“Drug abuse is one of the most vicious and corrosive forces attacking the foundations of American society today. It is a major cause of crime and a ruthless destroyer of life. We must fight it with all the resources at our disposal. This administration has declared a total and global war against this drug menace…” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay On March 28, 1973, then-President Richard M. Nixon appeared before Congress as he established the Drug Enforcement Administration and attempted to gain support for his escalating war on drugs. The consequences have since become clear. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people lost their lives. The United States has become the nation with the highest number of incarcerated people per capita. Blacks and modern “hippies” in the United States have faced increasing discrimination from the government, justice system, and law enforcement. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, police, military and powerful drug cartels incite violence linked to corruption-filled power struggles, while civilians are caught in the crossfire. And in hindsight, it is disturbingly clear that the thousands of deaths and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted are all in vain. The War on Drugs in North America has been a disaster and failure for everyone involved and in every nation where it took place, and policy must adapt to help drug users instead of punishing them. Soon after Nixon began the War on Drugs, attention turned to the Colombian cocaine industry when drug traffickers killed 40 people in one weekend in response to the seizure of 600 kilograms of cocaine by Colombian authorities with the help from the United States. This was the beginning of the violence that would plague the War on Drugs, continuing to the present day. In 1975, Operation Condor began, in which the US government used the war on drugs as an excuse to silence opponents of capitalism in Latin America. About 60,000 were killed. Support for criminalization increased after marijuana was found at a 13-year-old's birthday party in August 1976, leading to the 1978 amendment of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which allowed law enforcement order to seize all money and/or "other things". of value furnished or intended to be furnished to any person in exchange for a controlled substance [and] all proceeds attributable to such exchange. The first fatal drug-related shooting occurred in Miami on July 11, 1979, where a Colombian trafficker was killed along with his bodyguard in the Dadeland Mall. Shortly thereafter, in 1981, Ronald Reagan was elected president, continuing Nixon's war on drugs. From then to 1997, incarceration rates in the United States for drug crimes increased by approximately 70 percent, and approximately 400,000 people were incarcerated that same year. In August 2000, President William Clinton delivered $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Colombia to finance the war on drugs. In 2006, Mexico, following the United States, became the second country to use the military in the war on drugs as part of the Mérida Initiative. Soon after, the situation in Mexico turned violent. On January 31, 2010, gunmen stormed a birthday party in Ciudad Juárez and killed 13 teenagers as part of the city's ongoing war. On March 19 of that year, Mexican soldiers accidentally killed two graduate students atMonterrey, Nuevo Léon, during a firefight against drug traffickers. The military attempted to frame the students and destroyed the security camera recording the event. About two months later, on May 31, 55 bodies were found and removed from a mass grave near Taxco, Guerrero. On July 25, 2010, more than 70 bodies were removed from mass graves near Monterrey, Nuevo Léon. Autopsies showed that most were shot and others showed signs of torture. On November 5, 2010, more than 100 people died in the firefight between Mexican security forces and the Gulf Cartel in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Conditions continued to worsen throughout the following year. On May 14, 2011, in the state of Durango, 340 bodies, all with signs of torture, were removed from mass graves by Mexican police. And in June of that year, a Global Commission on Drug Policy, made up of former presidents, senior advisors and a former United Nations secretariat, declared that the global war on drugs had failed. However, the war on drugs is not over; in fact, former US President Barack Obama and incumbent President Donald Trump (at the time of writing) have both agreed to continue and escalate the war's destructive policies. The economic cost of the war on drugs alone is immense. Every year, in the United States alone, more than $47 billion is spent on the war on drugs. Overall, since 1971, the United States government has spent $1 trillion on war. Every dollar devoted to funding equals a dollar taken away from possible drug treatment, healthcare, defense, education, infrastructure, energy, science, trade or agriculture. This slows down development in all sectors. Closely linked to the cost of the war on drugs are incarceration and law enforcement. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Prisons Bureau, the average annual cost per federal inmate in 2016 was $31,977.65. Considering that approximately 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States and that one-fifth of them are incarcerated for drug crimes; this costs approximately $14.7 billion each year. In 2017, there were 1,632,921 arrests in the United States for drug law violations. 85.4% of these arrests involved possession only. Therefore, every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for drug possession. This surprisingly high arrest rate contributes to America being the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Worse, black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana charges than their white peers. According to the NAACP, blacks account for about 30 percent of all drug-related arrests, despite making up only 12.5 percent of substance users. There is a cynical reason for this. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House afterward, had two enemies: the antiwar left and blacks... We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be both anti-war or black, but causing the public to associate hippies to marijuana and blacks to heroin, and then by criminalizing them both heavily, we could destroy those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, disrupt their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. We knew we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.” The above is a quote from John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon's former domestic policy advisor, and explains why the war on drugs, an absolute failure, was started and continued during.