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It’s Time to Decriminalize Drugs
The war on drugs can’t be won, not the way you think.
Has the United States’ war on drugs always really been about drug use? We’ve all heard many gut-wrenching, heartbreaking stories about addiction. Lives have been destroyed. Families have been torn apart. Criminalization has created an insidious monster. Casualties litter our country. We’ve been told the enemy is “drug abuse”, but the drugs aren’t the ones paying the heavy price.
In the 1870s, the first anti-opium laws were put into action, but they were mainly directed at Chinese immigrants. When the first anti-cocaine laws were drafted and enforced in the early 1900s, they targeted black men. In 1971, President Nixon plunged the United States into a relentless war that we’re still battling today. The United States declared a war on drugs. Was Nixon really trying to clean the streets of drugs and drug users, or did he have another “enemy” in mind?
“You want to know what this was really all about. 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…
