The term “war on drugs” describes the disastrous American endeavor to aggressively criminalize, outlaw, and use military action to enforce laws about certain psychoactive substances that are considered illegal. For more than half a century, the country’s drug policy has been severely shaped by this punitive approach that views drug use as a criminal offense rather than a matter of public health. Despite stated objectives to that effect, the war on drugs has proven to be a complete failure, directly damaging individuals, communities, and society in the process of attempting to establish a “drug-free society.” The US war on drugs is among the worst policy missteps in recent memory.
Its objectives of decreasing drug consumption and eliminating illicit drug businesses have not been met. Still, it has caused far more harm than good by corrosively perpetuating racial discrimination, destroying human potential, eroding civil liberties, and destabilizing vulnerable communities. The decades of destruction can only be lessened by rejecting the militaristic enforcement paradigm and adopting a public health strategy focused on harm reduction, accessible treatment, and human rights. By encouraging racism, mass imprisonment, violations of human rights, enabling criminal violence, and deliberately undermining governance and equality, the criminalization paradigm has wreaked havoc on generations. As the specialists say, the community is impacted much more than the plants they were supposed to address, which are out of place. Therefore, children become victims of trauma and family breakups, and their economic prospects are poorly affected. American history has made one of the most terrible decisions by conducting the “war on drugs.”
This course’s requirements show that the war on drugs is a significant social problem. It causes massive conflict, deviance, and social disorder by actively fostering violence, criminal activity, endemic racism and prejudice, horrific human rights violations, and the eventual erosion of civil freedoms. Vitiello found that the aggressive drug war tactics’ unjust practices by law enforcement, and the harsh sentencing of prisoners had cost society dearly (Vitiello, 2020). Even in terms of public safety, the drug war’s gains don’t outweigh its negatives.
The moral battle against illegal psychotropic substances shows that these prohibitions are based on social prejudices rather than public health threats, even if these risks are different from alcohol’s. Scholar-led global drug policy is often criticized for prioritizing colonial racism and morality above public health. Countenance may be defined variously. Which substances are “forbidden drugs” and ruthlessly criminalized depends on morality and media influence (Daniels et al., 2021). The societal perception of drugs as the primary existential threat to be defeated is artificial, arbitrary, and nonobjective and cannot be demonstrated or disproven by a scientific examination of the social effects of illicit and legal psychotropic chemicals. Drug wars are immoral and lack scientific evidence to lessen damages.
By the early 20th century, America regulated psychotropic drugs. Nixon and Reagan militarized and harshened the ‘war on drugs’ Such regimes actively and erroneously marketed drugs as a national security concern. Thus, police were bolstered, and the military was permitted to fight. The government increased drug laws and enforcement. Although there was little evidence they worked, drugs and their programs were depicted as a threat to national existence and hopeless (Earp et al., 2021). The new “war on drugs” increased harsh illegal penalties, including brutal, mandatory minimum sentences, the unfair use of excessive funds to law enforcement instead of treatment, the normalization of cruel and unusual tactics like sketchy civilian SWAT team raids, and alarmist politics that actively promoted the outrageous termination of certain drugs through even more senseless warfare.
Even though the war on drugs conceptually started as an internal domestic policy issue, it has evolved into an international campaign that is influencing drug policies all over the world. This is because American prohibitionist policies and their aggressive law-and-order paradigm toward drug enforcement have been actively exported and imposed on a global scale through economic pressure, political pressure, and even direct military intervention into foreign nations that the United States considers to be significant “source countries” for drugs.
But at the federal level in the United States, the application of harsh drug laws and the destruction caused by harsh criminalization policies that followed have been incredibly unequal and highly concentrated, particularly in marginalized urban communities and ethnic minority populations. Empirical studies and statistics have repeatedly shown how the so-called “war” has not been fought in a way compatible with all facets of American culture (Orlin, 2021). Instead, non-discriminatory policing implemented equitably has placed the repercussions most heavily on Black, Latinx, and other communities of color suffering from economic disadvantages.
America’s drug battle has destroyed many families. Worse, those who fall into this cruel system discover that the sentence is gruesome even for possession, discrimination, denial of housing, jobs, and humanitarian education, psychological trauma, loss or denial of inalienable dignity inherent in every human being, and most inhumanely, separation from their children, an undercover market with uncontrolled proportions of harmful additives, contaminants, and even impure materials has increased drug overdose risk due to prohibition. Nobody is responsible for illegal supply quality control (Kendall, 2004). Unregulated drug supply increases toxicity and overdose. This unusual event destroyed many extraordinary lives and dreams. The drug war’s ignoring of long-term issues has undermined culture and exacerbated local trafficking, substance misuse, and instability.
Soft critical care transcends massive terminal sickness deaths. Family neglect has ruined most marriages and left some children without parents for years. Fathers may miss their child’s first smile or school start. The daughter’s father is serving 12 years, yet their name is on the school’s wall to show their connection. Seeing a parent in jail traumatizes children emotionally, financially, and long-term. Generational unemployment, alienation, depression, and drug use result. Discrimination affects poor inner-city inhabitants and people of color.
The war on drugs has generated an unprecedented fiscal misallocation that has hurt the country socially and economically and not improved public safety or well-being. Over the previous several decades, harsh enforcement and punishment have cost billions. Social services, public health campaigns, evidence-based education, accessible addiction treatment, and other harm reduction measures may have improved community health and quality of life using this money. The worst thing is that despite the drug war’s horrible repercussions, military enforcement proponents have failed to show successes or justify maintaining them (Kendall, 2004). Drug use, drug-related violence, organized crime, and societal impacts have increased or remained steady despite rising expenses. Criminalization has harmed the nation’s civic and social foundations. Racism, discrimination, human rights abuses, multinational criminal cartels, drug-related violence, and mass incarceration disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups.
The origins of the war on drugs may be seen through a functionalist lens as an attempt by dominant social groups to maintain and enforce moral boundaries and widely accepted social norms, as well as to exert control over behaviors seen as possible sources of deviance that could threaten or destabilize the current social order. Likely, the goal of outlawing and criminalizing the use of certain mind-altering drugs was to encourage greater social integration, adherence to traditional cultural norms, and the repression of actions seen as abnormal or dangerous to the interests of the powerful (Minhee & Calandrillo, 2019). But the majority of modern functionalist scholars studying contemporary American society would probably come to the same conclusion: the war on drugs itself, with its extreme punitive excesses, harsh enforcement strategies, and glaring policy failures, is a prime example of systemic dysfunction and critical malintegration between key institutions governing law and order, public health, social equity, and human rights.
Critical theorists have persuasively argued that the unstated latent function served by the war on drugs has actively been one of top-down social control over minority populations by those holding institutionalized power and privilege. Given the sheer magnitude of civil liberties violated, human rights abuses committed, entrenched racial discrimination perpetuated, generational wealth and opportunity denied to marginalized communities through mass incarceration, and cyclical trauma inflicted across generations, this would represent an unacceptable systemic strain fundamentally unable to achieve its stated functional goals of reducing drug use and mitigating associated societal problems (Kendall, 2004). In the drug criminalization process, carried along with people of inferior classes and color, the dominant racial casting systems and social control hierarchies are maintained.
Because it is more than just a word-of-mouth campaign to promote a social class as better, this concept has been around for a much more extended period than that. More specifically, it is the application of the ruling capitalist class’s intellectual realization of oppression, racism, and power relations in order to subjugate those who are seen to be a danger to their hegemonic position (Daniels et al., 2021). The conflict theory offers an explanation of the inadequacies of the military strategy that was taken over many decades to restrict drug sales and usage. It also explains the catastrophic effects achieved (Minhee & Calandrillo, 2019). The phrase “war on drugs” grew even more vague, and it made some elite groups more potent since they were able to communicate messages geared at certain ethnic minority groups, often without providing clear facts.
The drug war is a prime example of how dominant groups may selectively interpret deviance to protect power structures, economic systems, and racial caste systems from being put under strain. The capitalist ruling class has purposefully established the notion that substances are harmful “drugs” that should be forbidden, rather than genuinely detrimental medications, to criminalize poverty, degrade minorities, and smash any threats to the power of the establishment. A conflict perspective is used to assess the drug war, which demonstrates how governmental forces have been used to maintain corporate profits, impede labor movements, and economically oppress whole communities. These activities have been carried out under the guise of moral crusades, which have the effect of perpetuating race and class interactions.
Symbolic interactions and frameworks negotiated within a social context shape individuals’ subjective meanings, definitions, and perceptions of social reality. The United States war on drugs, according to this theory, normalizes and expands a dominant “moral reality” in which certain psychoactive substances are strongly stigmatized as evil, corrupting forces that threaten social stability and must be aggressively suppressed and eliminated by all means, including military warfare. This theory is based on the idea that the war on drugs has increased the prevalence of this dominant “moral reality.”
This is the case even though how civilizations have classified and symbolically characterized mind-altering substances is subjective and prone to change. It is possible that the robust symbolic framing of some narcotics as an existential sickness that has to be mercilessly destroyed by military enforcement may hide more nuanced opinions and normalize the harsh and humiliating treatment of users (Daniels et al., 2021). This symbolic paradigm dehumanizes people who reject harsh narratives, and it threatens to repress anybody who questions “moral reality,” even when scientific data disproves the effectiveness of punitive techniques. Through the normalization of ideologically laden views that portray certain substances as destructive creatures that need to be tamed by military force, the symbolic interactionist method demonstrates how the “war on drugs” became so engrained in American culture. It is possible that a destructive policy approach might survive and even beat more logical public health policies for decades despite the undeniable fact that it causes damage to humans. This is because socially constructed definitions and moralized symbolic meanings are subject to change.
Experts in public health want to completely change the failed model of punishment and replace it with policies that treat addiction as a medical issue instead of a criminal justice problem. Overspending on harsh enforcement measures that haven’t worked to stop drug use and the issues it causes would be cut back. Instead, the money would be used to provide comprehensive, affordable rehabilitation and integrated healthcare services based on compassion and science. Getting rid of the harsh penalties for owning and using illegal drugs for personal use is an essential step toward ending the unfair practice of locking people up just because they have a substance use problem (Minhee & Calandrillo, 2019). This change would stop the cycle of punishment that hurts human rights and public health.
Also, letting regulated legal markets for adults to use drugs for fun would keep customers from having to deal with criminals on the black market. This would make it much harder for organized crime groups to make money and gain power, which has been made more accessible by bad prohibition policies. Regulated markets could make sure that quality control measures like strength and contamination are met, and harm reduction services like drug checks, safe usage places, and teaching people about the risks could be added (Kendall, 2004). This part about risk education is very important because it gives open, honest, and evidence-based advice on how to weigh the possible benefits and risks of using psychedelic drugs, along with practical harm reduction methods like tests for drugs and correct doses. The fear-based “abstinence only” misinformation must be replaced with truth and clarity.
People’s attitudes and perceptions about drug users need to change drastically. Instead of moralistic judgment, demonization, and dehumanization, they need to be seen as fellow humans struggling with health problems who deserve care and support. This is probably the most important cultural shift that needs to happen to fix the issues caused by the war on drugs. We need to change the deeply held shame that leads to harsh punishments, discrimination, and exclusion of this weak group with views that are based on facts, science, and basic human respect (Earp et al., 2021). The openly racist foundations and unfairly uneven implementation of harsh drug laws have caused a lot of suffering across generations in Black, Latinx, and other disadvantaged communities. The fact that it is mostly only the poor people who are left starving needs to be taken care of now. Here, society should make an upswing through its judicial webs and uproot these discriminating laws and policing standards, which, in a way, constitute the false legal perception of the whole community, trapped in a vicious cycle of suppression.
The optimal way to undo the terrible damage of many years of hard-handed drug-war policies in society is by replacing the short-sighted ideology, which is mainly based on unfair morality campaigns, with human-based concepts, like drug harm reduction, based on scientific fact and decent human rights. This paradigm essentially abolishes the punishment model, which is always futile, and coherently replaces the truth model, which has morals and positively impacts people’s health. The progress of nations and communities is inevitable.
Finally, a public health-centered approach that removes the stigma surrounding substance use prioritizes affordable access to evidence-based treatment and long-term recovery support services, offers honest, scientifically-grounded education on weighing potential benefits and risks along with harm reduction strategies, and regulatory models that let adults make their own informed choices about any responsible recreational substance use are the most important parts of changing behaviors (Kendall, 2004). A more informed development like this would significantly improve public health, respect for fundamental human rights, and the building blocks of a more fair and just society based on truth and reality rather than widespread moral panics.
The American drug war became the most significant maneuver on the part of the US Government. It failed, but it has killed the individuals, the communities, and the societies instead of its good intentions. The suite of unsuitable results is known as stirring up racial discrimination, mass incarceration, human rights violations, crime, violence among people, collapsing countries, and wasting billions of public money. The core of this is the criminalization and the militarization of drug usage taking place under the cover of force, which in turn evades human dignity, ethics, and, of course, rationality. Public health “War” against drug addiction and substance misuse is the ethics; moral panics should not result in human rights abuses and injustice. We can make sure generational trauma is stopped through education that conveys the consequences of drug use, regulation of drug supply and economic pragmatism, and integration of a holistic patient-oriented healthcare system by implementing harm reduction, science, economic pragmatism, and human rights policy. The war on drugs is finished; drugs should be perceived as public health matters instead of shots to communicate societal depressions, which happen to be the result of economic and social structural challenges.
We can take the lead and prevent criminality on the new track. The route should use harm reduction and evidence-based public health measures. Despite the inevitable human cost and fallout, we can only start a nationwide effort to reckon with and correct the immeasurable generational betrayals from deprived communities and ethical governance. This old-fashioned anti-drug orthodoxy has met its long-awaited, tragic end, and we should apply its progressive reform to drug policy development to secure citizens’ health and well-being. Due to the lives lost and the tremendous expense of post-arrest separation, the fallback on unsuccessful criminalization is too great to continue.
Daniels, C., Aluso, A., Burke-Shyne, N., Koram, K., Rajagopalan, S., Robinson, I., … & Tandon, T. (2021). Decolonizing drug policy. Harm Reduction Journal, 18(1), 120. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12954-021-00564-7
Earp, B. D., Lewis, J., Hart, C. L., & Bioethicists and Allied Professionals for Drug Policy Reform. (2021). Racial justice requires ending the war on drugs. The American Journal of Bioethics, 21(4), 4-19. https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/clevslr69§ion=16
Kendall, D. E. (2004). Social problems in a diverse society. https://plus.pearson.com/products/c3406be2-18f1-4083-b200-0af2bb4db783/pages/urn:pearson:entity:2dad2284-074d-4cf6-821f-1c3e4f1f8470?userPreferredType=read
Minhee, C., & Calandrillo, S. (2019). The cure for America’s opioid crisis: end the war on drugs. Harv. JL & Pub. Pol’y, 42, 547. https://heinonline.org/hol bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/hjlpp42§ion=23
Orlin, K. (2021). The war on drugs and racial health disparities in incarceration. HPHR Journal, 30.
Vitiello, M. (2020). The war on drugs: Moral panic and excessive sentences. Clev. St. L. Rev., 69, 441. https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/clevslr69§ion=16