The War on Drugs is declared
The “War on Drugs,” as we now know it, is said to have begun on June 17, 1971, at a press conference held by President Richard Nixon. This conference, which made public the arguments Nixon had made to Congress earlier that day, contains the following declarations:
America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. …
If we are going to have a successful offensive, we need more money. Consequently, I am asking the Congress for $155 million in new funds, which will bring the total amount this year in the budget for drug abuse, both in enforcement and treatment, to over $350 million. …
I very much hesitate always to bring some new responsibility into the White House, because there are so many here, and I believe in delegating those responsibilities to the departments. But I consider this problem so urgent — I also found that it was scattered so much throughout the Government, with so much conflict, without coordination — that it had to be brought into the White House.
His earlier proclamations to Congress were, if anything, far more dire. Nixon claimed: “If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us. I am not prepared to accept this alternative.” This publicity led to the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration two years later to further consolidate federal power over drug offenses. That department now employs nearly 10,000 people and controls a budget of nearly $3 billion per year — but this is only a fraction of the amount spent on the War on Drugs each year.
The federal government alone spent more than $15 billion prosecuting the War on Drugs in 2010 — equal to nearly $50 for every man, woman, and child in the country. State-level spending rose to nearly double that amount. Nearly 1.6 million arrests are made for drug-abuse violations each year, and since 1996 a quarter of all new prison inmates are imprisoned for drug offenses. More than $1 trillion has been spent on prosecuting the War on Drugs since 1971, and more than 40 million people have been arrested for drug-related violations.
That’s undeniably a tremendous long-term drag on the U.S. economy, and for what benefit? Drugs have not been destroyed in the U.S., nor have they destroyed us. Nixon was wrong.
The article The Longest Bear Market Begins originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.
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