There are a lot of pointless wars that have existed throughout history - I would say that almost all of them, particularly in the past 40 years or so, have been extremely stupid. However, despite the obvious dangers that illegal drugs pose to certain people and communities, you have to stand back in awe of the king of wasted money and resources that is the "War on Drugs."
The year was 1982
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Declaring it to be a threat to national security, Reagan was able to free up loads of resources towards a battle that has proven over the years to be an unwinnable one that despite the amount of money that is thrown at it, doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact on drug use, or distribution.
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The chart comes from a documentary made by Matt Groff and his numbers come from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. Just in case anyone is thinking that the chart has no factual backing to it.
There are a number of watchdog groups out there, primarily the Drug Policy Alliance, which is a group that pushes for an end to the War on Drugs in America that suggest that the annual expenditures today are more in the neighborhood of over $50 billion - all while not seeing any meaningful prolonged drop in supply, access, or addiction.
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Nancy Reagan simultaneously spearheaded the "Just Say No" campaign aimed at the youth of USA and while i was quite young in 1982, myself and my friends immediately mocked it despite the fact that we didn't really even know what drugs were. The entertainment industry joined the schoolyards in mocking this campaign and this was especially true on Saturday Night Live, where they dedicated at least one segment a week to making light of the entire thing.
While Reagan was not the first President to address illegal drugs, or even the person to coin the term, he is the one that made it a reality, eventually signing into law the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which among other expansions of government power introduced seizure of assets, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the criminalization of marijuana possession.
These policies were meant to decrease drug use. Instead they resulted in an increase of people in prison for non-violent drug offenses from 50,000 to 400,000. Another wonderful action was restricting access to clean syringes, which resulted in sending the spread of HIV into hyper-drive.
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This would later begin involving the CIA and international covert (and not so covert) operations to actually violate the sovereignty of friendly nations under the auspices of eliminating the drug trafficking operations headed to the United States. One only need to watch NARCOS for a bit to understand that eliminating one drug kingpin, merely results in the sprouting of 3 more.
There were even cases of the U.S. military spraying large amounts of herbicide on the jungles of Central and South America intended to destroy crops at their source - and lo' and behold, they "accidentally" destroyed all vegetation in these fragile ecosystems as well as caused health problems for the human inhabitants.
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of course there are the many cases of the CIA actually being INVOLVED in trafficking
In 2001 Portugal became the first country in the world to decriminalize the use of ALL drugs and instead pumped money into health services and rehabilitation. They now have a drug-related death-rate that is 1/5 that of most of Europe and 1/50 of the United States. While expenses on rehabilitation rose 400% (as you would expect) the number of people imprisoned has dropped dramatically. There also isn't an epidemic of drug-addled zombie-folk roaming the streets. Portugal has an addiction rate of a mere 0.9% - the lowest in all of Western Europe. They have also seen a 66% reduction in court cases and a decline in new cases of HIV / AIDS that outpaces all of the rest of Europe. Of course this statistic falls on deaf ears in Washington.
Maybe i got a bit too preachy there and truth be told, i actually liked Reagan but i was a kid and simply found him charismatic, as did much of the rest of the world. While it wasn't his idea exclusively as even Nixon increased the amount of resources into combating drugs. There is no denying that Reagan was the major protagonist in this war that can never, and will never end until the governments admit that they were wrong about this one...
And we all know how much politicians love admitting fault.