The War on Drugs: A New Era of Discrimination

On June 18, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon proclaimed, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.” Thus, the government launched an “all-out offensive” against drug abuse on both the supply and demand fronts. This initiative started the infamous war on drugs. The war started out for the “prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted.” However, it has become clear that the United States government is fighting an unwinnable battle. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, the United States spends more than $51 billion annually fighting the War on Drugs! Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argues that United States criminal justice system discriminates and oppresses African Americans under the guise of the War on Drugs.

First and foremost, the origins and history of drug policy in the United States must be analyzed. In 1906, the federal government passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, requiring accurate labeling of food and drugs. The first federal law that restricted the use and distribution of specific drugs in the United States was the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. This act taxed and regulated the distribution of opiates and cocaine. Physicians could prescribe narcotics to patients for normal treatment, but not to treat addiction. Then the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. A tax was now placed on the sale of cannabis. This made it extremely difficult to acquire cannabis, and there were harsh penalties placed on those who acquired the drug illegally.

In 1930, the Treasury Department created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The agency was operated...

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...ncreased scale of incarceration has not been caused by changes in criminal behavior. Although prison populations have steadily been rising for more than three decades, the crime rate has been anything but consistent. Crime rates rose in the 1970s, fell in the 1980s, increased again, and then sharply decreased in the 1990s (Loury, 2). The fluctuation of the crime rates compared to the dramatic increase in imprisonment shows that the two statistics have been unrelated to each other. Additionally, the increasing racial disparity in incarceration rates is not a consequence of increased crime offenses for African Americans. As the crime rates for violent offences sharply dropped, the racial disparity in prisons continued to rise. Loury contends that the “racial disparity of imprisonment rates has increased dramatically… largely because of ‘the War on Drugs’” (Loury, 2).