virginia (US Census Bureau, 2015). To complicate matters, the island had embraced extreme neoliberal policies that led to the privatization of its healthcare system, and it is now struggling with the effects of a protracted economic crisis that started in the mid-2000s ( Lopez-Garriga, 2016 ). With declining revenue and increasing healthcare expenses, the government chose to cut from the already meager treatment programs. But while treatment options for drug misuse have dwindled, placing a strain on PWID and their families and communities, the demand for treatment, according to our observations, has not diminished.

To solve this problem, municipalities have resorted to a set of unusual measures. Treatment in Puerto Rico is heavily dependent on faith-based programs, such as CREA , although this organization does not provide any medication to help patients cope with the effects of heroin withdrawal and has a very poor record of patients avoiding drug relapse ( Upegui & Torruela, 2015 ). Another alternative has been to send PWID to the U.S. for treatment. Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, the idea is to help them access (abroad) the treatment they cannot receive at home ( Deren, Shedlin, Decena, & Mino, 2005 ; Deren, Kang, Colón, & Robles, 2007a ; Deren, Kang, Colón, & Robles, 2007b ; Deren, Gelpí-Acosta, Albizu, González, & Des Jarlais, 2014a ; Deren, Gelpí-Acosta, Albizu, González, & Des Jarlais, 2014b ; Gelpí-Acosta, Hagan, Jenness, Wendel, & Neaigus, 2011 , Gelpí-Acosta, Pouget, Reilly, Hagan, Neaigus, Wendel, Marshall, 2016 ). This, in turn, creates yet another strain for Puerto Rican PWID since this kind of migration is arguably structurally imposed and therefore not entirely voluntary. Furthermore, some of these programs have been criticized as a “modern form of human slavery,” for preying on vulnerable impoverished patients and their families while providing little or no therapeutic benefit ( Lubrano, 2016 ).

Unfortunately, despite mounting evidence of its failure on the island, the War on Drugs does not show any sign of slowing down. On the contrary, the newly elected governor, Ricardo Rosello – son of the former governor Pedro Rosello – seems eager to produce his own version of the mano dura . He was elected on a “tough-on-crime” discourse and has introduced legislative changes to make it more difficult for convicted drug users to enter treatment in exchange for serving their sentences ( Lopez-Caban, 2017 ).

It seems that the permanence of the War on Drugs, both in the continental U.S. and in Puerto Rico, can be explained less by its success in tackling the problem of drug addiction than by the material resources it can mobilize from the militarization of the police, the growing industrial prison complex, and the political support of a fearful electorate ( Bourgeois & Schonberg, 2009 ; Benson, Rasmussen, & Sollars, 1995 ; Whitford & Yates, 2009 ; Johns, 1992 ). Research findings illustrate the unevenness of the war on drugs in the US. We suggest that a critique of the war on drugs should pay close attention not only to historical factors but also to the local contexts in which these policies are displayed. For example, findings on the effects on the war on drugs in rural Puerto Rico in particular, contrast with the introduction of a prevention based policy approach in rural US where the transition from prescription opioids to injection heroin has reached epidemic levels mainly among poor, white men. While generalizations are possible, they should be made with caution, making sure not to overlook how particular social contexts might have shaped the way the war on drugs is conceived and implemented.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health [grant number R01DA037117]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

1 Not his real name. All names have been changed to protect participants’ anonymity.

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THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY: The War on Drugs

America has spent three decades and hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a national war on drugs. Has the war on drugs been an effective way of dealing with America's drug problem or does it cause more harm than good? How should we weigh the moral and utilitarian arguments for and against the war on drugs; in other words, do we need to intensify the war on drugs or is it time to declare a cease fire?

To view the full transcript of this episode, read below

Peter Robinson:  Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Our show today,  The War on Drugs . Testimony before the United States' Senate by the Federal Council of Churches. I quote, "In dealing with gigantic social evils like disease or crime, individual liberty must be controlled in the interest of public safety." Later in the testimony and again I quote, "Traffic in these intoxicants is a social evil that must be destroyed. It means the degradation of families and needless inefficiency in industry."

No, the Federal Council of Churches was not testifying in favor of the war on drugs. It was testifying in favor of prohibition. Prohibition was enacted in 1920 with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It banned the sale of alcohol throughout the United States. What happened? Consumption of alcohol did decline but only temporarily. A black market in alcohol arose, giving rise to violent crime and colorful figures such as Al Capone. And as for the hoped for improvements in family life and industrial productivity, they never materialized. From hooch to hash.

Today's war on drugs has been going on for more than thirty years at a cost, every year, of billions of dollars. Our question, simply this, is the war on drugs any more effective than was the war on alcohol?

With us, two guests. Pete Wilson is the former governor of California. Governor Wilson is a staunch advocate of the war on drugs. Milton Friedman is a Nobel Prize winning economist. Dr. Friedman believes the war on drugs should be brought to an end.

Title: War, What Is It Good For?

Peter Robinson:  The  Economist  magazine this past August, I quote, "If you want to see money thrown at a problem to no good effect, you need look no further than America's war on drugs." The war on drugs and no good effect. Pete Wilson?

Pete Wilson:  Well I would disagree with that. The effort that is being made is to contain drug use, to prevent the kind of dysfunctional behavior, dangerous behavior, the neglect of children, all of the things that come from drug use of dangerous drugs, whether it is legal or illegal. And yes, it's expensive but I would argue that the alternative is far more costly.

Peter Robinson:  No good effect. Milton Freedman?

Milton Friedman:  Worse than no good effect. Many ha--harmful effects. We have been destroying other countries because we cannot enforce our own laws. The attempt to prohibit drugs has done far more harm than good.

Peter Robinson:  Pete Wilson, listen to a few statistics. First declared by Richard Nixon, the war on drugs has gone on for more than three decades. This year, 2001, the federal government will spend more than nineteen billion dollars on drug control policies with state and local governments kicking in another twenty-two billion. So we're talking about something that's gone on for thirty years and has a current year price tag of over forty billion dollars. The price of drugs, heroin and cocaine, lower today than it was fifteen years ago. After dropping somewhat during the 1980's, drug use now appears to be rising. I cite one study, the percentage of high school seniors who used an illegal drug within the past thirty days, peaked at forty percent in 1980, drops to fourteen percent in 1992, but has now risen to twenty-five percent. You still wish to maintain that this is a good investment for the nation?

Pete Wilson:  Yeah and I think the statistics that you are citing make the point that when we, in fact, actually engaged in a serious national effort, which didn't began in really until about 19--the mid 1980's. For a seven year period ending in '92, it had the effect of su--substantially containing the problem.

Peter Robinson:  Okay, what about these distinctions? When you have somebody who is serious about it, you can actually accomplish something?

Milton Friedman:  I don't think, first of all, the most important thing is you're not looking at the real cost of the attempt to (?) the drug. The costs are not dollars. The dollars are the least of it. There's a lot of money wasted.

Pete Wilson:  On that, we agree.

Milton Friedman:  The dollars are the least of it. What the real costs is what is done to our judicial system, what is done to our civil rights, what is done to other countries. I want Pete Wilson to tell me how he can justify destroying Colombia because we cannot enforce our laws. If we can enforce our laws, our laws prohibit the consumption of illegal drugs. If we can enforce those, it would be no problem about Colombia. But, as it is, we have caused th--tens of thousands of deaths in Colombia and other Latin American countries. I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program--immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it's destroyed nations…

Peter Robinson:  It's destroyed civil rights at home because of large numbers of Blacks and Hispanics and…

[Talking at same time]

Peter Robinson:  …what do you mean by that?

Milton Friedman:  No, no. It's destroyed civil rights at home for a very simple reason. If you take laws against murder or theft…

Peter Robinson:  Right.

Milton Friedman:  …there's a victim who has an interest in reporting it. So if somebody is--has a burglary, he calls the cops and the cops come and investigate. Now in drug use, in the--when you try to prevent somebody from ingesting something he wants to ingest, you have a willing buyer and a willing seller. There's a deal made.

Peter Robinson:  No one has an interest in reporting it.

Milton Friedman:  No one has an interest--and so the only way you can enforce it is through informers. That's the way in which the Soviet Union tried to enforce similar la--laws, laws which tried to prevent people from saying things they shouldn't say. Th--what's the difference, Pete, between s--p--saying to somebody, the government may tell you what you can take in your mouth but the government may not tell you what you may say out of your mouth? Where's the difference?

Pete Wilson:  The answer to your question is that they--they also enforce speed limits. I might like to drive a hundred and twenty miles an hour in a sixty-five mile zone but society tells me I can't. Why? What is their justification for curbing my free will? They are protecting others in society from the harm that I would do. When you say victims, drug use is hardly victimless whether it is legal or illegal.

Milton Friedman:  I agree with you on that. It's not…

Pete Wilson:  It's a tragedy. And it costs--where we do agree is that the dollars are the least of it. It is the incalculable human suffering, the waste of human potential and opportunity. It's the crack babies. It is…

Milton Friedman:  But all of those are made worse by the attempt to prohibit it. And look, take marijuana, for example, in thousands of years, there's not been a single death from overuse of marijuana. There's not evidence whatsoever that marijuana causes people to harm other people. And yet--and six--what is it, six states now…

Pete Wilson:  There's extraordinary evidence that PCP, methamphetamines and other dangerous drugs do.

Milton Friedman:  Yes, and those drugs…

Pete Wilson:  No question about it.

Milton Friedman:  …those drugs are--have been stimulated and--and their--their market expanded by the tempt--attempt to prohibit other drugs which has driven up the price of drugs that are less harmful.

Peter Robinson:  Can I--let me attempt…

Peter Robinson:  Next topic, is it useful to treat hard and soft drugs differently?

Title: The Harder They Come

Peter Robinson:  Pete, would you then be willing to decriminalize or at least entertain the decriminalization of marijuana and to draw a distinction between soft drugs, so to speak, of which marijuana would be the primary example and the harder drugs, heroin, co--cocaine, PCP's, methamphetamines. Would you be willing to entertain that?

Pete Wilson:  I don't think it's a good idea to legalize either one but, of course, I would make that distinction because law enforcement makes the distinction and indeed the law presently makes that distinction. But one of the popular mythologies is that there are people in prison for simple possession of marijuana. If you talk to judges, if you talk to prosecutors, talk to prosecutors in particular, they will tell you that the people in the California prison system, at least, who are there because of drug convictions, are not there because of simple possession. They had copped a plea. They had engaged in plea bargaining. They are there because they are dealers.

Milton Friedman:  Well many more there are dealers but, again, take the case of dealers. Because of prohibition, the dealer--the--the real dealers, have found it advantageous to hire teenagers because the juvenile laws punish them less s--less…

Peter Robinson:  Less severely.

Milton Friedman:  …less severely. When Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller was governor of New York, he put in especially stringent laws on drugs. But the juveniles were…

Peter Robinson:  Exempted.

Milton Friedman:  …exempted or--or on a lower level. And, as a result, the drug dealers st--switched to using juvenile. The attempt to prohibit drugs is one of the main reasons for the destruction of the ghettos in our cities. I'm sure you agree with that, Pete, that if you take--if you go into the ghettos, the prohibition of drugs is one of the main reasons why the prisoners in prison are disproportionately Black.

Pete Wilson:  Well I--I think this is a separate issue. I really do because what you're saying is an indictment that is leveled by civil libertarians with respect to the criminal justice system in general.

Milton Friedman:  Yes, it is.

Pete Wilson:  And the answer is, the criminal law ought to be enforced in a way that it's totally color blind. If it's not, it should be.

Milton Friedman:  But it's not because--it's not because the civil law is not col--color blind. It's because the ghettos are a good place to distribute drugs for obvious reasons. That's where you'll have a group that'll protect themselves, that'll provide protection. The customers are not Black for the most part. They come in from the outside, shop in the--in the inner cities.

Peter Robinson:  So you have a relatively lawless environment where the serious dealers can set up shop, employ gangs and kids and it becomes a distribution center for the White people from the suburbs.

Milton Friedman:  Absolutely.

Peter Robinson:  That's roughly--could we engage…

Peter Robinson:  A crucial question, would legalization cause drug consumption to go up?

Title: Up in Smoke

Peter Robinson:  James Q. Wilson, quote, "The central problem with legalizing drugs is that it will increase drug consumption under almost any reasonable guess as to what the legalization regime would look like." Wilson then goes on to survey the literature. He finds the predictions about how much under a regime of legalization the price of hard drugs would drop, range from a factor of three to a factor of twenty. I quote again, "Now take a powerfully addictive substance, one that not only operates on but modifies the brain and ask how many more people would use it if its cash price were only thirty percent or even five percent of its current price. The answer must be a lot."

Milton Friedman:  Well we have a good deal of evidence to counter Jim Wilson. In the first place, remember that drugs of all kinds were perfectly legal in the United States before 1914 or '13 rather. At that time…

Peter Robinson:  The original Coca-Cola actually contained a trace of cocaine…

Milton Friedman:  …it contained cocaine.

Milton Friedman:  You could buy it. There were--there--there--and the--the level of drug addiction, by the best of estimates, was roughly the same as it is now. We have the experience now in Holland where essentially marijuana has dec--is de--dereg--is legalized or effectively legalized. And the rate of use of marijuana among tee--teenagers, among you--youngsters in Holland is less than it is in the United States. There are all sorts of things that Jim Wilson leaves out of that account. But for--but for the moment…

Milton Friedman:  …let me suppose that there were--I'm not saying there would not be more users. There might be.

Peter Robinson:  But isn't that the central point?

Milton Friedman:  The people that might benefit most from legalization…

Pete Wilson:  Yes, it is the central point.

Milton Friedman:  …the people that would benefit most from legalization…

Milton Friedman:  …are the addicts because they would have--have an assurance of quality. They would not be in danger of their lives. They wouldn't have to become criminals in order to support their habit. It would be a wholly different world for them. Right now, you speak about crack babies. Right now, women who are--pregnant women are afraid--who--who are drug users, are afraid to get an--a prenatal care, afraid to get care because they'll be called criminals and turned over to the justice system.

Peter Robinson:  Let me go back to the other Wilson, James Q. Wilson. I quote Wilson, "John Stuart Mill, the father of modern libertarians," I go now to the moral point, "argued that society can only exert power over its members in order to prevent harm to others. I, James Q. Wilson, think the harm to others from drug illegalization will be greater than the harm and it is a great harm, it will be greater than the harm that now exists from keeping these drugs illegal." So it is a moral duty of the government to do what it can to contain the problem.

Milton Friedman:  Well I think it's a whole new speech, this argument, because the--the argument for drug prohibition has always been, in terms of the interest of the drug users themselves, to prevent people from becoming drug users.

Milton Friedman:  And so far as John Stuart Mills' dictum is concerned, he says government may never interfere for the benefit of the s--of the people who are using it or making the decision themselves. Only for the harm done to third parties.

Peter Robinson:  You may victimize yourself if you wish to and the govern--that is not the government's business.

Milton Friedman:  That's not the government's business. That's your business. You belong to yourself.

Pete Wilson:  He is concerned about the user. I am far more concerned about the users' parents, about the users' child, that addicted crack baby, about all the people who are indeed the victims of the use of dangerous drugs, whether it is legalized or whether it remains illegal. And Jim Wilson is right, that really is the issue. How do you restrict the number of people who will become users and thereby minimize the tragedy.

Peter Robinson:  What kind of arguments are Milton and Pete making, moral or utilitarian?

Title: Moral High Ground

Peter Robinson:  It sounded to me a moment ago as though we were slip-sliding from John Stuart Mill in the direction of Jeremy Bentham in the greatest good for the greater number. Is it, to both of you, merely an economic question which ought, in principle, to be open to investigation.

Pete Wilson:  Neither of us is it…

Peter Robinson:  That is to say…

Pete Wilson:  …primarily an economic question.

Peter Robinson:  …if we're simply trying to say, under one regime, we have more drug users and, under the other regime, we have fewer drug users, whichever regime produces the fewer drug users is what we'll go for. That is not the case?

Milton Friedman:  Of course not because you have to take account of the other harm which is done in the process of trying to prohibit the use of drugs. Look, alcohol kills a lot more people than--than drugs do.

Peter Robinson:  But you're nevertheless making util--utilitarian rather than a moral argument. Drug use is wrong and it is…

Milton Friedman:  I want to make…

Peter Robinson:  …the responsibility to the government to embody moral values. You have none of that. You're not interested in that?

Milton Friedman:  Yes I am.

Peter Robinson:  You are?

Milton Friedman:  I personally…

Milton Friedman:  …am opposed to drug prohibition on moral grounds. I think it's unethical. I think it's immoral. However…

Milton Friedman:  …lots of people don't agree with that and therefore, as an--as a person who is looking at the argument and trying to make the argument, I have gone and said, let's suppose I didn't have that view. What would my attitude be then? And I say, even then, as I look at the costs on the one hand and the benefits on the other, I say that the benefits for--the benefits from drug prohibition, even to those people who bel--believe it's moral, are far less in the costs, that this is a--it's--the drug prohibition has been a failure. We've had thirty years to try it. We've spent tens of hundreds of millions of people, we've sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of people in this country and in other countries…

Peter Robinson:  At the same…

Milton Friedman:  …and what have we achieved?

Peter Robinson:  …the same could be…

Milton Friedman:  Nothing.

Peter Robinson:  …said…

Pete Wilson:  No, that isn't true either…

Peter Robinson:  …in thirty or forty years, the same could be…

Pete Wilson:  …in fact, your evidence is very selective.

Peter Robinson:  …said of our approach toward the Soviet Union. We at least contained it. We had to live with it but we at least contained it. And that, in itself, is a moral and indeed a practical victory. Right?

Milton Friedman:  Not…

Pete Wilson:  Absolutely.

Milton Friedman:  …it's not clear that we've--we haven't contained it.

Pete Wilson:  But now, wait a minute.

Peter Robinson:  Okay. Pete.

Pete Wilson:  Let me give you some statistics that proves that we did when we were making the effort to do so. From '85 to '92, the estimated use of cocaine fell from 5.8 million Americans to 1.3. Now that's a significant figure. And I'm not going to drown you with other statistics because I think that one makes the point.

Peter Robinson:  Let me make you drug czar for a year. How would you prosecute the war on drugs if you could reform it in any way you chose to do, what ways would you reform it?

Pete Wilson:  I would do everything that could both reduce demand and reduce supply…

Peter Robinson:  Let me ask…

Pete Wilson:  …reduce availability and the last thing in the world that will reduce availability and reduce supply is to make it legal.

Peter Robinson:  Okay, federal money…

Pete Wilson:  There's no question. I mean, I would ask--I would ask Milton, what happened to the consumption of alcohol when there was a repeal of prohibition?

Milton Friedman:  First of all, when--when there was a repeal of prohibition…

Pete Wilson:  Did the end--did the use increase?

Milton Friedman:  Initially it did but then it started going down again. It was a temporary increase. It's not at all clear that prohibition reduced the consumption of alcohol. And what is clear is that alcohol it pro--prohibition destroyed civil rights. It's clear that it also led to adulteration, that it led to a higher level of deaths. If you look at the different question, if you look at deaths and the use of alcohol, they rose during…

Peter Robinson:  During prohibition.

Milton Friedman:  …during prohibition.

Pete Wilson:  But the paramount question is, if you are talking about a substance that produces tragic results…

Milton Friedman:  That's alcohol.

Pete Wilson:  It is also dangerous drugs far more than alcohol.

Milton Friedman:  Not at all.

Pete Wilson:  Well we…

Milton Friedman:  …alcohol…

Pete Wilson:  …we differ on that as well.

Milton Friedman:  Well look at the rate of use…

Pete Wilson:  I'm not here to…

Peter Robinson:  If you're going to have a war on drugs, should drug treatment be given a higher priority?

Title: Trip or Treat?

Peter Robinson:  Nineteen billion dollars slated in 2001 for the federal government--federal war on drugs. Another twenty-two billion among the states. It is certainly in the federal government and, by and large, true among the states, that the large share, the large majority of that money is devoted to law enforcement and interdiction efforts and only a relatively small minority of that money goes to drug treatment. Rand Corporation discovers in a study, treatment is seven times more cost effective than law enforcement, ten times more effective than drug interdiction and twenty-three times more cost effective than trying to cut drugs off at their source in Colombia or elsewhere in Latin America. Would you, as drug czar, shift resources away from interdiction and law enforcement to treatment?

Pete Wilson:  I would fully fund treatment but what I would point out to Rand and anyone else who wants to argue the point, that most of the people who undergo treatment do not do so voluntarily.

Peter Robinson:  That is true that--this...

Pete Wilson:  It is under coercion and if it is illegal, they are under the coercion of the courts. That's how most of them get there. If you make it legal, do you want to take on the ACLU when they say, how can you compel my client to go to court or go to drug rehabilitation…

Milton Friedman:  I'm not going to try to compel them. I would not…

Pete Wilson:  Well and--and you know what, the result is there would be far less in terms of a percentage and probably even in absolute numbers, people going into treatment, if you legalize it than if you maintain its illegality.

Peter Robinson:  Let's just grant that, as a political matter, for a number of reasons, a war on drugs, a major and sustained effort against drug use is just going to be with us. Let's just stipulate that it will. The question then would be, would you favor granting the government the coercive power to force people into treatment? Would you favor a massive shifting of resources from drug enforcement and drug interdiction to treatment?

Milton Friedman:  Yes I would.

Peter Robinson:  As a matter of principle, would you favor treating the war on drugs less as a matter of law enforcement…

Pete Wilson:  I would do both, Peter.

Peter Robinson:  …and more as…you would do more?

Pete Wilson:  I would do both because--and that's what happened during the period…

Milton Friedman:  That's what they've been saying all these years…

Pete Wilson:  …that we made significant progress on containment. Now we're never going to achieve perfection or anything close to it but what I will tell you is that it made an enormous difference. Fifty-eight or 5.8 million to 1.3 million in a seven year period is a very significant drop.

Peter Robinson:  Even that came at too high a cost in your view?

Milton Friedman:  Oh yes it did but moreover, it's very misleading. If you look over history at--at periods of dr--you have periods when drugs go up, periods when drugs go down. Without making things illegal, things can also be affected. Look at what's happened in--in smoking. Tobacco kills far more people than--than drugs do by--by a multiple. By information, by knowledge, you've had a strong reduction in--in--in smoking.

Peter Robinson:  So under the Milton Friedman…

Peter Robinson:  If drugs were legalized, would anti-drug campaigns still be effective?

Title: Smoke 'em If You Got 'em

Peter Robinson:  So under the Milton Friedman regime, that would not be a regime of moral laxity, it would be a regime of--under which drug use was legal but that would--you would--you, yourself would sign up to join the anti-drug temperate society. You would want large organizations, probably voluntary in your view, to be advertising against drugs, to be speaking against drugs…

Peter Robinson:  …you would want public pressure exerted on people to persuade them not to use drugs.

Milton Friedman:  I think drugs are terrible. I think people ought not to use drugs. I think it's not in their self-interest to use drugs. But if people insist on doing things in their self-interest, who am I to stop them? What I have to do is to stop them from doing harm to other people. That's the function of government as Pete and I agree. But I could do more--far more effectively, stop them from doing harm to other people in a legalized regime than I can in a--in a regime in which so-called illegal drugs are illeg--are--are--are illegal.

Pete Wilson:  Well I think history contradicts that. He mentioned the Dutch experience. The Dutch experience has not been a great success. If you look at the U.S. Department of Justice studies, the highest per capita crime rate to be found anywhere in Europe is in Amsterdam. If you look at the British experience, when they legalized it, allowing physicians to prescribe heroin, they experienced a thirty-fold increase in heroin use. And that wasn't all of the use either. You asked a question a moment ago, Milton answered it, I didn't. You said, is the basic point that we contain use? And the answer is, absolutely. When Mr. Sterling, the Director of the National Criminal Justice Foundation was making his remarks at the Hoover Symposium in this past year, I believe, his concluding remark was that there is no question that the increased availability of drugs makes it far more difficult for teenagers to resist the temptation. Well I can't think of anything that will more greatly increase the availability of drugs than legalizing it.

Milton Friedman:  What happens under the current circumstances is that teenage…

Peter Robinson:  I have the last word. It's television so…

Milton Friedman:  …teenagers tend to be attracted to drugs by--by the fact that they're illegal. First of all, there's propaganda against drugs which is so outrageous, which is so violent, violates what they know to be facts, when they're told that marijuana will eat out their brains, for example, that they come to distrust all such statements. And the, you know, the fact that it's illegal is an attraction, not a--a deterrent. In my opinion, there's no evidence whatsoever that legalizing drugs would cause any major increase in uses. I think you'll have periods when drug use goes up, periods when drug use goes down as you do with all other human phenomena. And I think that what you have to take into account is the enormous amount of harm that the attempt to prohibit drugs does to our system of laws, to our civil liberties, to human freedom and that we'll be more effective…

Peter Robinson:  Pete Wilson, you've got about twenty seconds…

Milton Friedman:  …in reducing the use of drugs…

Peter Robinson:  …for a closing statement.

Milton Friedman:  …by persuasion than by…

Pete Wilson:  Drug use, legal or illegal, is a tragedy if we're talking about hard, dangerous drugs. Drugs are not bad because they are illegal. We made them illegal because they produce tragic results. And the cost in dollars is the least of it. The human cost in calculable tragedy, the parents, the crack babies, that is the tragedy and John Stuart Mill said that society has a right to protect the third parties from harm by those who would exercise their own will doing something stupid.

Peter Robinson:  Pete Wilson, Milton Friedman, thank you very much.

Peter Robinson:  Prohibition lasted only a dozen years before the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. The war on drugs, the war on drugs has already lasted nearly three times as long. And as we just saw, the debate continues. I'm Peter Robinson. Thanks for joining us.

View the discussion thread.

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25 The Impact of the US Drug War on People of Color

Samuel K. Roberts is Associate Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, and former Director of its Institute for Research in African American Studies. He is the author of Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (2009), and is completing a book about “Race, Recovery, and America’s Misadventures in Drug Policy.”

• Published: 18 March 2022
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This chapter surveys three facets of the US war on drugs and its effects on communities of color. The first is how sentencing reforms from the 1960s on (mandatory minimums, stronger punitive drug laws) contributed to the rise of today’s mass incarceration crisis. Second is what scholars term the “collateral effects” of the drug war, including material impacts on wealth and assets, structural effects on communities of color (such as social punishments beyond prison), and health impacts, including psychological trauma to families and children. The third problem is its impact on Black politics: the post-Civil Rights generation of mayors and officials governed over declining urban enclaves, paradoxically responsible, with little dissent, for enforcing damaging drug policies. Federal drug policy emphasized zero-tolerance, drug testing, and abstinence, and thereby stigmatized the formation of citizens as “addicts,” which proved devastating to Black public health at the start of the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In the United States, the post-1973 “war on drugs” is directly related to racial inequality, a relationship seen in the origins and governance of modern drug war, the militarization of policing, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the drug war’s role in mass incarceration. Definitions of the war on drugs vary from the technical and basic (i.e., encyclopedia entries) to those developed in larger book-length treatments that seek to locate this particular aspect of drug policy within historical, social, and political contexts. 1 In all cases, the consensus has been that, at a minimum, the war on drugs has been ineffective. More critical assessments—including those launched in the first years of the war on drugs, and since 2010 increasingly mainstream in social science and political thinking—have made the case that the war on drugs was launched on spurious grounds, capitalized on racist fear, and has been detrimental to the most vulnerable groups in American society. Many have argued persuasively that the drug war is a mode of “governance” integral to a post-1980 economic, social, and political order characterized by federal retrenchment, attacks on organized labor, the scaling back of the welfare state, and post-Cold War state securitization even before the war on terror. In the early 1990s, Lusane and Desmond noted that “the national and international illegal drug crisis is both rooted in and the expression of deeply troubled economic, political, and social relations. As this crisis of race, class, and global politics unfolds, the battle against illegal drugs has taken on a character not unlike the religious crusades of medieval Europe…. The government, in engaging its drug war at home and abroad, has aimed its weapons overwhelmingly at people of color.” 2 As drug policy analyst Deborah Small has said, America’s punitive drug policy has left a “system of apartheid justice.” 3

The Structure of War on Drugs Legislation

President Ronald Reagan’s administration (1981–89) dramatically escalated the war on drugs. On one hand, Reagan’s foreign policy agenda (linked closely to his anticommunism in Latin America) included drug interdiction, crop eradication, and anti-drug sanctions, measures which effectively internationalized the US war on drugs. Domestically, the Reagan war on drugs had at least three interrelated effects: the militarization of the drug war and policing, the emergence of mass incarceration as a form of urban policy and racial management, and the deployment of a stark and racialized zero-tolerance view of the drug issue. Such measures reframed all aspects of the drug question within binaries such as good versus evil, and morally pure abstinence versus abject addiction.

The expansion of the drug war during the Reagan years came through executive actions and four significant pieces of legislation: the Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1982, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. In the aggregate, these actions served to federalize and partially militarize drug enforcement.

Whereas President Nixon’s war on drugs, declared in 1971, had been largely rhetorical and episodic (and acknowledged some expert and public demands for treatment), Reagan skillfully turned the drug menace into a rationale for an impressive aggrandizement of federal police power while shrinking the social welfare state. 4 Nixon, unlike Reagan, had invested significant funds in treatment programs, even as he sought to scale back President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs (especially the Department of Housing and Urban Development), while emphasizing a rhetoric of Black self-help capitalism. 5 By the late 1970s, Reagan, too, had an established record of opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to anti-discrimination measures in housing. In this regard, Reagan’s post-election rhetoric enjoyed a reciprocally beneficial relationship with a much larger popular media frenzy surrounding crack cocaine. 6 In contrast to Nixon, Reagan escalated the assault on anti-poverty programs and social services in mental health, education, housing, and nutrition. His administration deployed images of drug sellers and users as examples of how the “war on poverty” had done nothing more than instill dependency among the poor and coddled the indolent and criminal classes. This message was entirely racialized, and Reagan was only the initiator of a decades-long ideological project highlighting “welfare queens” who gamed the system, male “superpredators” who held morality and society in complete contempt, and “crack babies” who were the literal biological expression of failed motherhood and familial dysfunction. 7

Reagan’s earliest appeals, since 1976, to voters to support ramped-up drug law enforcement came after a demonstrated decline in heroin use but before the moral panic of the mid-1980s “crack epidemic.” His Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (the first major legislation in the modern war on drugs), was enacted just as cocaine had seen its national peak and was on the decline. Some scholars have argued that, even in the late 1980s, there was no need for a war on drugs, although this government policy continued well into the twenty-first century. Instead, the war on drugs was seen as a coded proxy for a larger assault on the gains of the civil rights and Poor People’s movements. 8 Looking back on nearly twenty years of the war on drugs, one critic said that “The current ‘war on drugs’ is essentially a rearguard action against full equality for racial minorities.” 9 Another noted, “The drug war’s uncanny revisiting of the badges and indicia of slavery began, ironically enough, as a slogan from the Party of Lincoln: a ‘war on drugs’ to outdo the Democrats’ ‘war on poverty.’ ” 10 Yet, although Reagan’s rhetoric had originally provided the impetus for drug war legislation, and each of the major acts expanded the powers of the executive branch, it was the Democratic-majority Congress that had passed them. Indeed, as in the broader war on crime, Democrats (including President Bill Clinton) were no less active collaborators in the political turn toward police action as the solution to social ills. 11 All four acts were voted into law during election years. 12

Media Representations of Crack

While the three branches of government developed and executed drug policy, members of the journalist and pundit class were essential in creating drug law governance. Multiple scholars then and since noted that competition within the news industry produced an environment of escalating sensationalism fed by moral panic. 13

Official accounts trace the origin of major print coverage of crack cocaine to the November 25, 1984 Los Angeles Times article, “South Central Cocaine Sales Explode Into $25 ‘Rocks.’ ” 14 The media frenzy crescendoed over the next several years, peaking in 1989–90, although crack cocaine use had peaked in 1986 and fully 90 percent of all cocaine users sniffed powder and did not smoke crack. 15 The months immediately preceding the 1986 midterm congressional elections featured the publication in national outlets of over one thousand print articles on the crack cocaine menace, thereby ensuring that the political campaigns in large part would be a contest over which candidates were most responsive to these fears. American readers found themselves instructed to blame crack for a wide range of social problems—the decline of municipal educational systems, fraying social and familial fabrics, physical and mental health disparities, and hyper-policing—whose roots could be found in the political economy of the city, federal, and state assaults on safety nets that had been in place since the New Deal and the Great Society. Television journalism also joined the panicked chorus, given impetus by the June 1986 powder (not crack) cocaine-related death of University of Maryland basketball forward Len Bias two nights after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics. In the seven months preceding the 1986 midterm elections, NBC devoted fifteen hours to stories on cocaine, including a lengthy special titled “Cocaine Country,” which aired two months before the election and depicted crack as an apocalyptic plague. When CBS’s 48 Hours television magazine aired its two-hour “48 Hours on Crack Street” (also in early September 1986), the New York Times panned it for its sensationalism and implied that in the staging and editing CBS had been guilty of some misrepresentation. Glorying in the success of the program—attracting some fifteen million viewers, garnering the highest Nielsen ratings of any such show in the preceding five years—network executives were unfazed by the critics, however. Indeed, as the ratings for 48 Hours went into decline three years later, producers returned to the theme in “Return to Crack Street,” which went fully an hour longer than the original. 16

The relationship between the fourth estate and government was reciprocal. In his zealous support for the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Senator Lawton Chiles (D-FL) entered into the congressional record extensive and racially intoned quotes from news articles that described Black predatory sellers whose preferred clientele were white suburban children. Proving post-civil rights movement legal desegregation to be the nightmarish inversion of Martin Luther King’s dream, “there are ominous signs that crack and rock dealers are expanding well beyond the inner city … crack has captured the ghetto and is inching its way into the suburbs.” 17 As Henry Brownstein noted in 1991, “the media, operating in a particular political context, effectively supported the movement of government policies toward the right.” 18

Policing and Militarization

Whereas the trend from the 1950s until the early 1980s had been toward the medicalization of drug use as a social problem, the war on drugs emphasized criminalization over treatment as well as the militarization of drug law enforcement over public health and prevention strategies. In 1974, for example, nearly 70 percent of all federal drug policy funding went to demand-reduction efforts (prevention and treatment), with the remainder going to supply-side interdictions. By 1983, the ratio had flipped, with 25 percent going to demand reduction and 75 percent to attacks on supply. The trend had retreated somewhat by 1992, with a 65 percent to 35 percent split, and holding somewhat steadily between there and 60 percent to 40 percent through 2011. 19

The alteration in supply-reduction was not simply a matter of relative degree, but also of intensity. Annual federal expenditures on drug law enforcement rose from $8 million to $95 million just between 1980 and 1984, well before the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. In 1998, the federal budget allocated $15 billion for anti-drug work, with state and local governments expending another $33 billion. 20

Most of this money went directly to local and state law enforcement agencies, and in many municipalities the rate of growth in resources allocated to policing outstripped those of all other governmental functions. And within law enforcement, anti-drug efforts outranked all others, with crack cocaine in the 1980s–90s taking utmost priority. While law enforcement agencies received the bulk of federal funding, there were also anti-drug funding programs to which other agencies could apply. The Departments of Justice, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Defense and even the Federal Aviation Administration were but some of the federal agencies to receive and/or demand anti-drug funding. The 1986 Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (part of the broader 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act) committed $200 million to school-based drug prevention education, emphasizing abstinence and “Just Say No.” By 1996, the annual budget for the federal Department of Education’s drug prevention work was $482 million. 21 In time, the drug war, especially its campaign against crack, emerged as a mode of governance of its own. As Charles Reasons has noted, “the War on Drugs has captured the imagination of the public to such an extent that procedures that would have been dismissed as outrageous a generation ago are accepted today to ensure public safety.” 22

As the 1980s legislation had intended, the generously available funds for anti-drug policing efforts encouraged cities and states to make drug law enforcement a priority. The number of drug-offense arrests between 1980 and 2006 trebled, from fewer than 600,000 to nearly 1.9 million. The significance is statistical as well as numerical. Drug arrests in 1987 comprised 7.4 percent of the national total of all reported arrests; by 2007, they had risen to 13 percent. 23

In a political environment of demonization of both Black Americans and drug users, and because federal legislation allocated more resources to large urban centers where the majority of Black Americans resided, policing and arrests tended and continue to fall most heavily on African Americans. Studies since the 1970s showed that African Americans were little or no more likely to be heavily drug-involved than the national average. Further, rates of drug use nationally were lower in the early 1980s than they had been in several years. 24 Most arrests and convictions therefore have not been of major distributors but of users or petty sellers, who often sell small amounts to support their own use.

Yet, before long, in both the state and federal court systems cases involving crack cocaine outnumbered all other types of drug charges, and nearly all of the defendants were Black. Even the US Sentencing Commission, which had established the schedule of mandatory minimum sentences and had since expressed mild alarm at the ensuing racial inequities, pointed out that in sixteen states, among them New Jersey and Illinois, not a single white person had been charged in 1992. Another contemporary study found that in more than 50 percent of the federal district courts trying drug cases, all of the defendants were non-white. 25 In the late 1990s, African Americans comprised 75 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison in seven states; and in at least fifteen states, African American male drug-offense incarceration rates were between twenty and fifty-seven times higher than those of their white counterparts. In New York, home to the original mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, Black and Latinx people were over 94 percent of those imprisoned on drug offenses. 26 As researchers at the Sentencing Project found, “the caseflow of African Americans coming through the … court system reflects racially disparate patterns of law enforcement, rather than merely differential trends in drug abuse.” 27

The war on drugs not only escalated the intensity of urban policing, but also changed its character into a more militarized endeavor. In the nation’s major and secondary cities, traditional “cop on the beat” policing faded in importance relative to the emergence of police paramilitary units (PPUs) such as special weapons and tactics (SWAT) and other “special operations” teams. The idea originated with Daryl Gates, who as a Los Angeles police inspector in the 1960s had been vocal in his belief that new and more violent police tactics were warranted in response to civil unrest like that which had occurred in Watts. Gates received authorization to create a special unit, and the first SWAT raid, in 1969, was against a Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. Gates, who became chief of police and served from 1978 to 1992, also oversaw the secret Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) squad that illegally infiltrated political movements until a lawsuit ended the program in 1983.

The imperatives of the war on drugs transformed SWAT teams into anti-drug forces, work in which they were joined also by various special militarized anti-narcotics forces such as tactical narcotics teams (TNTs) and strategic narcotics and gun (SNAG) teams. By 1975, some five hundred SWAT or similarly organized units existed around the country, and there were thousands by the end of the twentieth century, found in 90 percent or more of the nation’s mid-sized and largest cities. In the 1970s, the number of SWAT actions conducted annually was a few hundred, but grew to three thousand in the 1980s, and to 45,000 by the year 2005. The growth in the number of squads and actions was disproportionate to any in violent organized crime or the threat of civilian criminal use of military firearms. Police paramilitary deployments (which increased twentyfold between 1980 and 1997) were increasingly against unarmed civilians suspected (and often innocent) of low-level drug crimes. 28

The militarization of anti-narcotics work emerged from several funding quarters, including the Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1982, which included Representative (D-GA) Billy Lee Evans’s amendment authorizing law enforcement agencies at every level to make use of military equipment and train personnel in drug enforcement. 29 The principal modes of financing, however, have been the Department of Defense’s 1033 (Military Excess Property) Program and the Department of Justice’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program. Begun in 1990 as part of the 1989 National Defense Authorization Act, the 1033 Program is administered through the Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), specifically the DLA’s Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO). The 1989 act temporarily authorized the Department of Defense to transfer military equipment to local law enforcement agencies for anti-drug work. However, in 1996, Congress made the program permanent and expanded its scope to include counterterrorism activities. Matériel transferred in 1990 was valued at roughly $1 million, $324 million only five years later, and $450 million in 2013. LESO, whose motto is “from warfighter to crimefighter,” estimates that since its inception the 1033 Program has transferred between $4.3 billion and $5.0 billion worth of property to law enforcement agencies, which today number more than 17,000 in all US states and territories and include school districts and parks departments. The transfer of military matériel is free of charge (except for transportation costs) and comes with little directive or stipulation except that all equipment must be put to use within a year, thereby guaranteeing, critics argue, that police agencies will use military force on civilians whether or not it is warranted. Further, because the Department of Defense consistently requests, and receives, ever-increasing appropriations from Congress, Program 1033 is a useful way for it to offload older equipment so that it can request newer versions. Indeed, roughly a third of all equipment and matériel recently transferred under 1033 had been completely unused. 30

The Byrne program was essentially a 1986 revision of earlier federal anti-crime funding mechanisms established by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act of 1968 but redirected entirely to narcotics work and renamed after slain New York City police officer Edward Byrne. By the late 1990s, the Byrne program was the largest contributor to state and local drug law enforcement efforts. Just as importantly, Byrne funds have given rise to hundreds of multijurisdictional drug task forces (MJDTFs). Between 1988 and 1991, the number of MJDTFs doubled to over nine hundred, collectively covering a geography which contained 83 percent of the US population, and making a staggering number of arrests annually—between 220,000 and 280,000. 31 The largest proportion of Byrne funding has gone to law enforcement, with much smaller proportions going to prevention, education, and treatment. Further, the most intense policing has been in areas heavily populated by African Americans and Latinx Americans. Reviewing the use of Byrne funding in anti-drug policing, researchers have shown that “federal funding for the war on drugs can be linked directly to the increase in racial disparities in arrest, disproportionally affecting blacks,” with certain studies providing “strong support for the narrative linking targeted policing strategies with regards to drug offenses with prison population growth associated with black men.” 32

Although the Byrne program has come under consistent criticism for its lack of oversight and for calculating success metrics based entirely on numbers of arrests, as opposed to crime reduction or improvement of social services, funding has generally remained high. Furthermore, where and when local police forces deemed federal funding insufficiently generous, Congress encouraged them to subsidize their work through civil asset forfeiture, provided through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and expanded in the Byrne program. 33 Under civil asset forfeiture, any assets (including cars, houses, and cash) in any way connected to a drug arrest may be seized by the enforcing agency. These assets need not contain drugs or be related to drug use or trafficking at the moment of arrest, nor must the asset in question be owned by the person under arrest. Furthermore, seizure is not dependent upon actual conviction, and many people have lost property even after charges were dropped or after not-guilty verdicts were rendered. In 1985, the Justice Department seized $27 million through civil asset forfeiture. In 1993, that amount ballooned twentyfold to $556 million. In 2012, Justice took a record $4.2 billion in assets. An account of the total value of property seized by local jurisdictions is more elusive, but well into the twenty-first century, many police departments funded substantial proportions of their operations through such seizures. 34 Indeed, asset forfeiture, along with fines and court fees, have significantly reinforced economic inequality and in themselves present hyper-policing as a lucrative revenue stream.

Mandatory Minimum Sentencing

Although they contributed greatly, arrests alone do not account for the increase in the US incarceration rate, which is due also to longer periods of incarceration under mandatory sentencing laws, and violations (often drug-related) in probation or parole. 35 Sentencing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s implemented mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, augmented prosecutorial prerogative, and inversely constrained judicial discretion. This measure may be understood within a broader historical tendency in sentencing reform between 1960 and the 1990s, featuring “truth in sentencing” measures (requiring convicted persons to serve 85 percent or more of their sentence before parole eligibility) and the categorical expansion of capital crimes and violent crimes. 36 Congress first introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug use, possession, and distribution in the 1951 Boggs Act and the 1956 Narcotics Control Act (the Daniel Act), and retracted them in the 1970 Controlled Substance Act, which emphasized regulation (drug scheduling under the Food and Drug Administration) along with enforcement (the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and, later, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA).

However, state governments, led by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York in 1973, produced the legislation mandating minimum sentencing for drug offenses. Initially the “Rockefeller Drug Law” was principally aimed at heroin and marijuana, but the marijuana statutes were liberalized in the late 1970s. By 1983, forty-nine state governments had passed mandatory sentencing laws. 37 The federal move in this direction was signaled in Chapter II (the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984) of the omnibus Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which created the United States Sentencing Commission, a body which put drug crime on par with violent crime, and enacted mandatory sentencing guidelines for both. Chapter V (the Controlled Substance Penalties Amendments Act of 1984) increased prison terms (up to twenty years) and fines (up to $250,000) for the distribution of substantial amounts of Schedule I and II drugs, penalties which would double if the violation had occurred within one thousand feet of a school. Two years later, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 stipulated mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses based on the quantity involved and differentiated crack from powder cocaine. Under the act, the minimum prison sentence for a defendant found guilty of selling a quantity of crack cocaine was made the same as that for a similar defendant convicted of selling one hundred times that amount of powder cocaine. Under later legislation, even a first-time offense for simple possession of five grams of crack (roughly the weight of one US nickel) triggered a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. Second and third offenses with smaller amounts (three grams and one gram, respectively) required the same penalty. The act also allowed for the possibility of the death penalty for some drug offenses.

Mass Incarceration and Prison Construction

Not surprisingly, drug policy has been the primary driver of mass incarceration, contributing, according to Justice Department statisticians, to roughly half of the growth in the US prison population since the mid-1980s. More than 1.5 million individuals went to state or federal prisons (a number which excludes a larger group who spent time in a jail) for drug offenses between 1980 and 1998, producing a twelvefold increase by 2003. 38 That drug arrests, prosecutions, and sentencing exacerbated Black-white disparities is clear. In the thirty-four states reporting to the National Corrections Reporting Program, the African American rate of admission to state and federal prisons quintupled between 1986 and 2003, whereas the white rate did not even triple. As a result, the total rate of prison admission for Blacks at the dawn of the twenty-first century was a bit more than 250 per 100,000 adult Black residents. For whites, the rate was a tenth of that, or twenty-five per 100,000 adults. By 1989, well before the peak of mass incarceration in the United States, the putatively post-segregation United States and apartheid-era South Africa claimed, respectively, the first and second highest rates of incarceration in the world. 39

Generally speaking, rates of arrests and conviction depend in some part on institutional capacity to incarcerate. While drug war paramilitary policing began under President Reagan, President Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 created the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-in-Sentencing Incentive Grants Program, which provided to the states nearly $10 billion in grants for prison construction and expansion. However, grants depended on legislated truth-in-sentencing guidelines, which required defendants convicted of violent crimes to serve no less than 85 percent of their sentences. Two-thirds of the states passed such guidelines, limiting the ability of parole boards to grant an earlier release date or prison administrators to award time off for good conduct. Another popular measure was harsher penalties for repeat offenders—which people with substance use issues tend to be—such as the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” measures adopted by twenty-four states and the federal government between 1993 and 1995. Between 1980 and 1994, direct expenditures alone for correctional activities by state governments grew from $4.26 billion to $21.27 billion, largely for the construction and support of institutions. 40 Meanwhile, a significant portion of the post-1980 prison population boom was derived from drug arrests and convictions. In 1980, fifteen out of every 100,000 adults were serving a drug sentence in a federal or state prison, a figure which skyrocketed to 148 by 1996, when those prisoners comprised 60 percent of the federal and 23 percent of the states’ prison populations. 41 Policing practices and sentencing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s meant that incarceration was the measure of first resort in the war on drugs. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the proportion of prison inmates whose worst offense dealt with drugs did not even reach 10 percent. In contrast, by 1998, it was 30 percent (as it was, respectively, each for violent and property crimes, with a remaining 10 percent for public order offenses), making drug-offense sentencing the most important single cause of the trebling of the US prison population since 1980. 42

Although the Sentencing Commission was directed to render guidelines “entirely neutral as to race, sex, national origin, creed, and socioeconomic status of offenders,” differentials in sentencing practices have had a profound impact on Black communities.

Reproductive Injustices: Mythologies of Crack Mothers and Crack Babies

The gendered dynamics of drug war policing in Black communities has been relatively unexplored until recently. Yet drug prohibition since the nineteenth century has been a project of gender-making as well as race-making, and any account of the modern drug war on Black life must take into account not just the racialization of drug politics, but also its gendered biopolitical dimensions. 43 Although the war on drugs in its initial years targeted Black men in particular, women became more vulnerable in at least two ways. First, they, too, were swept up in the wave of arrests. From 1986 to 1991, Black female drug-offense incarceration increased by 828 percent (more than three times the increase of their white counterparts, and roughly twice that of Black males). 44 Second, even when not directly targeted by the war on drugs, Black women and the communities in which they lived suffered no less deeply from the loss of sons, fathers, brothers, friends, and partners.

The politics of fetal protection, and the discursive construction of the twin specters of the crack mother and the crack baby, illustrate the imperatives of drug regulation, surveillance, reproductive oppression, and racialized and gendered constructions of motherhood and citizenship. Thwarted in their attempts to criminalize drug use while pregnant, prosecutors in many states beginning in the latter 1980s implemented novel interpretations of existing laws to charge pregnant drug users with child abuse and neglect, failure to provide child support, drug trafficking (by delivering a controlled substance to a fetus), contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and even assault with a deadly weapon. The profusion of such prosecutions presumed both fetal personhood (a contentious matter in the post- Roe v. Wade era) and the detrimental effects of intrauterine exposure to cocaine (which were never supported by evidence and later disproved altogether).

It was Ira Chasnoff who first popularized the idea of crack babies, publishing his first study in 1985 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine . Employing a very small sample of twenty-three children, and no control group, Chasnoff argued that children exposed in utero to crack cocaine quickly showed themselves to be less responsive and even emotionally stunted. A young pediatrician working at a drug treatment clinic in Chicago, Chasnoff was not averse to the publicity which he attracted within mere days of the article’s publication. In interviews, Chasnoff elaborated with further sensationalist claims of drug-induced prenatal brain damage, launching years of media hysteria and moral panic.

No concrete evidence ever existed to support the theory that fetal exposure to cocaine produced any long-standing, let alone permanent, effects. In no studies asserting negative effects, for example, were efforts made to compare pregnancies that in every other way were similar except for cocaine use. Chasnoff himself had compared his small sample of crack-using pregnant women and fetal-exposed children to measurements taken outside his study of healthy women and babies. He certainly would have been aware, however, that most women who habitually used crack cocaine also use other drugs (such as tobacco and alcohol), had little access to good nutrition, and frequently received little prenatal care—all conditions which had been proven to negatively impact pregnancies and child development. Critics in the 1980s called attention to these methodological shortcomings, and by the early 1990s studies emerged to show no causal connection between prenatal cocaine exposure and child development. 45 A longitudinal study begun in the 1990s by Hallam Hurt and colleagues found no difference in cognition, memory, intelligence, and inhibitory control between fetal-exposed children and a control population throughout their childhoods. 46 A systematic literature review found that “there is no convincing evidence that prenatal cocaine exposure is associated with developmental toxic effects that are different in severity, scope, or kind from the sequelae of multiple other risk factors.” Furthermore, “many findings once thought to be specific effects of in utero cocaine exposure are correlated with other factors, including prenatal exposure to tobacco, marijuana, or alcohol, and the quality of the child’s environment.” Other studies showed that poverty effects were far more influential than prenatal cocaine exposure. 47

Scholars and advocates have since concluded that the moral panic around crack babies and crack mothers was at least in part produced by the backlash politics against reproductive rights and reproductive justice, arguing that prosecutions against pregnant women who use drugs was part of a campaign to create a category of crime called “fetal battery” or “fetal abuse” which would provide a back door to reversal of Roe v . Wade . Although at least one such case, in 1977, antedated the crack cocaine scare, opponents of reproductive choice, this argument holds, perpetuated and even manufactured the crack baby scare in service of this campaign. Beyond an attack on reproductive choice , the pregnant crack user and the crack baby were useful foils against reproductive justice . They embodied the neoliberal ideologies calling for federal retrenchment, self-responsibility, carceral expansion, and severe cuts to the social welfare programs poor women needed to successfully raise children or, conversely, to terminate pregnancies safely and affordably. That crack babies would develop to become problem, even criminal-minded, children who at best would be a drain on society, and at worse the base of an emerging class of “superpredators,” was an assumption whose ideological power overwhelmed the lack of evidence. Representative George Miller (D-CA) claimed publicly that crack babies would prove to be “the most expensive babies ever born in America,” spending their entire lives drawing from virtually every social service available to them. Describing a new and permanent “bio-underclass” of physically and mentally deficient children, the American Enterprise Institute’s Douglas Besharov warned, “this is not stuff that Head Start can fix,” referring to the federal program which, since 1965, has offered early childhood health, education, nutrition, and parental assistance services to low-income children and their families. Boston University president John Silber expressed his sorrow at the appropriation of public resources for “crack babies who won’t ever achieve the intellectual development to have consciousness of God.” 48

That crack mothers and crack babies, like the “welfare queen” popularized by Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, came to be used politically as refutations of reproductive choice, reproductive justice, and social support is historically important. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a nationwide welfare rights movement had emerged, drawing from civil rights movement economic justice activism and Black women’s feminist activism, and significantly challenging mainstream white feminism to articulate an analysis that was attentive to how race, gender/sex, and class produced specific modes of oppression (or “intersectional” oppression, a concept elaborated by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989). The welfare rights movement effectively brought to light contradictions in American capitalism in which a single income, especially for Black women, rarely was sufficient to support a family. The movement’s activism, which dovetailed with the Poor People’s movement of 1968 and after, and the joint mobilizations of the labor and civil rights movements that continued into the 1980s, opened a new front in progressive politics with poor Black women as a potentially important voting bloc and source of Democratic Party resurgence. 49

As such, the deployment of crack babies, crack mothers, and welfare queens was a largely successful effort to negate poor Black women’s political subjectivity by erasing their contributions as mothers and workers. More specifically, the figure of the crack mother flattened the experiences of women who used drugs and ignored the question of the wide range of circumstances in which women used drugs, reducing them all to abject and callous examples of failed citizenship, spoiled womanhood, and monstrous motherhood. Remarkably poor research designs describing the effects of fetal exposure garnered much more attention than the complex, illuminating, and innovative ethnography examining how women became drug-involved and that suggested individual and structural interventions that promised to help them recover. 50 For example, many women and men deeply ensconced in harmful substance use (including problem tobacco or alcohol use) will employ family planning strategies to delay pregnancy until they can get it and other aspects of their lives under control. Inability to do so may reflect layers of chaotic existence, poverty, and disruption so dense that criminalization would hardly seem productive or appropriate. Similarly, for many poor women, drug involvement (sales, distribution, or use as part of other survival means) was difficult to avoid. Such structural problems also left them vulnerable to stigma and the era’s zeal for criminalization. As Murphy and Sales have argued, “Women’s drug use during pregnancy reveals more about the low point in social conditions in the United States than about the powers of any particular drug…. Women’s drug use during pregnancy cannot be understood apart from the social and economic contexts in which these experiences were embedded.” 51

The impact on Black women, their children, and their families was significant. Prompted by their wrongheaded moralism, assumptions of Black female drug use and criminality, and the need to justify funding they received to open “crack baby wards” in hospitals, obstetrical personnel demonstrated more willingness to report drug use when dealing with Black mothers than with white ones. Between 1987 and early 1991, more than fifty fetal abuse cases were filed in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. In 1992, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project documented no fewer than 167 cases of women in twenty-four states arrested for drug use during pregnancy; and a follow-up review uncovered more than four hundred—most certainly an undercount—that occurred between 1973 and 2005. The majority of these cases involved poor, non-white women, with a disproportionate number coming from Florida and South Carolina. 52 Additionally, drug use surveillance continues to be a disruptive element in the lives of poor families. Parents, especially mothers, involved in family court are often subjected to drug tests whose results may supersede all other indications of competent parenting and have led to the removal of an (as of this writing) uncounted number of children from their families. Further, in 1999, only three years after the federal withdrawal of traditional welfare benefits, states began adopting various drug testing measures either as a condition of social support or a pretense for ejection from state welfare rolls. Michigan was the first to do so, and as of late 2016, thirteen states had such measures. 53

Conclusion: Other Effects on Black Communities

Aside from arrest and imprisonment, a much longer list of damages has accrued to Black communities as a result of the war on drugs. Some of these include the massive expropriation of financial resources from hyper-policed communities, fraying social fabrics, economic incapacitation, and deteriorating educational systems. As a large component of the carceral state, the war on drugs has contributed mightily to the production of a labor underclass because individuals with felony records in many states are barred from several occupations. Even where this is not the case, many potential employers request applicants provide information about their arrest records, information which often leads to discrimination at hiring. As a result, many millions of people work in low-paying occupations or in the informal economy. 54 Meanwhile, the removal of millions of individuals from their communities for years at a time has done more to harm those communities than would have substance use disorder treatment and mental health recovery programs that could bring these individuals back into the community as supportive family members and wage earners. The favor which carceral solutions have enjoyed over treatment and prevention has spelled increasing social alienation over the life course. The combined weight of such alienation is carried by millions of effectively “invisible” men and women, as one post-release memoir has phrased it, who enjoy only a very constrained freedom even after having paid their debt to society. 55

The surplus prison population delivered by the war on drugs also represents an “opportunity cost,” a wrongheaded prioritization of economic and political investment. For example, the average per capita annual cost of imprisonment far outstrips that of public education, even college, although level of educational attainment has an inverse relationship to likelihood of criminal justice involvement or post-involvement recidivism. Quite tragically, prisons long ago discarded the rehabilitative ideals that characterized the reformist movements of the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Even as late as the brief period between 1972 and 1994, federal Pell grants funded college education programs in prison as part of the rehabilitative programs to prepare individuals for productive life after incarceration. That, however, was rescinded with the passage of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill. 56 Although public policy need not be a zero-sum game, it is certainly one of finite resources. More effective policing could be performed for less money, with the surplus directed to, among other things, education and vocational training, public health infrastructure, and housing.

There are also the public health implications of war on drugs policing. From the 1980s to the twenty-first century, the criminalization of drug use and of the possession of drug paraphernalia has meant that people who inject drugs are less likely to carry syringes with them and therefore are more likely to share them after procuring drugs. Though such laws in some states have been relaxed, this aspect of drug policing continues to be a problematic driver of HIV and HCV infections. Further, drug policing has served to repel hundreds of thousands of individuals from health services for fear of detection, despite the fact that people who use drugs have high incidences of mental health challenges that cannot be treated appropriately in carceral settings.

Finally, there is the matter of individual and community political incapacitation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, some five million adult US citizens (roughly 2.5 percent of the voting-eligible population) were deprived of the voting franchise because of a past or current felony conviction. 57 As Marc Mauer has observed, “The irony of the combined impact of American disenfranchisement policies along with the massive expansion of the prison system is that a half century after the beginnings of the civil rights movement, increasing numbers of African Americans and others are losing their voting rights each day.” 58

Since the 1990s, one study after another, including the latest wave of social science and historical studies, has accumulated damning evidence about the disproportionate and harmful impact the war on drugs had on communities of color in the United States. In the public eye, “the incarceration crisis” has a name but is not always specifically linked to the war on drugs, which is finally shedding some of its earlier public legitimacy. Sociologists, among others, have long suggested, and the evidence is compelling, that the politics of drugs served as a way to reverse mid-century civil rights gains and war on poverty urban social programs. The legacies of this social and political catastrophe are wider, and they continue.

1.   Charles E. Reasons , “War on Drugs,” in Encyclopedia of Race and Crime , ed. Helen Taylor Greene and Shaun L. Gabbidon (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009) ; Joseph L. Smith , “War on Drugs,” in Encyclopedia of Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery , ed. Gary L. Fisher and Nancy A. Roget (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009) ; Clarence Lusane and Dennis Desmond , Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston: South End Press, 1991) ; Michael H. Tonry , Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) ; Dan Baum , Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure , 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996) ; Michael Massing , The Fix (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998) ; William J. Chambliss , “Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement,” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (1994): 177–94 ; Diana R. Gordon , “US Drug Laws: The New Jim Crow?: Drug Policy and the Dangerous Classes: A Historical Overview,” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review 10 (2000–2001): 315–20 ; James A. Inciardi , The War on Drugs III: The Continuing Saga of the Mysteries and Miseries of Intoxication, Addiction, Crime, and Public Policy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002) .

  Lusane and Desmond, Pipe Dream Blues , 3, 4.

3.   Deborah Small , “The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice,” Social Research 68, no. 3 (2001): 897 .

4.   Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle , eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) .

5.   Doris Marie Provine , Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 95–96 ; David T. Courtwright , Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America , enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 171–72 ; Jerome H. Jaffe , “One Bite of the Apple: Establishing the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention,” in One Hundred Years of Heroin , ed. David F. Musto , Pamela Korsmeyer , and Thomas W. Maulucci (Westport: Auburn House, 2002), 43–53 .

6.   Craig Reinarman , “The Social Construction of Drug Scares,” in Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction , ed. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 249–59 ; Baum, Smoke and Mirrors ; Katherine Beckett , “Setting the Public Agenda: ‘Street Crime’ and Drug Use in American Politics,” Social Problems 41 (1994): 425–47 ; J. D. Orcutt and J. B. Turner , “Shocking Numbers and Graphic Accounts: Quantified Images of Drug Problems in the Print Media,” Social Problems 40 (1993): 190–206 ; Henry H. Brownstein , “The Media and the Construction of Random Drug Violence,” Social Justice 18, no. 4 (1991) 85–103 ; Erich Goode , “The American Drug Panic of the 1980s: Social Construction or Objective Threat?,” International Journal of the Addictions 25, no. 9 (1990): 1083–98 .

7.   Rae Banks , “Drugs, Race, and State Power: The Urban Terrain,” in The Black Urban Community: From Dusk Till Dawn , ed. Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 227–43 ; Keith Humphreys and Julian Rappaport , “From the Community Mental Health Movement to the War on Drugs: A Study in the Definition of Social Problems,” American Psychologist 48, no. 8 (1993): 892–901 .

  Tonry, Malign Neglect , 83–103; Reasons, “War on Drugs” ; Banks, “Drugs, Race, and State Power.”

  Gordon, “US Drug Laws,” 320.

10.   Graham Boyd , “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow: Racism Is the Original Sin of the United States; Today It Has Risen to the Surface in the Form of the War on Drugs.” NACLA Report on the Americas 35, no. 1 (2001): 18–22 .

11.   Jonathan Simon , Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) .

12.   Eva Bertram , Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) .

13.   Donna M. Hartman and Andrew Golub , “The Social Construction of the Crack Epidemic in the Print Media,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 31, no. 4 (1999): 423–33 .

14.   Andy Furillo , “South-Central Cocaine Sales Explode into $25 ‘Rocks,’” Los Angeles Times , November 25, 1984 ; US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, “The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department’s Investigations and Prosecutions (USDOJ/OIG Special Report)” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997) .

15.   Craig Reinarman and Harry Gene Levine , “Crack in Context: America’s Latest Demon Drug,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry Gene Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2 .

16.   Mary Bumgarner and David L. Sjoquist , “The Impact of Crack Enforcement on Police Budgets,” Journal of Drug Issues 28, no. 3 (1998): 701–24 ; Matthew D. Phillips , “Reagan Administration, Ronald,” in Encyclopedia of Drug Policy , ed. Mark A. R. Kleiman and James E. Hawdon (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2011), 681–85 ; Reinarman and Levine, “The Crack Attack, Politics and Media in the Crack Scare.”

  Provine, Unequal under Law , 112–15.

  Brownstein, “The Media and the Construction of Random Drug Violence.”

19.   Grischa Metlay , “Federalizing Medical Campaigns against Alcoholism and Drug Abuse,” The Milbank quarterly 91, no. 1 (2013): 123–62 .

20.   Katherine Beckett , Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) ; Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen , “Policing for Profit: The Drug War’s Hidden Economic Agenda,” The University of Chicago Law Review 65, no. 1 (1998): 35–114 .

21.   D. M. Gorman , “The Failure of Drug Education,” Public Interest 129 (1997): 50–60 .

  Reasons, “War on Drugs.”

23.   Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008) ; Howard N. Snyder, “Arrest in the United States, 1990–2010: Patterns & Trends,” (2012), http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4515 .

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  Provine, Unequal under Law , 120.

  Small, “The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice.”

27.   Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King , “A 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society” (Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, 2007) .

28.   Peter B. Kraska , “Militarization and Policing: Its Relevance to 21st Century Police,” Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice 1, no. 4 (2007): 501–13 ; “Militarization of American Police,” in Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement , ed. Larry E. Sullivan et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 283–85 ; American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing” (2014); James E. McCabe , “The Narcotics Initiative: An Examination of the NYPD Approach to Drug Enforcement, 1995–2001,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 20, no. 2 (2009): 170–87 .

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30. American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home”; Shawn Musgrave , Tom Meagher , and Gabriel Dance , “The Pentagon Finally Details Its Weapons-for-Cops Giveaway: Bellying up to the Arsenal,” The Marshall Project (2014), https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/12/03/the-pentagon-finally-details-its-weapons-for-cops-giveaway .

  Blumenson and Nilsen, “Policing for Profit.”

Robynn Cox and Jamein Cunningham, “Financing the War on Drugs: The Impact of Law Enforcement Grants on Racial Disparities in Drug Arrests (2017). CESR-Schaeffer Working Paper No. 2017-005” (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Center for Economic and Social Research, 2017). See also Derek Neal and Armin Rick, “The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith and Welch (NBER Working Paper No. 20283)” (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014).

33. American Civil Liberties Union, “War Comes Home”; Michelle Alexander , The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010) ; Edward G. Goetz , “The US War on Drugs as Urban Policy,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20, no. 3 (1996): 539–49 .

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Suzanne M. Kirchhoff, “Economic Impacts of Prison Growth” (Washington, dc: Congressional Research Service, 2010), http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41177.pdf; viewed 25 July 2013 .

36.   David Garland , The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) ; Simon, Governing through Crime ; Heather Ann Thompson , “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” The Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (2010): 703–34 ; Naomi Murakawa , The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) ; Elizabeth Kai Hinton , From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) ; Rufus King , The Drug Hang-Up: America’s Fifty-Year Folly (New York: Norton, 1972) ; David F. Musto , The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control , 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) .

37.   Julilly Kohler-Hausmann , “‘The Attila the Hun Law’: New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (2010): 71–95 ; Marvin D. Free , “The Impact of Federal Sentencing Reforms on African Americans,” Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 2 (1997): 270 .

  Musto, The American Disease , 279; Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks , 10–11.

  Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks , 16; Goetz, “The US War on Drugs as Urban Policy.”

40. John Clark, James Austin, and D. Alan Henry, “ ‘Three Strikes and You’re Out’: A Review of State Legislation (NCJ 165369)” (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1997); Franklin E. Zimring , Gordon Hawkins , and Sam Kamin , Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) ; “Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1998” (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999).

41.   Alfred Blumstein and Allen J. Beck , “Population Growth in U. S. Prisons, 1980–1996,” Crime and Justice 26 (1999): 17–61 .

  Tonry, Malign Neglect .

43.   Michelle McClellan , “‘Lady Tipplers’: Gendering the Modern Alcoholism Paradigm, 1933–1960,” in Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000 , ed. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 267–97 ; Timothy A. Hickman , “The Double Meaning of Addiction: Habitual Narcotic Use and the Logic of Professionalizing Medical Authority in the United States, 1900–1920,” in Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000 , ed. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 182–202 ; Janet Golden , “‘An Argument That Goes Back to the Womb’: The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973–1992,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 2 (1999): 269–98 ; Mara L. Keire , “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 4 (1998) ; Mariana Valverde , “‘Slavery from Within’: The Invention of Alcoholism and the Question of Free Will,” Social History 22, no. 3 (1997): 251–68 .

44.   Stephanie R. Bush-Baskette, “The War on Drugs as a War against Black Women,” in Crime Control and Women: Feminist Implications of Criminal Justice Policy , ed. Susan L. Miller (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 113–30 .

45.   Beatrix Lutiger , Karen Graham , Thomas R. Einarson , and Gideon Koren , “Relationship between Gestational Cocaine Use and Pregnancy Outcome: A Meta‐Analysis,” Teratology 44, no. 4 (October 1991): 405–14 .

46.   Laura Betancourt et al., “Problem-Solving Ability of Inner-City Children with and without in Utero Cocaine Exposure,” Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 20, no. 6 (1999): 418–24 ; Laura M. Betancourt et al., “Adolescents with and without Gestational Cocaine Exposure: Longitudinal Analysis of Inhibitory Control, Memory and Receptive Language,” Neurotoxicology and Teratology 33, no. 1 (2010): 36–46 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “Cocaine-Exposed Children: Follow-Up through 30 Months,” Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 16, no. 1 (1995): 29–35 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “Children with in Utero Cocaine Exposure Do Not Differ from Control Subjects on Intelligence Testing,” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 151, no. 12 (1997): 1237–41 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “A Prospective Evaluation of Early Language Development in Children with in Utero Cocaine Exposure and in Control Subjects,” The Journal of Pediatrics 130, no. 2 (1997): 310–12 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “Children with in Utero Cocaine Exposure (COC) and Controls (CON) Have Similar Scores on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R) at Age 6 Years,” Pediatric Research 43, no. S2 (1998): 92 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “A Prospective Comparison of Developmental Outcome of Children with in Utero Cocaine Exposure and Controls Using the Battelle Developmental Inventory,” Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 22, no. 1 (2001): 27–34 ; Hallam Hurt et al., “Postnatal Caregiver Cocaine Use, Not in Utero Cocaine Exposure Alone, Is a Marker for Language Problems in Children at School Age,” Pediatric Research 45, no. 2 (1999): 126 .

47.   Deborah A. Frank et al., “Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285, no. 12 (2001): 1613–25 ; Alan Mozes , “Poverty Has Greater Impact Than Cocaine on Young Brain,” Reuters Health , December 6, 1999 .

48.   Dorothy E. Roberts , “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 104, no. 7 (1991): 1419–82 ; Lynn M. Paltrow, “Criminal Prosecutions against Pregnant Women: National Update and Overview” (Reproductive Freedom Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, 1992); Laura E. Gómez , Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) ; Loren Siegel , “The Pregnancy Police Fight the War on Drugs,” in Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice , ed. Craig Reinarman and Harry Gene Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 249–59 ; Drew Humphries , Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999) ; Katharine Greider , “Crackpot Ideas,” Mother Jones , July/August 1995 ; Nancy Duff Campbell , “Regulating ‘Maternal Instinct’: Governing Mentalities of Late Twentieth-Century US Illicit Drug Policy,” Signs 24, no. 4 (1999): 895–923 ; Assata Zerai and Rae Banks , Dehumanizing Discourse, Anti-Drug Law, and Policy in America: A “Crack Mother’s” Nightmare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) ; Ana Teresa Ortiz and Laura Briggs , “The Culture of Poverty, Crack Babies, and Welfare Cheats,” Social Text 21, no. 3 (2003): 39–57 ; Michele Goodwin , “Fetal Protection Laws: Moral Panic and the New Constitutional Battlefront,” California Law Review 102, no. 4 (2014): 781–875 ; Tiffany Lyttle , “Stop the Injustice: A Protest against the Unconstitutional Punishment of Pregnant Drug-Addicted Women,” New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 9, no. 1–2 (2005): 781–815 ; Charles Krauthammer , “Worse Than ‘Brave New World’: Newborns Permanently Damaged by Cocaine,” Philadelphia Inquirer , August 1, 1989 .

49.   Kimberlé Crenshaw , “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67 ; Premilla Nadasen , Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005) ; Melinda Chateauvert , “Framing Sexual Citizenship: Reconsidering the Discourse on African-American Families,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 2 (2008): 198–222 ; Felicia Ann Kornbluh , The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) ; Marisa Chappell , The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) ; Rhonda Y. Williams , The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality , Transgressing Boundaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) ; Anne M. Valk , Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) ; Jacqueline Jones , “Shifting Paradigms of Black Women’s Work in the Urban North and West: World War II to the Present,” in African American Urban History since World War II , ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe William Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 295–315 .

  50.   Marsha Rosenbaum , “Women Addicts’ Experience of the Heroin World: ‘Risk, Chaos, and Inundation,’” Urban Life 10, no. 1 (1981): 65–91 ; Marsha Rosenbaum , “Getting on Methadone: The Experience of the Woman Addict,” Contemporary Drug Problems 11, no. 1 (1982): 113–43 ; Nancy D. Campbell , Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000): 177–94 ; Jennifer Friedman and Marixsa Alicea , Surviving Heroin: Interviews with Women in Methadone Clinics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) ; Sheigla Murphy and Paloma Sales , “Pregnant Drug Users: Scapegoats of Reagan/Bush and Clinton-Era Economics,” Social Justice 28, no. 4 (86) (2001): 72–95 ; Claire E. Sterk , Fast Lives: Women Who Use Crack Cocaine (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014) .

  Murphy and Sales, “Pregnant Drug Users,” 92.

52.   Roberts, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies” ; Paltrow, “Criminal Prosecutions against Pregnant Women”; Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin , “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005: Implications for Women’s Legal Status and Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 38, no. 2 (2013): 299–343 .

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Research Paper

The war on drugs.

The War on Drugs in the United States is controversial, in part because it is based on an ever-changing cultural reaction to a substance rather than to an actual threat of individual or social harm. Public perceptions of drugs and alcohol are socially constructed and subject to change based on many factors, perhaps primarily based on the intensity of media campaigns detailing community devastation at the hands of drugs addicts and drug dealers and political pressure to once and for all win the war against drugs. Although the boundary between legal and illegal substances is arbitrary, the United States has spent decades waging this war. It involves a growing prison–industrial complex; a series of “get tough” measures; an almost continual barrage of drug-war rhetoric; and discriminatory treatment based on class, race, and gender. The cost of the War on Drugs has been violence, crime, corruption, devastation of social bonds and the destruction of inner-city communities, and the exponential growth of the number of minorities and women incarcerated. Only after nearly 40 years of conducting this war did the United States government, under President Barack Obama, shift its efforts away from heavy-handed enforcement of drug laws and toward recognition of the public health aspects of the problem, placing greater emphasis on drug-use prevention and treatment (Hananel 2010).

I. Background

II. Key Moments / Events

A. Racial Discrimination

B. Gender Discrimination

C. The Intersections of Discrimination

III. Conclusion

During colonial times, the growth of hemp was required by townships because it was used for a wide variety of purposes, including the production of textiles and paper. The first prohibitionist laws in the United States were passed in the 19th century, when state and local ordinances were enacted based on the belief that minority individuals were corrupting the moral stature of white American women. High drug-addiction levels during this period were primarily a result of the liberal use of narcotics, for which accurate education was unavailable. Narcotics were viewed as a socially accepted cure-all, and the addictive nature of these substances remained unknown. To illustrate, cocaine was an ingredient in Coca-Cola from 1886 to 1900, and Bayer sold heroin over the counter in 1898 (Gray 2001, 20–21).

One of the first laws to address illicit substances was the Pure Food and Drug Act, passed in 1906, which required all medications to contain accurate labeling of contents. This act was a significant contribution to the rapid decline in the use of narcotics as society became aware of the potential side effects of such substances. Shortly thereafter the Harrison Act, in combination with Webb v. United States, prohibited physicians from assisting addicts through the prescription of drugs to alleviate the symptoms associated with narcotics withdrawal. As such, many addicted individuals sought out the black market and contaminated drugs to temper their withdrawal. This era marked the beginning of drug prohibition (Gray 2001, 21–22).

Moral crusaders worked to lobby governmental officials for strict legislation against alcohol and other drugs. The result was prohibition of alcohol from 1920 until 1933. This caused widespread crime and violence, a substantial increase in the law enforcement budget, and a significant rise in the number of individuals incarcerated for alcohol-related offenses. The 1920s also saw the demonization of marijuana, with movies such as Reefer Madness conveying to the American public that “one puff of pot can lead clean-cut teenagers down the road to insanity, criminality, and death” (Gray 2001, 24). The Marijuana Tax Act was passed shortly after the end of Prohibition in 1937, recognizing the medical usefulness of marijuana and permitting physicians and authorized others to dispense the drug provided that a licensing fee was paid. The tax, however, for an unlicensed transaction, was so steep as to dissuade the wide-scale use of marijuana for medical purposes (Gray 2001, 23–26). Attitudes toward marijuana, or at least toward its potential uses, changed briefly during World War II, when the government initiated an effort to encourage the use of domestic hemp for industrial purposes. After the end of the war, hemp once again became a “prohibited substance without any practical usages of any kind” (Gray 2001, 26). With the tide turned back toward prohibition, the plethora of get-tough laws began.

Key Moments / Events

Politicians have garnered public support and political benefit from the passage of get-tough laws that, for the most part, consider all illegal substances in one broad category. Both the Boggs Act in 1951 and the Narcotic Control Act in 1956 paved the way for increasingly strict sentences for drug offenses. This was followed in 1961 by ratification of the Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs treaty. Richard Nixon, who expanded antidrug efforts to disrupt the importation of drugs and increase interdiction, initiated the officially declared War on Drugs. The federal budget for drug prevention and law enforcement increased from $150.2 million in 1971 to $654.8 million in 1973 (Inciardi 2008, 188).

Although Nixon’s drug war included moderate financial support for treatment programs, this was dismantled with Ronald Reagan’s redeclaration of the War on Drugs. Nancy Reagan popularized the “Just Say No” campaign, and abstinence rather than treatment became the focus. Such campaigns increased public support for antidrug efforts, and in 1984 the Comprehensive Crime Control Act was passed, which served to increase bail and sentences, as well as to increase federal authority to seize the assets of individuals convicted of felony drug offenses. This was followed closely by the Anti– Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which enacted mandatory minimum sentences for persons found guilty of simple possession, doubled penalties for the deliberate involvement of juveniles, and mandatory life sentences for individuals found guilty of conducting a continuing criminal enterprise involving drugs. This act also made the distribution of illegal substances within 1,000 feet of a school a federal offense. In addition, the Anti–Drug Abuse Act required an annual presidential evaluation of countries producing or transporting drugs and the labeling of cooperating countries as antidrug allies in the War on Drugs. Unless granted a waiver by the president, countries that failed to cooperate with the American drug war were threatened with possible trade sanctions and the loss of foreign aid; in addition, the United States would oppose loans for these countries from international lending institutions (Gray 2001, 27).

In 1988 the Anti–Drug Abuse Act was further expanded to include as federal offenses the distribution of drugs within 100 feet of a park, youth center, playground, swimming pool, or video arcade. In 1994 the Crime Bill enacted criminal enterprise statutes resulting in mandatory sentences ranging from 20 years to life; it also indicated the death penalty as a sentence for some drug-selling offenses. All of these get-tough measures served to dramatically increase the number of individuals incarcerated and fueled the growth of the prison–industrial complex. Along with harsher sentences for drug offenses, legislation also affected an offender’s ability to successfully reenter the community after serving time. Although there are no disqualifications for offenses like rape or manslaughter, in 1998 the Higher Education Act disqualified individuals who had been convicted of marijuana possession from receiving federal aid to attend college (Gray 2001, 27–28).

The current American political system rewards politicians who approach crime with a get-tough approach, and this fuels the fire of ever-increasing spending on the prison– industrial complex. The Executive Summary for 2010 of the ONDCP (Office of National Drug Control Policy 2009) indicates a 2009 federal budget of $14.8 billion for reducing illegal drug use, an increase of $1.1 billion from 2008. This is in addition to the approximately $30 billion total state budgets, bringing spending for the War on Drugs to approximately $45 billion per year. The ONDCP budget, however, does not appear to fall in line with its stated priorities, which are as follows: priority I, substance abuse prevention; priority II, substance abuse treatment; priority III, domestic law enforcement; and priority IV, interdiction and international counterdrug support. Just over $5 billion in 2010, reduced slightly from 2009, has been devoted to priorities I and II combined. The remaining two thirds of the budget will be dedicated to law enforcement and disrupting the market through the use of programs such as Southwest Border Enforcement, Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, support of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and interdiction programs focused on Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan (Office of National Drug Control Policy 2009).

Aside from the economics of the prison–industrial complex at the state and federal levels, the number of arrests for drug offenses more than tripled from 580,900 in 1980 to 1,846,400 in 2005. Governmental studies reveal that over half of those imprisoned for federal drug offenses are street-level dealers or transporters, about one third are midlevel dealers, and approximately 11 percent are high-level dealers (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2000). On the state level, 58 percent of drug offenders have no history of either violence or high-level drug activity, and one third have been convicted only of a drug-related crime (King and Mauer 2002).

In addition to the expanding prison population, it is also important to recognize the types of offenses for which individuals are receiving lengthy prison terms. During the period from 1990 to 2002 there was an increase in drug arrests of 450,000 individuals. Of these arrests, 82 percent were for marijuana charges, and 79 percent of marijuana offenses were strictly for possession. These numbers represent an increase in marijuana arrests of 113 percent during this period, while overall arrests decreased by 3 percent. During this period, the arrest of offenders using drugs other than marijuana increased by only 10 percent. These results indicate that nearly half of the drug arrests each year involve marijuana, with a mere 6 percent resulting in felony convictions. To pursue such vigorous incarceration policies toward marijuana, the United States spends an estimated $4 billion annually on arrest, prosecution, and incarceration (King and Mauer 2005; Mauer and King 2007).

Research indicates that the increases in arrest do not correspond to an increase in the use of illegal substances. Furthermore, the shifting of law enforcement resources to a focus on marijuana is not in line with any substantiated decrease in the use of other drugs. Therefore the dramatic increase in marijuana arrest rates can only be understood as the result of selective law enforcement decisions. Such enforcement decisions have varied impacts on the lower class and racial minorities as well as on the female population.

Racial Discrimination

Race is intimately connected with the consequences of the War on Drugs. An example of the intersection of class and racial discrimination with regard to drug laws involves New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, among the harshest in the nation, which were enacted in 1973. These laws created mandatory minimum sentencing requirements intended to crack down on high-level drug offenders. Sentencing under these laws was based entirely on the quantity of drugs sold or possessed, with no consideration of the offender’s circumstances or role in the drug industry. What resulted was that many offenders sentenced under these laws were punished more severely than individuals convicted of rape or manslaughter.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws greatly impacted minority communities. New York’s population is 23.2 percent African American or Latino; however, these groups comprise 93 percent of those incarcerated for drug felonies. Between 1990 and 2002, New York City experienced an 882 percent increase in arrests for marijuana, including a 2,461 percent increase in arrests for marijuana possession. Although African Americans represent approximately 14 percent of marijuana users in New York City, they represent 30 percent of those arrested for marijuana violations (King and Mauer 2005). The Rockefeller laws were somewhat tempered by the 2004 Drug Law Reform Act, which created a determinate system of sentencing and reduced mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent felony drug offenses (Real Reform 2006). However, this pattern of discrimination occurs in many states. For example, in Maryland between 1996 and 2001, of all African American offenders, 64 percent were sentenced on drug violations, and an astounding 81 percent of individuals sentenced for drug offenses were African American.

An overwhelming amount of scholarly research indicates that racial minorities do not partake in the use of drugs with any more frequency than do whites. Nevertheless, the coexistence of race and a lower-class position leaves many minorities more visible to law enforcement, leading to the misperception of higher levels of drug involvement among these groups (Riley 1997). This results in disproportionate arrest and prosecution. Of all drug prisoners in state facilities, 45 percent are African American and 20 percent Hispanic. At the same time, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of white drug offenders (29 percent in 2005, compared with 20 percent in 1999) incarcerated in state prisons (Mauer 2009).

Gender Discrimination

Gender discrimination is another adverse consequence of get-tough drug legislation. The criminalization of women’s involvement in the War on Drugs depends on the notion that female offenders have transgressed their appropriate gender roles in society. Women’s involvement in the drug trade can frequently be attributed to economics as opposed to personal addiction. The feminization of poverty has resulted in women seeking alternative sources of income as decoys or drug couriers (mules) who import or transport drugs. The risks of this employment “choice” are high, often resulting in mandatory minimum sentences for women for whom this is their first offense.

In the late 1980s, the media-driven crack baby epidemic led the public to believe that children born to crack-addicted mothers would face educational and social obstacles that were insurmountable. This scenario fueled gender and racial discrimination in the War on Drugs, as an overwhelming majority of mothers portrayed in the media to have given birth to crack babies belonged to a racial or ethnic minority. The impression that this was an epidemic resulted in the passage of laws that criminalized drug use during pregnancy. Such a legal response, however, dissuaded some women from seeking prenatal care and drug treatment. In addition, maternal drug abuse laws were enforced primarily on minority women: African American and Latino women represented approximately 80 percent of those subject to prosecution. Although research from the National Institute of Drug Abuse has indicated that early medical reports regarding the long-term effects of being born crack-addicted were overstated, the stereotype of the drug-abusing African American or Latino mother remains in the eyes of many Americans (Inciardi 2008, 158–162).

At the close of 1999, more than 80 percent of the women in prison for drug offenses were sentenced using mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and approximately 70 percent of those women were mothers (Bush-Baskette 2000, 924). This has significant and adverse effects for the children’s emotional and psychological well-being as well as effects on those individuals who assume guardianship responsibilities of the children and financial costs of supervising children of women who are incarcerated. Perhaps most notably, the psychological impact on the children remains for many years and disrupts their developmental maturity.

The Intersections of Discrimination

When the widespread search for drugs began, drugs were overwhelmingly found where law enforcement exerted its primary search efforts: in low-income, minority neighborhoods where use and dealing are most visible. Although crack is the least used illicit substance, the War on Drugs specifically targeted the possession and sale of crack cocaine by lower-class and minority individuals. Because minorities are overrepresented among the poor, the case of laws regarding crack cocaine versus powder cocaine is illustrative of the intersections of discrimination by class and race.

The wide discrepancy in federally mandated sentences for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine illustrates a class and racial bias in the criminal justice system. Minorities are primarily prosecuted for crack offenses, while whites are primarily prosecuted for powder cocaine offenses (Bush-Baskette 2000, 924). Although the sentencing discrepancy between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses has closed slightly in recent years, initially the laws specified that 5 grams of crack cocaine would earn an offender the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine. This sentencing gap was significant in creating the current disproportion in minority confinement, as an overwhelming percentage of those sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were minority individuals. Conversely, approximately two thirds of those charged with powder cocaine offenses were white. Statistics such as these illustrate the disproportionate arrest and confinement of overwhelmingly lower-class minorities despite research by the Department on Health and Human Services reporting that less than 1 percent of young African Americans had used crack cocaine in their lifetimes, compared with 4.5 percent of whites (Barak, Leighton, and Flavin 2007, 133–135).

In an analysis of discrimination in the War on Drugs, it becomes evident that race and class are inextricably intertwined, because racial minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor. Increased social control of this group of individuals has been accomplished through the use of drug-related laws that are enforced with vigor in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Although drug laws may on their face appear equal and not discriminatory in intent, the consequences of applying get-tough legislation in fighting the War on Drugs has been the unprecedented incarceration of the poor and minorities as well as a significant increase in the number of women under the control of the criminal justice system. Assumptions based on race, class, and gender stereotypes have created and perpetuated moral panics that fuel support for the drug war.

When politicians and the mainstream media discuss all drug alternatives under one umbrella termed “legalization,” the public becomes frightened of sacrificing communities to the adverse consequences of drug abuse and addiction. There are numerous alternatives to the War on Drugs, however, such as decriminalization, regulated distribution, and harm reduction strategies, including many varieties of drug treatment programs. A bridge between the criminal justice system and the drug treatment community is the Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime (TASC) network. This program uses drug treatment as an alternative or supplement to a criminal justice penalty for a drug offense. Research on programs like TASC offers support for the harm reduction role this initiative plays in interrupting involvement in drug use and criminal activity (Inciardi 2008, 307). Such programs began the movement toward drug courts, which stress accountability, close monitoring, and treatment.

Studies examining the success of drug court programs throughout the 1990s reveal that such programs contribute to a significant reduction in recidivism. Research reveals that recidivism rates for participants range from 5 percent to 28 percent; however, recidivism rates are approximately 50 percent for defendants not participating in drug court initiatives. In addition, such programs substantially lower the self-reported drug use rates for participants (Drug Court Clearinghouse and Technical Assistance Project 1999; Drug Courts: The Second Decade 2006). In recent years, states such as Arizona and California have approved initiatives that mandate first- or second-time drug offenders be sentenced to probation and treatment as opposed to incarceration. A review of this program in Arizona by the state Supreme Court concluded that the rate of compliance was 62 percent as of 1999 and such initiatives saved the state $6.7 million in prison expenditures (Arizona Drug Treatment and Education Fund 2001, 364).

In light of the financial savings of many alternative initiatives and the documented success of such programs, the Obama administration has concluded that there are strong economic incentives to scale back and retool the War on Drugs. Current drug policies disproportionately affect lower-class, minority individuals, discriminate against women, and do little to reduce drug use or encourage treatment for addicted individuals and their families. Government officials now hope that by emphasizing the latter and by stressing community-based antidrug programs, better results can be achieved and a more sustainable balance might be reached between law enforcement requirements and the furtherance of public health (Hananel 2010).

Also check the list of 100 most popular argumentative research paper topics .

Timeline of Drug-Related Laws and Policies in the United States

1906 – Pure Food and Drug Act

1914 – Harrison Narcotic Act

1937 – Marijuana Tax Act

1951 – Boggs act

1956 – Narcotic Control Act

1961 – Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs

1966 – Narcotics Addict Rehabilitation Act

1968 – Mental Health Centers Act

1970 – Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act

1970 – Drug Abuse Education Act

1970 – Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act

1973 – New York Rockefeller Drug Laws

1974 – Narcotic Addict Treatment Act

1979 – Model Drug Paraphernalia Act

1979 – Marijuana section of Rockefeller Drug Laws repealed

1984 – Comprehensive Crime Control Act

1984 – Comprehensive Forfeiture Act

1986 – Anti–Drug Abuse Act

1986 – Mandatory Minimum Laws

1988 – Anti–Drug Abuse Act (expanded)

1990 – Crime Control Act

1994 – Crime Bill

1994 – First “Three-Strikes” Law in California

1996 – Proposition 215 in California (medical marijuana)

1998 – Higher Education Act

2000 – Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act (California)

2010 – National drug policy shifts away from the War on Drugs and toward recognition of the public health aspects of the problem

Bibliography:

• Arizona Drug Treatment and Education Fund, “Annual Report November 2001.” Federal Sentencing Reporter 14 (2001): 364.
• Barak, Gregg, Paul Leighton, and Jeanne Flavin, Class, Race, Gender, and Crime, 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
• Benavie, Arthur, Drugs: America’s Holy War. New York: Routledge, 2009.
• Bush-Baskette, Stephanie, “The War On Drugs and the Incarceration of Mothers.” Journal of Drug Issues 30 (2000): 924. Campbell, Howard, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
• Campbell, Nancy D., Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Drug Court Clearinghouse and Technical Assistance Project, Looking at a Decade of Drug Courts, 1999. http://www1.spa.american.edu/justice/documents/2049.pdf
• Drug Courts: The Second Decade, 2006. http://www1.spa.american.edu/justice/documents/207.pdf
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Report 2000. http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/00cius.htm
• Fish, Jeff erson M., ed., Drugs and Society: U.S. Public Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
• Gray, James P., Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It. Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2001.
• Hananel, Sam, “Obama Shifts Strategy away from War on Drugs.” Boston Globe (May 12, 2010).
• Inciardi, James A., The War on Drugs IV: The Continuing Saga of the Mysteries and Miseries of Intoxication, Addiction, Crime, and Public Policy. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2008.
• Jenkins, Philip, Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
• King, Ryan S., and Marc Mauer, Distorted Priorities: Drug Offenders in State Prisons, Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, 2002. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/dp_distortedpriorities.pdf
• King, Ryan S., and Marc Mauer, The War on Marijuana: The Transformation of the War on Drugs in the 1990s. 2005. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/dp_waronmarijuana.pdf
• MacDoun, Robert J., and Peter Reuter, Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Mares, David R., Drug Wars and Coffeehouses: The Political Economy of the International Drug Trade. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
• Mauer, Marc, The Changing Racial Dynamics of the War on Drugs, 2009. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/dp_raceanddrugs.pdf
• Mauer, Marc, and Ryan S. King, A 25-year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society, 2007. http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/dp_25yearquagmire.pdf
• Provine, Doris Marie, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Real Reform, “Rockefeller Drug Law Reform.” 2006. http://www.drugpolicy.org/docUploads/RDLFactSheet_May06.pdf
• Riley, K. Jack, “Crack, Powder Cocaine, and Heroin: Drug Purchase and Use Patterns in Six U.S. Cities.” December 1997. http://www.nij.gov/pubs-sum/167265.htm
• Sadofsky Baggins, David, Drug Hate and the Corruption of American Justice. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

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Drug Topics For School Projects And Academic Research

Research papers and essays on drug topics address sociology, pharmacology, medicine, psychology, statistics, history, and criminology issues. Drug abuse is a serious problem in modern society. It’s a serious issue that different countries are trying to combat. As such, educators ask learners to write academic papers and essays on drug abuse topics to understand this subject better.

Many countries have spent billions of dollars fighting addiction and treating drug addicts. Countless lives have been lost to drug addiction. The increasing crime rates in many countries have also been attributed to drug abuse and addiction. What’s more, people in different social groups gave initiated campaigns against drug use and trade. It’s, therefore, reasonable for educators to ask learners to write about drug and alcohol topics.

Choosing Drug Research Topics

• Interesting Drug Topics for Papers and Essays
• Effects of Drug Addiction Topics

Argumentative Research Topics about Drug Use

Drug and alcohol group topics, drug legislation research essay topics.

As students write academic papers on drug related research topics, they engage in research that helps them come to terms with the extent of this problem. They also learn how illicit drug use affects human life. War on drugs research topics helps learners to know the number of resources their governments are spending trying to deal with this problem. Such knowledge can help learners avoid addictive drugs.

But, choosing the drug research topics to write about is not easy. That’s because learners should choose interesting topics for which they can find adequate information to write about. If struggling to pick topics on drug abuse for your academic papers and essays, here are 100 great ideas from our assignment service .

Interesting Drug Topics for Papers and Essays

• The government should legalize marijuana use
• Drug users should go to rehabs, not jail
• The government should eliminate cash bail and legalize marijuana
• How illicit drugs benefit society
• Interesting medical uses of cannabis
• Effects of illicit drugs on society
• Why teens abuse drugs
• Possible solutions to the drug abuse problem among teenagers
• What are the effects of early drug abuse?
• Health benefits of marijuana
• Why athletes need marijuana
• Discuss the long-term effects of illicit drug use
• History of drug abuse
• What prompts a person to abuse drugs?
• Is the war against drug abuse necessary?
• Can the government win the war against illicit drugs?
• Can technology be used to fight drug abuse and addiction?
• How do movies promote drug abuse?
• Are modern celebrities promoting drug abuse?
• How can the government deal with prescription drug abuse?

These are interesting ideas for research papers and essays, especially for learners that want to write about controversial drug topics. Nevertheless, be ready to invest time and effort in research, analysis, and writing if you pick any of these research paper topics on drug abuse.

Effects of Drug Addiction Topics

Some people want to know how drug addiction affects a person’s life. As such, this category comprises some of the most interesting drug related topics for learners. Here are some of the best drug addiction research topics to consider if interested in the consequences of addictive substances.

• Does the amount of abused drugs affect its impact?
• Why are some people more addicted to drugs than others?
• How does drug addiction differ between men and women?
• Why are there differences in drug addiction levels between men and women?
• What influences the effects of illicit drugs?
• Why do different drugs affect humans differently?
• What are the major signs of alcoholism?
• What are the effects of abusing marijuana?
• What are the effects of psychoactive substances on the human brain?
• Explain the main social issues caused by alcohol abuse
• How does drug abuse affect the social life of a person?
• How do addicts try to hide the effects of addictive substances?
• Can family members help an addict deal with the effects of an illicit drug?
• Can a person deal with the effects of illicit drug abuse alone?
• Why is rehab necessary when dealing with the effects of illicit drugs?
• Is withdrawal syndrome an effect of illicit drug addiction
• Can abusing alcohol affect the judgment of a person?
• Why is it not advisable to drink alcohol and operate machinery or drive?
• Common myths about the effects of alcohol
• Common myths about the effects of marijuana

Choose any of these drug research paper topics if interested in learning how illicit substances affect the users. Nevertheless, be prepared to research extensively to come up with a solid paper about any of these essay topics on drug addiction.

Maybe you hold a certain perspective about drug use. Some people may not agree with you but you would like to persuade them. In that case, you might consider argumentative essay topics drug addiction ideas. That way, you can express your views on the topic professionally. Here are some of the best persuasive essay topics about drugs to consider.

• Addiction is a disease
• The genetic makeup of a person can prompt them to abuse drugs
• The environment of a person can influence them to abuse drugs
• Social and cultural factors play a role in drug addiction
• Drug abuse does not always lead to bad behaviors
• Mass media can encourage drug abuse and addiction
• Celebrities can influence drug abuse among teenagers
• Drug addiction treatments should focus on inner motivations
• Imprisonment does not help a drug addict
• Interactions with drug addicts can have a negative influence on kids
• The environment is not to blame for drug addiction
• Schools can help prevent drug abuse among the teens
• The perceived correlation between delinquency and drug abuse is wrong
• The effect of drugs on a person’s perception is not always negative
• Parents are partly to blame for drug abuse by teens
• A person who has never had an addiction can’t understand how it feels to battle drug addiction
• Drug addiction takes control over a person
• Behavioral and cognitive problems can also affect the academic performance of students that abuse drugs and alcohol
• Isolating drug addicts will only escalate their addiction
• Family members should play a role in the treatment of drug addicts

Pick a topic on drug addiction from this category if ready to research extensively and come up with strong points to support your argument. That’s because you must convince readers to support your position in your argument.

Perhaps, you’re looking for drug project ideas that touch on group mentality or perception. In that case, this category has some of the best academic papers and essay topics for drug abuse that you should consider.

• What are the major social aspects of drug addiction?
• Which are the most vulnerable social groups when it comes to drug addiction?
• Is drug abuse part of sacred rituals in some religions?
• Minors and drug abuse
• Irreversible effects of drug abuse among teens
• What is the psychological defense of drug abuse by human trafficking victims
• Cultural and ethnic traditions that compel some social groups to abuse drugs
• Can legalizing marijuana make some social groups abuse it more?
• Why do most women abuse painkiller drugs?
• How does the “club culture” enhance drug abuse?
• Who can benefit from the mandatory examination for drug abuse?
• How drug abuse affects social relations
• Can a family be affected negatively by substance abuse by one of its members?
• Drug abuse among the LGBTQ
• Why drug abuse is considered cool among teenagers
• How college culture enhances drug abuse
• How does attitude towards drugs differ among social groups?
• How does the legal drinking age differ based on cultural diversity?
• Should countries have similar laws on drug abuse?
• What are the main causes of drug abuse in various social groups?

These are also great drug debate topics for students in different study levels. However, they also require extensive research to come up with good papers and essays.

If you decide to write about topics for a paper on drug war, you may want to talk about policies, laws, and regulations that touch on different illicit substances. This category has research paper topics drugs ideas that may also focus on legislation.

• Common substance abuse laws in most countries
• Effects of drug abuse policies
• How some legislations compel people to abuse drugs
• How substance abuse laws can help in the war against the drug trade
• Top drug laws in the U.S
• Explain the confidentiality of drug and alcohol abuse patients’ records
• Explain the disparity in drug law among people of different races
• How governments can use legislation to fight drug abuse
• Should the government legalize marijuana?
• Scaling up the war against drug abuse through legislation
• Important legislations for enhancing the war against drugs
• Legislations for preventing underage alcohol consumption
• How can the government use legislation to fight drug abuse without infringing on human rights?
• Legislation to channel more resources to the war on drug abuse
• Causes of illegal drug use among women
• Vaping legislation to prevent drug abuse
• Important legislation to prevent prescription drug abuse
• Legislations to curb military populations’ drug abuse
• Enforcing law to curb college drug abuse
• Addressing the increasing cases of people drinking under the influence of alcohol

Drug abuse is a broad subject. Pick some of these drugs essay topics and then research them extensively to come up with papers that will earn you the top scores. Also, you can take a look at these health topics .

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Articles on War on Drugs

Displaying 1 - 20 of 118 articles.

Ecuador: raid on Mexican embassy draws international criticism – but President Noboa hopes voters approve

Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón , University of Cape Town and Maria Gabriela Palacio , Leiden University

‘Bukelism,’ El Salvador’s flawed approach to gang violence, is no silver bullet for Ecuador

Marie-Christine Doran , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Using ‘trip killers’ to cut short bad drug trips is potentially dangerous

Colin Davidson , University of Central Lancashire

Ecuador’s crackdown on violent crime helped turn the country into a narco state

Maria Gabriela Palacio , Leiden University and Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón , University of Cape Town

Why Colombia sees legalising drugs as the way forward. Here’s what’s being proposed

Raul Zepeda Gil , University of Oxford

The potential of psychedelics to heal our racial traumas

Vinita Srivastava , The Conversation

International drug policy: at a crossroads or a  dead-end ?

Khalid Tinasti , Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID) and Yong-an Zhang , Shanghai University

Mexico made criminal justice reforms in 2008 – they haven’t done much to reduce crime

Rebecca Janzen , University of South Carolina

Weed in South Africa: apartheid waged a war on drugs that still has unequal effects today

Thembisa Waetjen , University of Johannesburg

Decriminalizing hard drugs in B.C. follows decades of public health advocacy

Andrew Hathaway , University of Guelph

No-knock warrants, a relic of the ‘war on drugs,’ face renewed criticism after Minneapolis death

Tom Nolan , Emmanuel College

The police’s new scare campaign won’t stop people from using drugs. But it will increase stigma

Nicole Lee , Curtin University and Jarryd Bartle , RMIT University

Michael K Williams and The Wire: how the show redefined television watching

Ben Lamb , Teesside University

Ex-prisoners are going hungry amid barriers, bans to benefits on the outside

Margaret Lombe , Boston College and Von Nebbitt , Washington University in St. Louis

Drugs ‘trilemma’: how to halt the deadly trade while still ensuring development and peace

Jonathan Goodhand , SOAS, University of London and Patrick Meehan , SOAS, University of London

Legalizing marijuana, once a pipe dream on Capitol Hill, takes an important step forward

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula , University of Southern California

Oregon just decriminalized all drugs – here’s why voters passed this groundbreaking reform

Scott Akins , Oregon State University and Clayton Mosher , Washington State University

What history teaches us about shaping South Africa’s new cannabis laws

Trump and Biden ignore how the war on drugs fuels violence in Latin America

Luisa Farah Schwartzman , University of Toronto

Bolivia reverses years of progress with new draconian cocaine policy, supported by the EU

Kathryn Ledebur , University of Reading ; Linda Farthing , University of Reading , and Thomas Grisaffi , University of Reading

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• Global perspectives
• Illicit drugs
• Latin America

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Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University

Emeritus Consultant, St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst

Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong

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Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations, The University of Western Australia

Associate Professor of History, University of Johannesburg

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War On Drugs - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Writing argumentative essays on War on Drugs is pretty challenging as it unleashes the current problem of modern society in America. It requires thorough research of lots of data to introduce the relevant paper. This is a broad matter which can be split into different essay topics. For example, you can raise the issue of drug trafficking or provide arguments on the harmful effects of abused drug consumption. Also, you can touch on the engagement of the government in fighting against illegal drug use, current drug prohibition rights, etc.

There are so many ideas to include in your research paper, yet it is difficult to streamline your thoughts. That is why essay examples on War on Drugs are good options. They can help you compile an outline where the introduction, main body, and conclusion are the key parts. It is essential to stick to one topic and articulate it in one thesis statement and notice it in the introductory part. Then, you need to expand the topic by providing particular arguments and proof, so then to conclude with your thesis. We recommend you get familiar with essay examples on drugs on our platform. They might be a good prompt for you to define your topic and research path.

War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

The purpose of the law is to maintain societal order, while the criminal justice system operates to bring justice to the commission of crimes. In the United States, however, modern day criminal justice systems disproportionately disadvantage particular groups of people and undermine the intended functionality of law enforcement structures. This phenomenon of racial minority overrepresentation and overall prison population surge has endured since the 1970s. The declaration of the 70s "War on Drugs" was proceeded with mandatory minimum, amplified sentencing […]

The Negative Impacts of the War on Drugs

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Mass Incarceration in America

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The History of Drugs and the War on Drugs

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It is no surprise that the United States has a major issue with the incarceration of its people. In fact, the U.S. incarcerates more people, per capita, than any other country in the world, 714 in 100,000 people, or about 3.5 for every 500. We lock up more than 4 times the people than the United Kingdom [1]. When considering what leads people to prison two main components come to mind: crime and drugs. Crime is the most diverse and […]

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SLS’s George Fisher Discusses His New Book About Drugs, Morality, and Race

• April 2, 2024
• George Fisher; Q&A with Professor Richard Thompson Ford
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Stanford Law School’s George Fisher has spent decades exploring the history of criminal law and criminal institutions, including the regulation of alcohol and drugs. His latest book, Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of Today’s War on Drugs , takes a deep historical dive into the surprising link between America’s drug wars and ancient religious strictures against non-procreative sex and drunkenness. Among a host of other issues, Beware Euphoria explores how early drug laws in the United States were passed primarily to shield white people from the snares of moral degradation and addiction. A former Massachusetts assistant attorney general and assistant district attorney, Fisher is the Judge John Crown Professor of law and the faculty co-director of the Criminal Prosecution Clinic at Stanford Law School.

On a recent edition of the Stanford Legal podcast, Fisher sat down with co-host Richard Thompson Ford, the George E. Osborne Professor of Law, to talk about his book, including his take on why our culture broadly accepts alcohol, but rejects other mind-altering substances. The following is an edited excerpt of the full interview, which can be found here . (For more, read the recent Stanford Lawyer article about Beware Euphoria .)

Ford: I know this book has been a real labor of love for you. You’ve worked on the topic for many years. Why did you undertake this project? 

I started as a Massachusetts prosecutor and back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, drugs were at the center of everything in the criminal system. There were drug prosecutions themselves, of course, which consumed an awful lot of our energy and a lot of the system’s energy. Then there were all the spinoff crimes—the theft-related crimes that people were addicted to drugs committed to generate the money to pay for those drugs. It was hard to be inside the system and not wonder what the system would be like without all of those drug-related prosecutions, as well as how we got here and why. 

Ford: There’s a common narrative today that mass incarceration was largely driven by the war on drugs and that the war on drugs was a result of racism. There’s the famous quote by President Nixon’s aide, John Ehrlichman, who said, we wanted to go after the hippies and Black people, so we tied the hippies to marijuana, we tied the Black people to heroin, and then we went after them. What does your book tell us about that argument?  

Mass incarceration is driven by drugs, but not as substantially as people sometimes think. It’s true that in the federal prison system, almost 50 percent of the population are people convicted of drug-related crimes. But the federal system is only about 10 percent of our prison system. In the states, drug-related crimes account for fewer than 20 percent of the people who are imprisoned. Most of the people in prison in the United States today are there for crimes of violence. But the mass incarceration narrative has largely prompted the unwinding of the old drug war. Ever since Michelle Alexander’s book came out in 2010, The New Jim Crow , the focus on mass incarceration and the racially disproportionate ways in which the drug laws are punished, has been enormously influential in breaking down support for the old war on drugs.

The war on drugs is often traced to the Nixon years. That quote you cited from John Ehrlichman was certainly memorable, and no doubt Nixon himself was virulently anti-drug and was probably a racist too, but the drug laws actually took a dip in severity during the Nixon years. They had been more severe before and they became more severe after. The drug war I study in this book is not the Nixon drug war, not even the Rockefeller-Eisenhower drug war of the ’50s, but the drug war of the late 19th century. The early anti-drug laws were laws about whites. They were enforced against those who sold to whites, and especially to young whites and to white women. The driving force was to protect the moral integrity of respectable whites, especially youth and women. It didn’t matter who the sellers were. The early laws against cocaine were largely directed against white pharmacists. So it’s really only in the 20th century that the drug war began to focus on people of color. 

Ford : So to the extent there’s racism involved in the early drug laws, it was that lawmakers didn’t care about the people of color. They cared about whites and the effect that drugs would have on corrupting white people, correct?

Yes, it was the racism of indifference. We see that most clearly in the early laws against opium dens. The first shot in the American war on drugs was fired in 1875 when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted the country’s first ordinance against the opium dens, which was the country’s first law against any mind-altering drug other than alcohol. That law was written in race-neutral terms, but was characterized in the press as being the “San Francisco ordinance against white people in opium dens.” Those were the words that were used, not only in San Francisco, but when other anti-opium den laws were enacted in cities and states across the West. The police very self-consciously did not go after opium dens that were kept by the Chinese for the use of Chinese patrons. 

Ford: Why opium, later marijuana, but not alcohol, which is clearly also a powerful mind altering drug?

The moral lineage of the drug war goes back to early Christian notions of the wrongfulness of non-procreative sex. Those notions actually trace back earlier, but they were expressed in a very vivid and memorable way by the early Christian fathers who argued, with regard to non-procreative sex, that the sin of such sex was in the way it robs us of our reason —the faculty that most links humans with God. Our heads are up high, closest to the heavens, and we try to erect reason as the emperor over the temptations of the lower parts of our body, certainly our sexual organs, but also our stomachs and the appetitive parts of our character.

The notion was that sex was prototypically an instance in which the mind capitulates to the appetites of the lower members. That notion was expressed in almost unaltered form a millennium and a half later when Puritan theorists began to argue about the wrongfulness of drunkenness. From there, it’s a very short step to imagining the moral denunciation of pleasure-inducing drugs. I know it sounds simplistic, but the striking thing is how thick the evidence is that these threads carry forth from the early Christian times in a more or less unbroken fashion to the late 19th century when drugs first began to be banned. 

Alcohol is generally approved only when used in a non-intoxicating way. Imagine the same drug we know today as alcohol—but imagine that the only form of administration of that drug is a single swallow that carries the same punch as 10 shots of vodka, so one could not drink without getting drunk. Would that drug have been legal all these years? I think the answer to that is pretty clearly no. Alcohol is perceived as a drug that can be used in a non-intoxicating way, and it is seen as serving a lot of good, among them easing reasoned intellectual conversation, which is reason-enhancing, not reason-depriving. 

Ford: I’m wondering what you make of what’s happening with marijuana today. We’re slowly, it seems, moving in the direction of complete legalization?

The first state that banned cannabis was Massachusetts and four of the first 10 were in New England. It was once again, a story about morality and the protection of youth. But with all of those early state laws, I think with one exception, when they banned cannabis in the early part of the 20th century, they all preserved medical use as lawful. Doctors could continue to prescribe cannabis for a very narrow class of ailments. The striking departure, and the one part of the drug war that does trace particularly to the Nixon era, was the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which classified cannabis as a Schedule I drug with no recognized medical use.  That part was out of line with the whole history of drug and alcohol prohibition, where medical uses have been preserved in both the drug and alcohol realms—and not just cannabis, but also cocaine and the opiates.

So when states began to legalize medical cannabis use, that simply returned us to the old historical status quo. But it was revolutionary wh en Colorado and Washington and other West Coast states began to legalize recreational cannabis use. The interesting part of that story is what triggered it: We go back again to Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow,   and the way it brought to a wide audience conversations that had existed largely in the academic world about how the drug war was being weaponized against communities of color. That argument has the catalyst for legalization. The majority of jurisdictions that have legalized cannabis use for recreational purposes have also enacted equity provisions so that the licensing of cannabis dispensaries has been directed predominantly toward those communities hardest hit by the war on drugs, meaning those communities where there has been a higher proportion than elsewhere of cannabis-related arrests. Licenses for cannabis dispensaries have been allocated disproportionately to people who were prosecuted and convicted and imprisoned for cannabis-related crimes during the earlier drug war.

Ford: Now that cannabis use is effectively legal in many states, one of the consequences is that the potency of marijuana being sold, whether on the streets or in the legal dispensaries, has gotten much greater, correct? 

I predict that unless those marketing cannabis become savvier about the way they market it, including in terms of the potency, there will be a backlash. That’s exactly the message that will trigger the old moral notions, which are no longer springing from religious authority, but rather from the notions of mind clarity, and the problems with checking out and escaping from reality. We see that in Oregon, where the legislature just this week voted to undo the decriminalization provisions that had been enacted only a couple years ago, during a time when people thought that the war on drugs was truly coming to an end. I think the war on drugs in every realm except for cannabis is still vigorous. And in the realm of cannabis, I would not be shocked if the liberalization trend we’ve been watching stalls at the point where we are now.

Listen to the Stanford Legal Podcast

A former Massachusetts assistant attorney general and assistant district attorney, George Fisher is one of the nation’s top scholars of criminal law and evidence. In his scholarship he explores, through meticulous archival research, the history of criminal law and criminal institutions from prisons to juries, from plea bargaining to the regulation of alcohol and drugs. His publications include an acclaimed casebook on evidence and a history of plea bargaining in America. Professor Fisher is the faculty co-director of the Criminal Prosecution Clinic at the law school and a four-time winner of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching at Stanford Law School. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1995, he was a clinical professor at Boston College Law School, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, and an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Early in his career Professor Fisher clerked for Judge Stephen G. Breyer (BA ’59) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Is the war on drugs back on? | The Excerpt podcast

On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: It's been just over 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Since then, drug policy at the state level has mostly been progressing toward legalization, embracing liberal attitudes that aim to destigmatize drug use. But that experiment may soon be drawing to a close. In the wake of surging overdose deaths, Oregon has recently moved to recriminalize drug use and possession. Are we back to square one? Kassandra Frederique, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, joins The Excerpt to argue that policy makers simply didn't put the right safeguards in place.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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President George H. W. Bush:

All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. Drugs have strained our faith in our system of justice. Our courts, our prisons, our legal system are stretched to the breaking point. The social costs of drugs are mounting. In short, drugs are sapping our strength as a nation.

Dana Taylor:

That was then President George HW Bush speaking in his first televised address from the Oval Office back on September 5th, 1989. Fast-forward 35 years, and a lot has changed with regards to how we view drug use, but have we really evolved our policy since then? Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. In 2020, voters in Oregon approved Measure 110, making it the first state in the US to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs.

Today, the Oregon legislature has just passed a bill to reinstate criminal penalties for drug possession. Does the demise of Measure 110 signal a return to America's war on drugs? Here to discuss Oregon's Measure 110 and drug decriminalization is Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the US, working to end the drug war. Thanks for joining me, Kassandra.

 Kassandra Frederique:

Thank you so much for having me, Dana.

Measure 110, also known as the DATRA, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, was a significant win for drug decriminalization advocates. How did the drug policy shift in Oregon following its passage?

When Measure 110 passed, the point of it was to end the horrors of criminalization. So stopping the arresting of people with drug possession, because people recognized that arresting people for drug possession was not actually going to get people connected to the resources that they had or the resources that they needed. So when the measure passed, I think it had a rocky start in implementation, but the data and the research has shown that Measure 110 prevented tens of thousands of Oregonians from being shuttled into a horrific criminal legal system.

What we found, despite the rocky start of implementation that was created by the Oregonian bureaucracy, is that people did get connected to care. So in the first six months of implementation, Measure 110 increased services by 44%. It also improved the quality of care with 100% increase of people actually gaining access to everything from peer support to harm reduction services. And this includes 143% increase in people accessing substance use disorder treatment, as well as 296% increase in people accessing housing services, which was one of the biggest issues that people struggled with while Measure 110 was being implemented.

Your organization, the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance, has said that Measure 110 has been scapegoated by drug war advocates. How so?

So, so much of what Oregonians express frustration around were the conditions on the street. There was chronic homelessness that was exploding. There was a density population of unsheltered individuals. There was a lot of public drug use. And people made the connection to Measure 110, despite the fact that a lot of the issues and conditions that people were witnessing on the street and experiencing were a result of decades of inaction around housing.

It was about the fact that in the larger country, fentanyl, which is a more fast-acting opioid, has just made it to the West Coast, including Oregon, and that, in general, people's ability to get access to support has long been hindered by the lack of infrastructure in Oregon. And when I say the lack of infrastructure of support, Measure 110's purpose was to supplement the Oregon infrastructure.

However, what we learned was that decades of divestment in that infrastructure, as well as the Oregon Health Authority not listening to advocates about ways to improve the citation process, the ways that they needed to increase training for law enforcement about what Measure 110 did and what it didn't do, made it really difficult and confusing for Oregonians to actually see what was in front of them.

According to the CDC, in the 12 months ending January of 2020, there were 621 overdose deaths reported in Oregon. Then in the 12 months ending January of 2023, there were 1,431 overdose deaths reported, a significant increase. Is it fair to tie that increase to the passage of Measure 110?

Absolutely not. And in fact, it's not just advocates that are saying that. RTI actually came out with a study, and they're not the only ones, that they looked at the same period. What they found was that there was not a shred of evidence that showed that Measure 110 actually increased crime, increased homelessness, or increase the overdose rate.

What people are attributing that astronomical increase to is the introduction of fentanyl into the West Coast drug supply. And we know this to be true because the pattern of growth that Oregon is experiencing is similar to the pattern of growth that we saw on the East Coast, in places like New York and Massachusetts, when fentanyl entered its drug supply. And so part of the thing that it's important to disentangle is that Measure 110 was coming into implementation at the same time that the Oregon drug supply was changing.

You mentioned RTI. Who is RTI?

RTI is a research institution that held a conference a few months ago that looked at all the issues around implementation. They're also one of the academic institutions that is running an evaluation on Measure 110, about what worked and what didn't work.

Measure 110 was also enacted, as you've said, to address concerns related to incarceration rates for people of color. What kind of movement have you seen there?

So here, one of the things that the Oregon officials that focus on criminal justice statistics have said is that the recriminalization of drug possession will increase the amount of Oregonians of color that are incarcerated, or arrested, or engaged by the criminal legal system. And so this is something that continues to be an area of concern for us because part of the impetus for pushing the end of criminalization or ending the arrest was because of the historic disproportionate law enforcement engagement in communities of color, specifically that of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Oregonians.

I know that funding from marijuana tax revenue was allocated to expand access to addiction treatment services. Have any of those programs been successful?

You're seeing a 296% increase in people getting access to housing services. That would not have occurred outside of Measure 110. The money that people are able to put into these services have been really important. And I think you know that because when the conversation of recriminalization came up, everyone, all the elected officials said that that funding has to remain in place.

Kassandra, is there any argument that substance abuse became more visible in Oregon, particularly in the Portland area, after Measure 110 passed?

I think this is a great conversation. Public drug use happens because people usually don't have access to shelter or a home. Most people who use drugs have homes and don't use drugs in the street, and most people who are unhoused don't use drugs. There is a growing population of people who are unhoused, who are using drugs in the street, and the preeminent factor in that public drug use is that they don't have a home. And so I think if you're looking at the history of how homelessness rose in this time because of the eviction laws that were passed, because of the COVID eviction moratorium protections that were lifted during this time, you'll see that the unsheltered population rose, and those that are struggling and using drugs to cope with being unsheltered became more public and more visible. And those issues can't be attributed to Measure 110. They're attributed to the longstanding issues in Oregon around homelessness.

I want to turn now to the legalization of drugs versus the decriminalization was passed with Measure 110. You've advocated for legalization. What do you see as the upside of that?

I think in the moment that we're in right now, where our drug supply is continuously changing with more fast acting drugs, more powerful drugs, drugs that we have less scientific research around, it makes it more difficult for us to actually support people when the drug supply is shifting and shifting faster than we had in past years. And so, the conversation around the regulation of drugs is really about stabilizing the drug supply so that we can create the supports for people who use drugs.

In 1970, President Nixon signed the CSA, the Controlled Substances Act, into law. Was the signing of that act the beginning of the war on drugs.

The signing of the CSA was not the beginning of the war on drugs. Unfortunately, the war on drugs globally has been going on for a very long time. And in the United States, the first evidence of it here is in the late 1800s in California, where we passed the first drug laws, in part as a political tool to control Chinese migrants who had been working on the railroad. And so, we have had a long-standing strategy around drug criminalization and drug prohibition that has honestly set up the situation that we're in today.

What do you see as the specific failures of the war on drugs?

The war on drugs, as we see it, has really focused on criminalization. And that criminalization is not just something that we see in our criminal legal system. That strategy of criminalization, of surveillance, of stigma has infiltrated all our systems, and it's made it more difficult for us to give access to support for people who need it. It's also heavily relied on the legal system, which has incurred incredible amounts of incarceration, criminalization, deportation.

It's also really ripped apart families. People often don't speak to the ways that children are taken away from their parents, forcing other loved ones to be caretakers, and the disruption that is happening in the psychic impacts of what that looks like. And I think most urgently what we're seeing now is that our strategy of prohibition has made the drug supply more toxic and made it more difficult to manage, which has made it even more difficult for us to create the healthcare infrastructure to support people who are struggling with their use.

The Drug Policy Alliance has spent the last two decades in the pursuit of alternatives to criminalization. How do we stem the tide on the abuse of drugs like fentanyl?

Part of the things that we really need to focus on is what are the supports that are necessary for people? How are we giving people access to public education about fentanyl? How are we giving public education about all drugs? How we're giving public education around testing materials, giving people the opportunity to have testing materials so that they can know what is in their drug supply before they use them. How are we increasing access to different kinds of addiction services? So not just inpatient and outpatient treatment, as people traditionally have known. But what are the additional supports that can lead to someone stabilizing their use? And I think we have to look at our healthcare system, which has also really been impacted.

Kassandra, as you know, there are people who are opposed to Measure 110 and have been since the beginning. What do you see as the path forward that will benefit all of the communities that are grappling with drug addiction and the people living there?

I think we have to remind people that criminalization is not an appropriate way to deal with drug use. We know that because overdose has gone up in the hundredfold inside jails and prisons. We know that because when people come out of a jail in prison, they are 27 times more likely than the general public to have an overdose. People are frustrated, and I can appreciate that. I'm frustrated as well. My family members are frustrated with that as well. I'm living in the same wall that everyone else is, I'm experiencing the same wall that everyone else is, and I just truly believe that criminalization is not a pathway forward for us to get the things that we say that we want.

Kassandra, thank you for being on The Excerpt.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is the war on drugs back on? | The Excerpt podcast

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How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam

A mexican drug cartel is targeting seniors and their timeshares..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

Hello, James.

Hey. How’s it going?

Yeah. I’m not having much luck. So the problem is funding. And all of my money is in Mexico, all of it.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Katrin Bennhold. This is “The Daily.” A massive scam targeting elderly Americans who own timeshare properties has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars sent to Mexico.

Once you move forward and make your payment, if anything were to happen, he will directly pay you the full amount of what you’re entitled to, including the gains. He will pay you the full amount.

You’ve got all my money. It’s been sent. I sold a freaking house.

Listen to this. I sold a house that I grew up in so that I could come up with funds to send to Mexico.

I don’t even have anything from the sale, nothing.

My colleague Maria Abi-Habib on one victim who lost everything and the people on the other side of the phone.

That’s it. That’s it. There’s nothing —

You know what? That’s what has been said every freaking time. Every time, just pay this. That releases the funds.

But that’s why we won’t allow it to happen again. This is the last time, James.

It’s Friday, April 12.

Maria, you’ve been looking into this scam that’s targeting Americans. Where did your investigation start?

So several weeks ago, I received a phone call from a lawyer based in St. Petersburg, Florida, who had been contacted by a family who was very concerned that the father, this man named James, was in the middle of being scammed. He’d sent hundreds of thousands dollars to Mexico. And he was considering sending another $157,000 when his daughter decided to call up this law firm and try to get her father to stop, stop sending money to Mexico.

So I called him a few weeks ago as I was trying to understand what was going on.

Hi, James. How are you?

Good. Thank you.

He’s asked that his last name be withheld for privacy concerns because he’s quite embarrassed about the story that I’m about to tell you.

You’re retired now, but what were you doing for work? And if your wife was working, what was her job?

I was with the Highway Patrol.

James is a retired state trooper from California. And his wife Nikki is a former school nurse.

She was born in ‘51. So 71-ish.

Two. She’s just reminded me, 72.

And they’re both in their early 70s. And they own this timeshare that is in Lake Tahoe, California. And they bought it in the 1990s for about $8,000.

And for someone who did not grow up vacationing in a timeshare, remind me how exactly timeshares work.

Timeshares are essentially vacation properties. And they tend to be beach resorts. And multiple people can buy into this property. The ownership is a shared ownership. And this gives you the right to use the timeshare for one to two weeks out of every year.

And so James and Nikki used their timeshare every other year with their daughters. But as they hit retirement age and their daughters are growing up and starting their own families, they’re just not really using it that much anymore. And timeshares require the owners to pay off yearly maintenance fees. And so they’re starting to think about maybe letting go of their timeshare and selling it.

Then one day, in late 2022, James gets a phone call from a company that is purporting to be based out of Atlanta, Georgia called Worry Free Vacations.

Worry Free Vacations?

That sounds enticing.

Yeah. And they start off with a simple question, which is, do you want to buy a timeshare? And James says, I already have a timeshare. And then they say, great. Well, what about selling the timeshare? Do you want to sell? There’s this Mexican businessman, and he’s interested in your timeshare. And he’s willing to buy it for about $20,000.

So we figured, well, what the heck? If we can make a few bucks on it, we’ll go for it.

And James jumps at the opportunity.

And did he do anything to try and verify that this was real?

Yeah. So remember, James is former law enforcement. And he feels very confident in his abilities to sniff out untrustworthy people. So he goes online, and he googles this Mexican businessman and sees that, yeah, he is a real person.

He’s a very well-respected individual in Mexico, very well off. And —

And this makes James feel at ease, that he’s selling to a legitimate person, that Worry Free Vacations are who they claim to be and that he’s going to double his money overnight, essentially.

And what happens next?

Well, a couple of weeks after he makes the agreement with the buyer, he’s told that he needs to send a couple thousand dollars to facilitate the purchase.

What does that mean, facilitate?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I can’t remember specifically whether it was supposed to be cross-border registration —

So he’s being told that there are these fees that are paid directly to the Mexican government.

Or SPID or some other fee that was Mexican government required or not.

A lot of these fees are the same types of fees that you would pay in the United States for a real estate transaction. So he begins wiring money to an account in Mexico.

After that —

— a few days later, we get a notification. Well, everything went well, except that we have to pay an additional fee.

Every time that he sends one fee, he’s being told that he’s got to send another fee right afterwards.

Does he get suspicious at any point?

His wife is suspicious. After the first couple of payments, she starts saying, this does not feel right.

But James is the former law enforcement officer, right? And he’s the one that basically handles the family finances. And he’s confident that all of this is going to work out because he’s being told that the buyer of the timeshare will reimburse James for all of these fees once the sale goes through.

Michael from the Worry Free Vacations was constantly reassuring me the money’s in that account. Check with the commercial escrow account. It’s there. It’s just these fees have to be paid, and you’re being reimbursed for all of this.

They’re sending James documents that show all of the reimbursements that he’s owed and how much money he’s going to get. And this just makes him feel like all of this is kosher.

We have this commercial escrow company that was involved out of New York. So there was an air of legitimacy that I was comfortable with.

Maybe OK, these guys just need one more fee and everything is going to finally be cleared.

But about a year in, James starts to get suspicious. He begins asking questions because he wants his money.

And every time I asked, hey, is there a way I can get a partial release of these funds, there was always no, these funds have to be paid from your account before they’re released.

But Worry Free Vacations, they pivot. And they tell him that, listen, there are all these complications. It’s going to be really hard to get your money out from this transaction.

I could pay about $30,000 and change to reinvest the $313,000 into an environmentally-conscious development in Loreto, Mexico.

Instead, we’ve got this other investment opportunity in Mexico.

And I’m sure you know where that is, over on the East Coast of Baja.

And that is going to make you a huge return, even more money than you had thought that you were going to make, much more than the $20,000.

I’m supposed to have 54 million pesos in a Mexican bank account.

So this is now no longer just about his timeshare. They are now partners in a real estate investment.

Right. And there’s this whole new round of fees and fines associated with that.

So how many payments would you say?

Quite a few. Couple dozen at least, maybe more.

When was your last payment?

It would have been 17 January.

Uh-huh. And what was that for?

Good question.

And all along, he believed it was necessary to pay these costs just to get the money that he’s owed.

The amount of money that I’ve sent to Mexico is just freaking exorbitant. And I mean, it is approaching $900,000 or more.

And at this point, he’s sent about $900,000 to Mexico over about a year and a half.

Nearly $1 million.

That was almost all the money that he and his wife had saved for their retirement.

It also included money from the sale of James’s childhood home and money that he had borrowed from his daughter and son-in-law, about $150,000 from them.

It’s awful. So they were completely cleaned out by these guys.

Yeah. And this is when his daughter asks a law firm to look into this, which is the point in the story when I meet James. And when we start talking, it was clear to me that he just did not know what to think, even after losing this much money.

So this started in 2022. When did it end?

We’re still in it.

And he’s still talking to the scammers.

And as a matter of fact, presently, there was a request for $157,000 and change to clear up this whole thing. It would clear the entire issue out. Now —

And James is even considering putting a second mortgage on his house to send that money that he’d been promised would finally clear all this up — one final payment of $157,000.

It really sounds like he’s still wanted to believe that this was somehow legit.

Yeah. It was pretty clear to me that he was being scammed. But I didn’t definitively know what was going on, so I asked him if he could start recording his phone calls with the scammers.

Would you be so kind as to do me a favor?

Would you be willing to give them a call and record them?

[LAUGHS]: I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve been recording them.

And it turns out he already had been.

Worry Free Vacations.

So he shared the recordings of these calls that he’d had with these scammers over the last year or so. And it was just remarkable. It gave me huge insight into how the scam worked and the way that it sounded over the phone.

Is this is Michael in? I think he’s trying to call me. I couldn’t get through pick up.

Yes, I believe he did try to call you, sir. Give me a second. I think he’s only going to be in for a couple of minutes. One second.

There are two main takeaways for me listening to these calls.

Good afternoon. Michael McCarthy.

Michael, I missed your call. I was trying to pick up.

Yeah, don’t worry. Yeah, I figured something was wrong with your phone. Everything OK?

The first is that these scammers had really gotten to know James so well, and they really made James believe that Worry Free was a company that was working for him.

That’s why we need to hurry up and get this money over to you. Because hey, I’m losing my mind too. I’m not even here to convince you, James. I’m not — I’m your broker, and —

One of the things they continuously say is, trust me.

Look, I’m doing everything I can in my power and will on my end. So James, just look — like I told you from the get-go, I’m going to resolve this. And we are doing it. I just need you to focus on the goal.

They would refocus the conversation on what James needed to do to get his money back.

Look, if you make your payment as a security deposit, right away they will release the funds to you. With these —

And the other thing —

I’ve been having so much trouble trying to reach you, and I have not been successful.

— is that the scammers had created this elaborate cast of characters.

Why don’t you answer my calls?

And some of them were really aggressive. James shared a recording of this one man who claimed to be an agent for the Mexican government. And he basically started yelling at James.

I don’t care if your wife is at the hospital. To be honest with you, I don’t give a damn! But you know where I do give a damn? It’s your money, and my name is written all over it! Do you understand?

And he even threatened James. If James didn’t pay off these fines, then he would lose all the money that he’d sent to Mexico already.

You could get the best lawyer you want. You could get whoever you want. And this is not a threat. This is facts. But anyways, who am I to convince you, right?

Well, thank you for the information. And — are you still there? Hello?

Wow. So these scammers were basically doing a good cop, bad cop routine to stop James from walking away and to squeeze every last penny out of him.

If you provide me your email, contact information, I will certainly be happy to forward all of the wire transfer information from my bank account to you so that you can see where those funds went.

Yeah, that would be great. I have your email.

James asks me, a reporter who’s based in Mexico, who speaks the language, if I could help him figure out where his money had gone to.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your assistance.

I’m just doing my job. Thanks again, and we’ll talk soon.

And the only way that I could figure that out was to understand who was on the other side of the phone.

We’ll be right back.

So Maria, who was on the other side of that phone line?

So by the time that I’d met James, I’d already gotten a tip from US law enforcement agencies that they were seeing a new trend. Mexican drug cartels were getting involved in the timeshare scam industry.

Drug cartels?

Yeah. And not just any drug cartel. This is one of the most notorious, violent, bloody drug cartels that exists in Mexico and Latin America, the Jalisco New Generation cartel. And when I looked at James’s bank records, guess what? All the money that he was sending was going to various bank accounts that were all located in Jalisco state in Mexico.

Wow. So why would the drug cartels get into the timeshare scamming business?

It is a huge business. The FBI told me that it’s about $300 million in profits over the last five years.

But the thing is is that the potential for it to actually be multitudes more is huge. Because the FBI estimates that most of the scams are actually not even reported. In fact, only about 20 percent are. So that means the total timeshare scam business could actually be much larger than the $300 million that they have knowledge of over the last five years.

But wait. I thought the drug business was a pretty lucrative business in itself. So why get into the scamming of elderly people for their properties in Lake Tahoe?

Well, you have to remember that these drug cartels, they’re not just doing one thing. They’re doing multiple things. They’re essentially conglomerates. Because it’s really expensive to run a cartel. You need to pay off officials, both Mexican and American. You need to maintain basically an army in order to secure your routes up to the United States, ports of entry into Mexico from Colombia. And any big business, you need to diversify your income to make sure that you keep the money flowing. Because you never know when one business is going to be shut down by authorities or taken over by your rivals.

We’ve reported that they’re now in the avocado business and the construction business. And timeshare fraud is basically no different than any of those. So we’re seeing that the cartels have their fingers in many pies, the legitimate and the illegitimate economy here in Mexico.

It’s kind of fascinating to think of these drug cartels as like sprawling diversified business empires. But when did the cartels first get into the scamming business?

So Jalisco New Generation started about 15 years ago.

And when they started to consolidate their empire in Jalisco state, they found that there were all these scam timeshare call centers all over the state that were being run by various players, and that this was a huge, huge moneymaker. Because essentially, all you have to do is call up retired senior citizens in the US and Canada. It doesn’t take that much money to run that kind of a scheme. There’s no product you’re making.

So essentially, they conducted a hostile takeover of these call centers. They went in. They kicked down doors and dragged out the people who were managing these call centers by their hair and threatened to kill them unless they gave up the call centers or started handing over a cut of what they made. And slowly, slowly Jalisco New Generation cartel took over the entire timeshare fraud industry.

Interesting. Were you able to find any of these call centers?

So these call centers are pretty hard to find. They look like any other storefront. But I was able to visit two that were located in an upscale neighborhood in Guadalajara, which is the capital of Jalisco state. And it was just really perturbing because it was just so normal. Two villas about a mile away from each other outside. Outside of one villa, parents were walking by, holding their children’s hands as they did drop off at school.

It was right next to a park where people taking their morning exercise or their dogs for a walk. There was no real sign that the cartel was doing business there. But a few months before, Mexican law enforcement had found the bodies of eight young people who had used to work at one of these call centers and said that the Jalisco cartel had killed them.

Wow. What happened?

So I wasn’t able to talk directly to any of the victims’ families. They’re just too scared. But in general, this is usually how it starts.

The cartel seeks out English speakers to work for their call centers. Sometimes they don’t even tell them what exactly they are doing. They would tell the recruits that the job was adjacent to the hotel industry.

You have to remember, Jalisco is a huge, huge tourism magnet for Americans and Canadians and others. And the cartel would get their call lists from bribing hotel employees to give them the names of people who stayed at these hotels and also at the timeshare resorts. And the people who would work at the call centers are provided the names and a manual of what you need to do when you call, like a loose script of how to try to suck as much money as you can out of these people up North in Canada and the States.

So we don’t know for sure what exactly happened with the eight young Mexicans who were killed last year. But through an intermediary, one sibling told us that when their family member knew what their job actually was, they became extremely uncomfortable and tried to leave the call center and find another job maybe.

But the Jalisco New Generation cartel is known for being extremely brutal. They chop off heads, and they’ll put them on the gates of a playground, for instance. So that everybody in the neighborhood knows what went down. And in this case, it’s possible that they wanted to send a warning that there’s no defection from their timeshare call centers.

So basically making a very scary example of these guys, in case anyone else is thinking about quitting one of the call centers.

Exactly. And one man, who runs an organization who advocates for missing people and actually organizes search parties to comb the forests of Jalisco state looking for the missing, says that he knows of about 30 people who have disappeared from the call centers in Jalisco state since 2017. So while Americans and Canadians might be losing much of their life savings, in Mexico, this is actually deadly.

Are the authorities doing anything about this?

Not really, other than the fact that these two call centers were shut down. The authorities haven’t arrested others. They’re not putting pressure on Mexican banks, for instance, to look into these payments coming from senior citizens in the US or Canada. And you have to remember that people are really afraid. But you also have to remember that in Mexico things are not that clear. There is a lot of corruption and government collusion with organized crime and cartels.

And the tourism industry, it is huge in Mexico and particularly in Jalisco state. This is a multi-billion dollar industry. They don’t want Americans or Canadians or Europeans who are coming to Jalisco for its beautiful beaches and its mountains to hear about these stories regarding the cartels being involved in the tourism industry and think, I’m not going to send my family there for that beach vacation. It’s just simply too dangerous.

So everybody has an incentive to have the scam continue, whether because they’re too afraid and don’t want to speak out or because they’re in on it.

So in a way, local authorities have an interest in sweeping it under the carpet in order to just maintain this idea of a tourist destination.

Exactly. I mean, the spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office was very responsive to me until I told her what I wanted to ask her questions about. And then she just simply never answered any of my texts or phone calls.

So Maria, based on everything you know, all the information you have, would you say that you’re confident that the cartels were the ones who scammed James?

Yes, 100 percent. Everything I’ve seen points in that direction.

What did James say when you told him this?

So it took him quite a while to really allow himself to believe it. On the advice of his lawyers, he stopped picking up the phone calls. And about a week ago, they stopped after the scammers kept trying to call him.

But you said he was in it for over a year. Why do you think it took him so long?

Can you tell me, after all of that had been presented to you, why do you think you weren’t willing to be entirely convinced?

Well, I actually asked him that question.

That’s a very good question. Why wasn’t I able to pick up on that right away? And I think in the back of my mind, I’m finding out that I’m a little more stubborn than I thought I was.

And for him, it was pretty complicated.

And I think that I didn’t want to believe that I had fallen for this. I didn’t feel I was that foolish and stupid when it came to this. You know? I guess I didn’t want to believe that I could be fooled.

To come to terms with the fact that he had lost so much money was to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t the person that he thought that he was, that he wasn’t this kind of clever former law enforcement officer who was used to fighting the bad guys and winning.

I’m disappointed in myself. There’s a huge level of anger towards the perpetrators. And all of those things wrapped into one. And part of that, I think, contributes to not wanting to actually believe that I was wrong.

Hmm. Yeah, I hear you. I’m sorry. I can hear the pain in your voice.

[LAUGHS]: Yeah.

Some of it’s based on shame, right? That he lost all this money, everything that he’s worked for, and the fact that this was all supposed to be money that his children and his grandchildren were going to inherit. And now it’s gone.

And have you told your daughter that you think you’ve come to terms with the fact that this might have been a scam?

Oh, she’s been involved. Yeah. They know.

My daughter does.

I’m sorry. This is a tough time.

So I’ve got to make some sort of arrangement to compensate them for this on top of our regular debt. So yeah. It’s been a swell experience, all of it brought on by my — evidently, my stubbornness to believe that I couldn’t possibly be a victim.

How’s your wife doing throughout this whole process, with this new knowledge?

She’s not real happy, obviously, at all. I hear a lot of “I told you so.” And at this point, I’ve got no defense. She’s absolutely right. There’s no question about it.

Do you worry this is going to affect your marriage?

Yes, there has been an effect.

And do you think that at this point there’s any way for James and his family to get some kind of justice or at least find some kind of closure?

Ay. Justice? Unlikely.

At this point, I’m not necessarily expecting much in the way of restitution.

And as for closure, it’s a little bit too soon to tell. In a way, James has gone through several stages of acceptance for what happened. There’s fear. There’s shame. There’s resignation. And now he’s talking to me partly because he feels like it’s a public service, that he needs to be vocal so that other people don’t go through what he’s gone through and fall for the scam. And I think it also helps him feel a little bit empowered in a situation for over the last year and a half he was at the mercy of these people who were calling him multiple times a week.

I want to try to get as much information to as many of these official organizations as possible. I have a streak of anger through me now that I’ve developed to the point where I’m not going to let this go.

Well, Maria, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Here’s what else you need to know today. OJ Simpson, the football star who was accused and later acquitted of murdering his former wife and her friend, died of cancer at his home in Las Vegas, his family said Thursday. He was 76.

Today’s episode was produced by Astha Chaturvedi and Will Reid, with help from Clare Toeniskoetter and Lindsay Garrison. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Michael Benoist, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, and Will Reid, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

[THEME MUSIC]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Katrin Bennhold. See you on Monday.

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• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
• April 11, 2024   •   28:39 The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
• April 10, 2024   •   22:49 Trump’s Abortion Dilemma
• April 9, 2024   •   30:48 How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall
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Hosted by Katrin Bennhold

Produced by Asthaa Chaturvedi and Will Reid

With Clare Toeniskoetter and Lynsea Garrison

Edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Michael Benoist

Original music by Marion Lozano ,  Rowan Niemisto ,  Dan Powell ,  Pat McCusker and Will Reid

Engineered by Chris Wood

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Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.

A massive scam targeting older Americans who own timeshare properties has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars sent to Mexico.

Maria Abi-Habib, an investigative correspondent for The Times, tells the story of a victim who lost everything, and of the criminal group making the scam calls — Jalisco New Generation, one of Mexico’s most violent cartels.

On today’s episode

Maria Abi-Habib , an investigative correspondent for The New York Times based in Mexico City.

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How a brutal Mexican drug cartel came to target seniors and their timeshares .

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Political typology quiz.

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Where do you fit in the political typology?

Are you a faith and flag conservative progressive left or somewhere in between.

Take our quiz to find out which one of our nine political typology groups is your best match, compared with a nationally representative survey of more than 10,000 U.S. adults by Pew Research Center. You may find some of these questions are difficult to answer. That’s OK. In those cases, pick the answer that comes closest to your view, even if it isn’t exactly right.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .