The War on Drugs

The war on drugs is the name given to the federal and state effort, intensified beginning in the 1970s, to reduce illegal drug use through aggressive law enforcement, long sentences, and interdiction. It dramatically increased the American prison population.

President Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one" in 1971 and created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. The Reagan administration intensified the effort in the 1980s, with First Lady Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign and a wave of new federal legislation. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, passed in the wake of public alarm over the crack cocaine epidemic, imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug trafficking and created the 100-to-1 crack-powder disparity. State legislatures passed parallel laws. Police departments expanded narcotics enforcement. Federal funding flowed to state and local agencies that produced drug arrests. The result transformed American criminal justice. The federal prison population grew nearly eightfold between 1980 and the mid-2000s. State prison populations grew sharply as well. By the mid-1990s, the United States had become the world's largest jailer in both absolute and per capita terms. Roughly half of federal prisoners and about a fifth of state prisoners were serving time for drug offenses at the peak. Critics argue that the war on drugs failed in its core objective. Drug use has not declined meaningfully despite decades of enforcement, while drug overdose deaths have reached record levels. The enforcement burden has fallen disproportionately on Black and Hispanic Americans, who use drugs at roughly the same rates as white Americans but are arrested and imprisoned at far higher rates. Defenders argue that aggressive enforcement helped drive down violent crime through the 1990s and 2000s and kept harder drugs from spreading further. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 and the First Step Act of 2018 began rolling back some of the harshest sentences. The basic strategic question of whether to treat drug use primarily as a crime or as a public health matter remains unsettled.