The War on Drugs
A fifty-year policy built on enforcement rather than treatment — and what fifty years of evidence shows about whether it worked.
The short version
- The War on Drugs, launched under Nixon in 1971, shifted U.S. drug policy from a public health framework toward criminal enforcement — a shift that produced the world's largest incarcerated population without measurably reducing drug use.
- Nixon's domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman later admitted the War on Drugs was consciously designed to target Black people and anti-war liberals, associating them with heroin and marijuana to disrupt their communities and criminalize dissent.
- U.S. drug overdose deaths have increased every decade since the War on Drugs began, reaching a record 107,000 in 2023 — the highest in history, most driven by illicit fentanyl.
- Countries that have decriminalized drug possession — Portugal most comprehensively since 2001 — have seen overdose deaths fall, HIV infection rates drop, and drug use rates remain stable or decline, without the predicted surge in drug use.
What it is
The War on Drugs refers to the U.S. government's ongoing campaign of criminal enforcement against the production, distribution, and possession of illegal substances, framed as a 'war' by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Nixon declared drug abuse 'public enemy number one' and created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. The policy framework it established — treating drug use primarily as a criminal matter rather than a public health one, prioritizing interdiction and arrest over treatment and harm reduction — has remained the dominant approach for over fifty years, despite repeated evidence that enforcement-focused policies do not reduce drug use or drug-related harm.
The political origins of the policy were articulated with unusual candor by John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, in a 1994 interview published in Harper's Magazine in 2016. Ehrlichman stated: 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I'm saying? 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.' This is not a historian's inference — it is a firsthand account of the policy's design intent, delivered by the official responsible for it.
The War on Drugs escalated dramatically under subsequent administrations. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, passed after the cocaine-related death of basketball star Len Bias, created mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and established the 100:1 crack-to-powder cocaine sentencing disparity that produced systematically racially asymmetric outcomes. Reagan's administration dramatically increased DEA funding and military-style drug enforcement. The 1994 Crime Bill under Clinton expanded mandatory minimums, incentivized state prison construction, and allocated billions for enhanced enforcement. By the early 2000s, drug offenses accounted for approximately half of all federal prisoners and a large share of state prisoners — making the U.S. the world's largest incarcerator largely on the basis of drug policy.
The public health alternative that drug enforcement displaced was not a hypothetical. Before Nixon's declaration, federal drug policy was increasingly oriented toward treatment: the Hughes Act (1970), passed just before Nixon's War on Drugs declaration, required large employers to provide addiction treatment benefits and created the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That trajectory was reversed by the criminalization framework. Treatment funding was cut or stagnated relative to enforcement. Harm reduction approaches — needle exchanges, supervised consumption sites, naloxone distribution — were actively resisted by federal and state governments for decades. Needle exchange programs, which prevent HIV transmission among people who inject drugs, were barred from receiving federal funding from 1988 until 2016. The practical result was an HIV/AIDS epidemic within intravenous drug-using populations that federal policy prevented cities from addressing with known effective tools.
Why it matters
The empirical case against the War on Drugs rests on a simple observation: after fifty years and approximately $1 trillion in cumulative enforcement spending, drug use rates in the United States have not declined, and drug overdose deaths have increased every decade. Americans use illegal drugs at higher rates than citizens of most comparable countries. The drug supply has not been disrupted: prices for cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine adjusted for purity have fallen over the decades-long enforcement campaign. Interdiction removes a share of supply that the market rapidly replaces. Drug overdose deaths reached 107,000 in 2023 — the highest annual total ever recorded, driven primarily by illicit fentanyl that entered the supply chain as enforcement made bulkier drugs more difficult to smuggle. The policy has not achieved its stated objectives by any measurable criterion.
The racial disparities produced by drug enforcement are among the most documented in American social science. Black and white Americans use illegal drugs at roughly similar rates — numerous surveys including the National Survey on Drug Use and Health consistently find this — but Black Americans are arrested for drug offenses at roughly 3–4 times the rate of white Americans, and receive longer sentences for equivalent offenses. The ACLU's analysis of marijuana arrest data found that in 2018, Black Americans were 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans despite similar usage rates. These disparities compound across the criminal justice system: arrest rates determine prosecution rates, which determine conviction rates, which determine incarceration rates. The War on Drugs has functioned, in aggregate and by measurable outcome, as a mechanism of racially asymmetric criminalization.
The international evidence on alternatives is now substantial. Portugal decriminalized personal possession of all drugs — including heroin and cocaine — in 2001, redirecting enforcement resources toward treatment and harm reduction. In the two decades since, Portugal has seen drug-related HIV infections fall dramatically (from 52% of new HIV cases in 2000 to 7% in 2015), drug overdose deaths remain among the lowest in Europe, and drug use rates remain below the European average. Use did not surge after decriminalization, contradicting the primary fear of opponents. Switzerland adopted heroin-assisted treatment for people with severe heroin dependence in the 1990s; the program has reduced drug-related crime, homelessness, and HIV transmission among participants while being cost-effective compared to incarceration. Oregon's 2020 decriminalization ballot measure, while its implementation was troubled by underfunded treatment infrastructure, demonstrated the politics of reform are viable at the state level.
The opioid crisis — in which pharmaceutical companies marketed highly addictive prescription opioids to physicians and patients while understating addiction risk, producing a generation of opioid dependence that has since migrated to illicit heroin and fentanyl — illustrates what happens when drug policy maintains its enforcement orientation in the face of a supply-side pharmaceutical crisis. The DEA had authority to limit OxyContin production and distribution and chose not to exercise it for years, partly under lobbying pressure from Purdue Pharma and distributors. Federal and state governments pursued criminal enforcement against street-level drug sellers while pharmaceutical executives who built the crisis through deliberate misrepresentation largely escaped criminal accountability. McKinsey & Company paid $573 million to settle state claims that its consulting work for Purdue Pharma accelerated the opioid crisis; no individual executives went to prison. The contrast in enforcement priorities — street dealers versus pharmaceutical boardrooms — is legible in the outcomes.