The War on Drugs, Abolition
ENEMY OF PEOPLE NUMBER ONE
The New Deal
The War on Drugs is not merely a political campaign but a global social phenomenon that has reshaped societies, institutions, and public consciousness. Its harms have extended far beyond drug users, influencing policy, criminal justice systems, and everyday life across the world.
This article argues that understanding the War on Drugs requires rejecting the assumption that institutional behaviour is driven by rational decision-making.
Instead, it exposes how irrational fears, political opportunism, and moral panics have enabled the continued marginalisation of disadvantaged populations.
Although framed as a battle to eliminate drug consumption, trafficking, and addiction, the War on Drugs has failed on its own terms: prisons remain overcrowded, countless lives have been lost or derailed, and communities—particularly Black and minority communities—have borne the brunt of punitive policies.
Meanwhile, powerful actors, including pharmaceutical corporations, have profited from the very substances the state claims to suppress.
Political leaders have often celebrated these policies under the illusion of success; despite the long-term social damage they produce.
Ultimately, the War on Drugs is not about substances themselves but about the people who become targets of state power.
It reflects broader patterns of social control, scapegoating, and inequality, where marginalised groups—such as Black communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, and the working class—are disproportionately punished.
This article contends that the War on Drugs has functioned as a political mechanism to discipline, stigmatise, and regulate vulnerable populations, rather than offering meaningful solutions to drug-related harm.
A new, long-term vision centred on social justice, public health, and structural reform is urgently required.
State-Generated Harm
The consumption of psychoactive substances is a near-universal human phenomenon, a practice interwoven with religious rituals, social custom, and economic commerce throughout history.
Yet, for the better part of the last century, much of the world has been governed by a punitive regime of drug control known most famously as the "War on Drugs."
Despite this global commitment to eradication and prohibition, the scale of illicit drug use has not been significantly curtailed; rather, it has become a multi-billion-dollar global black market characterised by unprecedented violence and volatility.
Harms
The central paradox defining 21st-century drug scholarship is this: the persistence of a punitive, prohibitionist model that consistently fails to achieve its stated aims of reducing drug supply and demand, while simultaneously generating profound, systemic social harm across public health, human rights, and political governance.
This research critically engages with the notion that the War on Drugs is not merely a failed policy, but a primary structural mechanism for producing harm, chaos, and racialised inequality on a global scale.
The term "War on Drugs" was formally coined and popularised by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971, marking a decisive shift from viewing addiction primarily as a medical issue to framing it as a national security threat and a matter of criminal justice.
Nixon declared drug abuse "public enemy number one," a rhetorical move that justified the massive escalation of federal resources, the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the establishment of a paradigm focused on supply-side interdiction, mandatory minimum sentencing, and militarised policing.
However, the War on Drugs did not originate in 1971; rather, Nixon’s declaration was the culmination of a century of racially charged prohibitionist legislation.
Early U.S. drug laws, such as the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, were fundamentally rooted in anxieties over specific immigrant and minority groups: opium was linked to Chinese immigrants, cocaine to Black Americans, and cannabis to Mexican migrants.
These early laws established the crucial precedent that drug policy would be leveraged as a tool of social and racial control.
The War on Drugs accelerated dramatically under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, driven by the moral panic surrounding the emergence of crack cocaine.
This era institutionalised punitive neoliberalism, introducing harsh mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, and large-scale asset forfeiture programs.
This intensification transformed the American criminal justice system into the engine of mass incarceration, disproportionately targeting Black and Latinx communities.
Since the 1990s, the War on Drugs has transcended national borders, becoming the foundation for international counter-narcotics regimes that influence foreign policy, militarisation in Latin America, and punitive death-penalty policies in Southeast Asia.
This historical trajectory reveals a continuous pattern: drug policy serves less as a measure of public health and more as an instrument of political and racial governance.
