Declaration of the War on Drugs and Its Failure

Drugs in our world have been used for centuries, yet have been illegal for one 1% of our time. In 1971, President Nixon declared drug abuse to be public enemy number one. Tv shows and social media made it clear that drug dealers and cartels are villains and must be stopped. These social media networks decided to turn their heads the other way on the drug abusers and instead attack the hustlers and dealers. Nixon also put in place mandatory minimums on simple possession charges. Regardless of the culpability or circumstances of the offenders, the judges are forced to give out mandatory minimums of drug charges which are ridiculous. For example, a simple charge of possession of crack cocaine is a mandatory minimum of 5-10 in federal prison. Instead of talking about the end of social safety nets for low-income families, they rather talk about the drug dealers. In the United States, 22 percent of the prison population is from non-violent drug charges. Today, they imprison the most amount of people in the world. There are about three million people incarcerated in the United States.

The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world's prisoners. The drug prohibition efforts have had little impact on the supply of these drugs and have had no success in diminishing the demand of these drugs. The drug production trafficking and consumption of the drug have affected every single country in the world. Other countries are in the drug war such as Latin America and Afghanistan. Mexico is in control of 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States, and about 70 percent of the marijuana is from Mexico. In 2006 the Mexican drug war started. Mexico’s federal government put in new strategies to catch and imprison the cartel leaders and to dismantle cartels. Since then the Mexican government has taken out some big cartel leaders however this had lead to even more violence in their cities. This is believed because since the cartels have lost their leaders, there is no one to command and lead them, therefore the members in the cartel feel like they need to fight for control over the pipes that transfer drugs into the United States. These Mexican drug cartels make between nineteen billion and twenty-nine billion from drug sales in the United States alone. No matter how hard you try to stop these drugs from entering the country and into the public’s hand it will always be there. The demand for these drugs especially marijuana. About 55 percent of teens have used marijuana. Since the demand is very high for these drugs it will always be available to get your hands on. No matter how hard the government tried there is no way to lower the demand for these drugs. Since Nixon declared the war on drugs public enemy number one in 1971 we have been in the prohibition era, which is powered by propaganda and corruption. This era needs to end for the better of society, rather than spending millions and billions of dollars from taxpayers due to mass incarceration. Instead of paying for prisons the common people should be worrying about health care and education rather than mass incarceration. We also should be regulating the supply of drugs and providing aid to those need these drugs instead of punishing the abusers and the suppliers. Countries like Canada and Switzerland have learned from their mistakes and put in safe injection sites for high drug abuse areas in their cities. My thesis for the war on drugs is that the war on drugs has had terrible effects on societies economically and socially. Mass incarnation and The New Jim Crow will be examples of how my thesis is correct.

First, what is mass incarnation? Mass incarnation refers to the current experiment of incarceration in the united states today, which is defined by the extreme rates of imprisonment and by the concentration of imprisonment among African American men living in neighborhoods of poverty or near poverty. Despite the fact that there is academic accord about how to characterize mass incarceration, there is some level of disagreement over its causes and results. Some state it prevents and cripples; others state that it debilitates poor families, keeping them socially underestimated. While some have propelled a functionalist contention with regards to the reasons for mass incarceration, recommending that it is for the control of African Americans following slavery, the Jim Crow and others have contended that a mix of social movements, political realignments, changes in occupation prospects for low-gifted men, and maybe, in particular, legitimate changes have driven the sensational imprisonment and outright divergence in rates of imprisonment over the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

The huge increase in imprisonment may be reasonable if open wellbeing were significantly made strides. However notwithstanding a recent research proposing very advantageous impacts of detainment on wrongdoing rates, most of the proof currently recommends either that detainment's consequences for wrongdoing are not so vast as once suspected or that the wrongdoing battling advantages of detainment have so decreased in the course of the most recent couple of long periods of the twentieth century and the mid 21st century that imprisonment is presently a considerably less powerful technique for wrongdoing control than it was before the 1990s. Given the high rates of imprisonment and racial dissimilarity in detainment, imprisonment might be noteworthy as a generator of social disparity. About one in every three African American children born today are expected to go to prison in some time in their life. This statistic alone should prove that mass incarceration is one of the biggest problems in our world today. Also, in the state of Chicago about 55 percent of African American men will go to prison. If you’re African American and live in Chicago, you are more likely to go to jail than to go to college or university. Another fact that is ridiculous is that thrifty seven percent of the prison population is African American, and twenty-two percent of the prison population is Hispanic. Mass incarnation links to the thesis that the war on drugs has had horrible effects on societies economically and socially, because of the fact that one-third of black children are going to go to jail.

Black children are going to jail is more than it seems. When someone goes to jail regardless of age it affects their friends, family, and communities of that person that goes to jail. About 72 percent of African Americans born today are grown up in a household without a parent. Most of the prison population consists of African Americans and Hispanics and most of those males grown up in homes without a fatherly figure. There is a strong correlation between black inmates and a missing parent. No matter what happens there will always be people supplying drugs in the people that are in needs for it. Because of these ridiculous laws on drugs they force incarceration on a tremendous amount of the population which affects thousands of communities across the United States. Mass incarnation has horrible effects on the economy because taxpayers are forced to pay billions of dollars every year to pay for prisoners. Instead of taxpayers paying for health care or education they’re forced to pay for prisoners and their living because of these laws. Also, a lot of these people that are locked up are good people. Some of these African American men getting locked up have responsibilities to pay bills in their households and many others. These low-income neighborhoods and communities need these people in order to help financially. Without these role models in our communities families are going into more debt and poverty than ever before. About thirteen and a half percent of the population in the United States are in poverty and nearly a third of the population is near poverty.

Secondly, The New Jim Crow is a novel created by Michelle Alexander. The Jim Crow was a racial caste system used from 1877 to 1964 in the United States that states anti-black laws. These laws were put in place after slavery so African Americans were still not accepted in society but any means. These laws consist of a tremendous disadvantage in the whole country just because of their skin colour. African American men weren’t allowed to vote until 1965. African American men were labeled during this time as weaker and these men were stripped of their rights just because of their skin colour. A few examples of these laws put in place are blacks were only allowed to sit in the back of the bus, black kids weren’t allowed to play with white kids, black kids weren’t allowed to go to the same school and use the same bathrooms. White politicians and former slave owners put these rules in place so they would have control and power over African Americans regardless of the rights they were given following the civil war. These Jim Crow laws and rules were removed in the civil rights act of 1964. Michelle Alexander makes the case that the Jim Crow rules were never removed as they are disgusting as mass incarceration. In 1971 when the war on drugs started, the federal police made distinctions between crack cocaine and powder cocaine, because crack cocaine was more used commonly by African Americans than powder cocaine used by white people.

The media started to delineate these crack clients as the scourge of mankind, and since this scourge was African American and Hispanic, the image of a run of the mill criminal progressed toward becoming racialized. With these stereotypes in place for the whole world, police have the ability to stop almost anyone they want. Law enforcement claim that they go to low-income communities because there are high drug uses in those areas, but in realism, it is where African American families are due to housing segregation. Police have absolutely no real training in how to look for drug users. But, when the police do catch these poor African American men usually they aren’t financially stable so they are unable to pay for a good defense attorney and they are forced to go with a free one given by the court. These lawyers are usually overworked and underpaid and these lawyers don’t have the same resources as the expensive lawyer. This is the reason the law enforcement focus on these neighborhoods of poverty since they realize that regardless of what they do will always have the capacity to escape with it. These stereotypes also apply in court as the death penalty is more common for African American men than whites convicted of the same crime. In 1998 they passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act which says that if public housing agencies find that there is criminal activity in your home they will kick you out and you will never be allowed back into public housing. This also affects ex-offenders that have nowhere to go and they aren’t allowed into public housing due to their mistakes. Many families are vulnerable because of this act, and if they get caught doing anything wrong they will have nowhere to go and will be forced onto the streets.

The thesis that the war on drugs is terrible for societies economically and socially linked to the New Jim crow due to the fact of the 1998 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Since this act has been passed it allowed the government to kick out any family that has broken any little rule of law. This hurts societies socially because when you see your friends and even close friends being kicked out for doing almost nothing, it can make you depressed and not even want to leave your house. It can also put fear into your heart knowing that you can be kicked out for any reason at any time. This also affects societies economically because a lot of these people getting kicked out have financial responsibilities among different households in the community. Without these people in the community, many families will be forced to live on the street or elsewhere without the finical aid from these wonderful people.

In conclusion, the war on drugs is a total failure. The goal of the war on drugs is to prohibit the use of drugs and to reduce drug trade however, none of this has been accomplished. They have barely stopped drug trade and they’ve had absolutely no success in diminishing the demand for these drugs. The cons of the war on drugs totally out weight the pros of the war on drugs. The thesis of the war on drugs have has terrible effects on our societies economically and socially provided by my examples of mass incarnation and the New Jim Crow by Alexander Michelle should prove that the war on drugs is a total failure.