War on Drugs

History

The first drug law in the United States was passed as an ordinance in 1875 by the city of San Francisco. This local legislation outlawed the smoking of opium in opium dens in response to fears that Chinese men were “corrupting” white women who visited the dens. The Harrison Act of 1914 was the primary legislative vehicle implemented by the federal government to regulate narcotics in the United States. The federal government began to control the use of cocaine in the early 1900s and that of marijuana in 1937. These laws also linked drugs to specific minority groups. For example, politicians and news reporters fanned fears that “cocainized Negroes” might become impervious to bullets or engage in wild sexual rampages. Lawmakers used marijuana charges as a mechanism for stigmatizing and deporting Mexican immigrant workers.

If presidential announcements and legislative initiatives are used as indicators of the beginning of a war on drugs, four benchmark periods are identifiable: 1972, 1982, 1986, and 1988. President Richard M. Nixon declared the initial “war on drugs” in 1972. In February 1982, President Ronald Reagan also declared a “war on drugs.” Until 1985, legislators, the mass media, and the public largely ignored these declarations. The goals of these antidrug campaigns were to reduce drug use by individuals, stop the flow of drugs into the United States, and reduce drug-related crimes.

The focus changed with the federal enactment of the Anti–Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988. These acts moved away from targeting major drug dealers and providing treatment for users and toward punishing users and street-level dealers. In 1986, the amount of money spent for the direct costs of the war on drugs at local, state, and national levels was $5 billion. Just 10 years later, in 1996, the annual total expenditure for the war on drugs across all levels was approximately $100 billion, with two-thirds of that being spent on law enforcement.

Criminal justice statistics further document the federal government's increasingly harsh response to drug offenders between 1982 and 1991. During this period, the number of persons who were prosecuted for drug offenses in the federal system declined. Of those who were charged, however, the number who were convicted and incarcerated for drug offenses increased significantly. Furthermore, given the mandatory minimum sentences included in the drug laws of 1986 and 1988, federal drug offenders who had minor or no past criminal records received much longer sentences than similarly situated offenders had received prior to the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Current U.S. drug policies punish offenses related to crack cocaine more severely—by a ratio of 100 to 1—than those involving other forms of cocaine. For example, a person who is convicted of possessing 5 grams of crack is subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years; the threshold amount for the same sentence for powdered cocaine is 100 times as much: 500 grams.

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