The War on Drugs Targets People, Not Substances

While it’s interesting to look into the times the CIA tried to develop a “truth serum” or see if they could brainwash its citizens, the true way it uses drugs to control people is far more subtle.

All racial demographics in America use drugs at similar rates, yet arrest records and the perceptions around drug use show otherwise. Drug prohibition is an oppressive system of perpetuating racial and social disparities — making it a powerful tool for division and maintaining social order.

Maintaining these divisions are politicians, police forces, and the media, who drive home the stigmatized views many hold against drug use today. This is true now with the fentanyl scare stories, and it’s been true before of reports on crack, heroin, marijuana, alcohol, methamphetamine, and any other drug your mind could conjure up.

Nearly everyone uses drugs to some extent — whether it’s weed, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, or even sugar for a mid-day energy boost. Within the long list of possible substances, the legal system (and the news coverage, political rhetoric, and more flowing from it) draws an arbitrary line wherever best fits the government at that point.

Instead of educating the public on the reason behind drug use, the different effects of drugs, and the real benefits and risks associated with them, schools enact propaganda campaigns like DARE.

In doing so, we create a system where drugs start at an inherently bad position, leaving people to reason for their current drug of choice being the exception. 

As Russell Crandall puts it in Drugs and Thugs:

“Unfortunately, much of the contemporary public debate about drugs tends to deal in absolutes: drugs are either wholly evil or wholly harmless. In fact, the values and disvalues we assign to these substances are highly contingent on the prevailing social and political winds at the time when they are being considered.”

Is The War On Drugs Failing?

“The War on Drugs is an abject failure” is a common rallying cry among harm reductionists — including me at one point — but that’s not exactly true.

Dr. Carl Hart’s response to this question in Drug Use For Grown-Ups sums up the paradox of this issue quite well:

“Given society’s return on the twentyfold increase in our drug-control budget, we could reasonably conclude that the war on drugs has been a complete failure.

It has not. Otherwise, this country would not have continued to perpetrate this war decade after decade after decade…

The bottom line is simple: more drug arrests equate to more overtime, more “throwaway people” in prison, and bigger budgets.”

The war on drugs has not been successful when we measure it against its stated goal, but were drugs ever really the point? Drugs have been around since before people — and humans have always been dabbling.

What if the goal was more about controlling the people using the drug than the drug itself? If that were the case, the scores of disenfranchised Americans are closer to success stories than tales of horror.

“Along the way,” Hart explains, is the devastation of minority communities and the reduction of “complex economic and social forces” into “drug problems.” 

When it comes to boosting the budget of the police force, expanding the harms of marginalization, and removing the humanity of “throwaway people,” the War on Drugs is a tremendous success.

Hart even notes a Pennsylvania law that enables inmates to count as residents of their prison’s jurisdiction when reviewing the allocation of funds. This adds a massive incentive to boost the population of prisons and arrest as many people as possible — which, as we know, isn’t spread evenly among people who commit crimes.