10 Facts About the War On Drugs
1. The War on Drugs was never about drugs.
“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. 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.”
2. The War on Drugs began as retaliation against laws empowering black people to vote.
From the end of the Civil War until the mid-1960s, many states created a racial caste system designed to continue the subjugation of Black people through so-called Jim Crow laws. When two federal laws invalidated many Jim Crow laws, the Nixon Administration responded with the War on Drugs, starting with the Controlled Substances Act. As explained in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, “Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you are afforded scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.”
3. The War on Drugs creates deadly black markets, gangs, and cartels
There is a demand for mind-altering substances in nearly every society throughout the world. When some of these substances are made illegal, individuals and groups will rise to meet this demand and sell these drugs illegally, creating a black market. When demand for these substances is high, these organized criminal groups become incredibly wealthy and increasingly well-armed, and come into conflict with police, civilians, and other criminal gangs. During the prohibition era in the 1920’s and 30’s, prohibition gave rise to mobsters like Al Capone and strings of deadly violence between rival bootlegging gangs. In recent years the Drug War has empowered the notorious drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, leading to death tolls that number in the hundreds of thousands.
4. The Nixon Administration buried a study showing that marijuana was not harmful.
Nixon convened a commission to develop evidence that cannabis was harmful: “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana. Can I get that out of this sonofabitching, uh, domestic council? … I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.” When the commission found that cannabis was as safe as alcohol, the Nixon Administration buried the report.Item description
5. For 25 years, prison sentences for crack cocaine were 100 times longer than for powder cocaine.
Congress’ decision to make the mandatory prison sentence for crack cocaine 100-times longer than for powder cocaine is further evidence that the War on Drugs is nothing more than a war on Black people. In June 1986, Maryland basketball star Len Bias died of an overdose of alcohol and powder cocaine. Yet Congress falsely blamed crack cocaine for Bias’ death, then passed a law making the minimum prison sentence for crack 100-times longer than for powder cocaine. Worse still, this law was applied in a discriminatory way. Even though whites and Hispanics formed the majority of crack users, Black people constituted more than 80% of the defendants sentenced under this law. Although the 1986 law was amended in 2010, the law was not fully retroactive and the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine is still 18:1. Click here to learn more.
6. The War on Drugs has forced people to buy drugs laced with potent substances like fentanyl.
Criminalizing drugs just forces people to buy them from unregulated, unscrupulous sources who cut them with potent substances like fentanyl. According to the CDC, fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for adults ages 18-45 in the United States, killing 40,010 Americans. It claimed nearly twice as many lives as car accidents, suicide, COVID, and cancer. If you are going to take drugs, TEST THEM FIRST!!! You can buy cheap, effective testing kits from our wonderful friends at DanceSafe.
7. The DEA, ignoring uncontested evidence of MDMA’s medical use, declared that MDMA had no medical use.
The DEA announced in 1984 that it would be classifying MDMA as having no medical use. An administrative judge within the DEA examined the evidence and concluded that MDMA did in fact have medical use as an adjunct to psychotherapy. The DEA rejected the finding of its own judge and classified MDMA as having no medical use. Perversely, this classification precluded scientists from conducting further studies to explore MDMA’s medical use.
8. The study claiming to show that MDMA puts a hole in your brain has been retracted, and the author admitted he accidentally used the wrong drug.
One of the many lies of the “Just Say No” campaign was a study supposedly showing that MDMA puts holes in your brain. Turns out, the researchers screwed up and used the wrong substance: “We write to retract our report . . . following our recent discovery that the drug used to treat all but one animal in that report came from a bottle that contained methamphetamine instead of the intended drug MDMA,” admitted the study’s author.
9. Drugs, and science, are winning the war on drugs.
Federal law classifies all psychedelics and cannabis as having no medical use, but there has never been any evidence to support this classification. Fortunately, however, the dam is breaking. FDA clinical trials are showing psychedelics’ myriad benefits, including as treatments for PTSD, depression, anxiety, cluster headaches, and for addiction to opioids, alcohol, and tobacco, and the prohibition on federal cannabis research is eroding. Beyond that, more than two dozen states have legalized cannabis for recreational and/or medical purposes, and numerous jurisdictions have decriminalized small amounts of all drugs or certain subsets of them.
10. You can help bring an end to the war on drugs!
As John Lennon said, War is over if you want it! That’s true about the War on Drugs, too! There are myriad ways for you to get involved. You can encourage lawmakers in Washington to adopt the recently introduced bill that’s even more progressive measure than Oregon’s Measure 109. You can contact California legislators and encourage them to pass SB519, which would decriminalize small amounts of psychedelics in California. You can volunteer on a campaign to decriminalize drugs wherever you live, or get your own measure on the ballot! You can donate to organizations like Drug Policy Alliance that have been fighting the drug war for years. You can fight the propaganda by sharing accurate information about drugs. You can support MAPS and Usona, two nonprofits that are conducting exciting psychedelic research, or nonprofits like the the POC Psychedelic Collective, which focus in part on undoing the harms caused by the War on Drugs.
