The war on drugs has been one of America’s most grievous mistakes, resulting in as many citizens with arrest records as with college diplomas. At last count, an American was arrested for drug possession every 25 seconds, yet the mass incarceration this leads to has not turned the tide on narcotics.

The number of opioid users has surged, and more Americans now die each year from overdoses than perished in the Vietnam, Afghan and Iraq wars combined. And that doesn’t account for the way drug addiction has ripped apart families and stunted children’s futures. More than two million children in America live with a parent suffering from an illicit-drug dependency.

By some estimates, nearly half of Americans have a family member or close friend enmeshed in addiction

The war on drugs began in 1971 out of a legitimate alarm about narcotics both in the United States and among U.S. troops in Vietnam. But the “war” approach locked up enormous numbers of people and devastated the family structure. Drug laws discriminated against African-Americans (possession of crack cocaine, disproportionately used by blacks, drew far harsher sentences than possession of the same quantity of powdered cocaine, more likely to be used by whites).

Yet locking up endless waves of users has had little deterrent effect, and overdose deaths have surged. The White House has estimated that the economic cost of the opioid crisis in the United States exceeds $500 billion a year, equivalent to about $4,000 per household. And that doesn’t even include cocaine, meth and other drug use.

While the U.S. doubled down on the criminal justice approach to drugs, Portugal took the opposite avenue, decriminalizing possession of all drugs in 2001. It was a gamble, but it succeeded. Portugal’s overdose deaths plunged. The upshot is that drug mortality rates in the United States are now about 50 times higher than in Portugal.

The comment above, how the war on drugs started in 71...interesting, and kinda close to the truth,

If you dig deeper, you'll find the motivations for the "war on drugs" was almost entirely political.

You see, Nixon was evaluating re-election. And his primary "enemies" to getting votes?

Blacks, and hippies.

So, in order to neutralize them, he went after them...with a "war on drugs".

This is not made up, some weird conspiracy theory BS. One of his advisors, many years after the fact, has gone on record saying how they concocted this war on drugs so that Nixon could neutralize the democrat vote.

Go find it on YouTube or elsewhere-it's there.

So, after all this failure...billions and billions spent, lives wasted, and no real slowing of drug use...doesn't it suck to know that it wasn't started at all with the intent of helping society, rather, to get a President re-elected?

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.

The Trump administration is threatening to take us backward toward a 1980s style drug war. President Trump is calling for a wall to keep drugs out of the country, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it clear that he does not support the sovereignty of states to legalize marijuana, and believes “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”



http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/brief-history-drug-war

I don't see a problem with the sentencing disparities between crack and powdered cocaine. Crack is cheaper than cocaine so it would impact larger amounts of people and destroy communities. Most people using powered cocaine were rich executives partying with models. Crack could be bought by everybody on the block so whole families would be stoned while their kids roamed the streets unattended.

Most people who use drugs have to steal to buy more drugs so their drug habit will lead to other crimes like robbery and murder. I think it's better to lock these guys up so they don't break into your house or hit you over the head to grab your wallet.

Anonymous956 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't see a problem with the sentencing
> disparities between crack and powdered cocaine.
> Crack is cheaper than cocaine so it would impact
> larger amounts of people and destroy communities.
> Most people using powered cocaine were rich
> executives partying with models. Crack could be
> bought by everybody on the block so whole families
> would be stoned while their kids roamed the
> streets unattended.
>
> Most people who use drugs have to steal to buy
> more drugs so their drug habit will lead to other
> crimes like robbery and murder. I think it's
> better to lock these guys up so they don't break
> into your house or hit you over the head to grab
> your wallet.

Or if you’re Gerry you just suck dick for meth money.