writing a paper on the war on drugs, still gotta source it and add a bit more to it but if u want to give me some feedback or maybe other shit i could talk about thatd be great, otherwise its just an interesting read,
im an art major and this is intro english so dont hound on my too hard


The American war on drugs is a prohibition campaign with the intent of eliminating illegal drug trafficking and use in the United States. In 1971 president Richard Nixon declared an all out war on drugs, in hopes of eliminating all illegal drug shipping and use within as well as outside the borders of the United States. From a young age, Americans are encouraged to stay away from the illegal use of drugs through programs like D.A.R.E and the partnership for a drug free America. Today over two million Americans are currently in prison, with over half of that population being non violent drug offenders. America today has more people in prison than any other nation on the planet.

Throughout the country, a majority of doctors feel that drug abuse, like alcohol and cigerettes, is a medical condition in need of treatment, as opposed to a crime that requires incarceration. Throughout history there has never been a society without some kind of mind altering substance. Shamanism is one of the oldest religions on earth, using the knowledge of an array of plants and fungi for medical treatment as well as psychoactive trips to connect with a higher power. Throughout history, these Shamans were thought of as witches by other cultures, which slowly set the stage for a negative outlook on the use of psychoactive substances. Throughout history, prohibition has never been successful, and nothing illustrates this concept better than the United States attempt at alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Alcohol prohibition was an attempt by idealists to impose their own moral values on the rest of the country in an attempt to solve social problems such as the tax burden put upon the masses for prisons and poorhouses. Unfortunately, prohibition of alcohol was a miserable failure on all accounts. Prohibition spawned crime waves and allowed for the rise of bootlegger kingpins like Al Capone. Not only did prohibition increase the harm done by the bootleggers (bribing and killing of police officers), but the substances themselves became more dangerous. Moonshine, a dangerous highly concentrated alcohol was being cooked up throughout the country as a result of prohibition. The courtrooms and prisons were overcrowded, organized crime began to sharply increase, and corruption was running rampant.

Much of the crime surrounding prohibition led to the repeal of the 18th amendment (the only amendment to be repealed in US history). The problems caused by the 18th amendment are directly mirrored today by the war on drugs. Today, our court systems and prisons are overcrowded with drug offenders. Cocaine gave rise to huge Columbian drug lords like Pablo Escobar, who is considered to be one of the richest men on the planet. And much like the moonshine of the 1920s, more and more potent and addictive drugs are becoming readily available today.

During the 1970s, there was a large increase in the drug use among the youth. Drugs soon became associated with the rising “hippy” culture. This new culture highly opposed the Vietnam war, at the time being led by president Nixon. Soon, in the eyes of many possibly including Nixon, drugs become associated with not liking Nixon. Curiously enough, in 1971 the war on drugs was declared. Just two years later the DEA was created with an annual budget of $101 million dollars.

In 2000, the federal budget for the war on drugs had grown from $101 million, to over twenty billion dollars a year. And unfortunately for the war on drugs, in addition to narcotics being of better quality and less expensive, there are more of these illegal drugs in America than when the war started. With the addition to the rising costs of incarceration, the American tax payers spend approximately $50 billion a year to support the war on drugs. So far, the war on drugs has been the longest and most costly war in American history. The reasons for such a costly and ineffective war run much deeper than simply ineffective means of apprehending drug abusers.

As can be seen by the current war in Iraq, the government is rarely willing to take the blame for mistakes it has made. The war on drugs unfortunately is much more than just trouble getting America off drugs. Originally, the United States Government had a war on poverty. This war on poverty all together disappeared when the war on drugs came into the public’s view. The war on drugs was originally an attack on poverty. 56% of drug offenders incarcerated are African Americans, and 23% are of Hispanic decent. These rates of minorities in prison make a clear distinction of this war against the poor, when the numbers are compared to overall drug use, only 13% for African Americans and 9% for Hispanics. Simple math shows that an African American is more than four times as likely to be sent to prison as a caucasion for the same offense. This war will never end because it is used against the poor, and not those who benefit the most, one of which being the American government.

During the early 1980s, a new drug hit the streets. On every news channel across the country, stories covered a new epidemic. Throughout the country, people learned about the new vary cheap and potent drug we should stay away from (sounds a lot like product placement). Smokable crack cocaine began to sweep across the nation. No other area knows about this new drug better than California did in the 1980s. Perhaps one of the best examples of why the government is having such a “problem” with the war on drugs is the story of Freeway Ricky Ross.

At his peak, Ricky Ross was known as the Walmart of crack, and had over 40 employees working full time for him. Thanks to the black market created by the war on drugs, Ricky Ross was pulling in millions every week. During this time, several huge profit schemes were taking place from unlikely sources, one of which fueled Freeway’s massive domination of the crack market. In the 1980s, the US publicly supported the contras attempting to overthrow the San Donista Government in Nicaragua. Gary Webb, an investigative reporter, wrote a book entitled Dark Alliance. In this book he exposed a huge government conspiracy that fueled Ricky Ross’s empire. A man by the name of Danilo Blandon was displaced from Nicaragua, and fled to the US. In an attempt to continue to support for the contras in Nicaragua, Danilo, with the help of CIA agent Oliver North, began importing cocaine with the support of CIA planes, equipment, and personnel. Danilo then sold huge amounts of the cocaine to Freeway, who in turn made it into crack to be sold on the streets of Los Angeles. Information from the CIA laundered to Ricky Ross helped him to evade authorities for years, keeping a steady flow of millions going back to Danilo and the CIA to support the contras in Nicaragua.

Thanks to the incredible investigative work of Gary Web, the underground cocaine operation was uncovered. Of course in the end, the CIA found itself not guilty of all charges, placing the blame on Freeway and Danilo, the two topmost operators not directly connected to the CIA. Curiously, Gary Web was found shot dead in 2004. Government agencies are not the only ones who have learned of the huge profit potential of illegal drugs.

The United States government has allowed for some of its closest affiliates, big business, to participate in the profit sharing surrounding this failing war. In the mid 1980s, a law was passed that allowed the privatization of jails. Since this law was passed, there has been a steady growth of drug offenders in prisons, increasing at a rate of about 3% every year. Under the Clinton administration, about 60% of this growth was non violent drug offenders.

The average daily cost per state prison inmate was $67.55. State prisons hold about 250,000 inmates for drug offenses, costing the state $16,887,500 a day. This money comes out of the pockets of American tax payers, and is in turn paid to private companies. To take these costs into perspective, the average annual costs for a student to attend a public university in state is $16,000, or about $43 a day. It would actually cost the state less money to give drug offenders a completely free college education. All research shows that treatment and drug education work far better than incarceration. Unfortunately, as a result of the huge profits that can be attained for these private companies, drug offenders are still being locked up today. Locking offenders up for drug crimes means no drug education. No education results in a huge risk for drug users repeating past mistakes over and over.

Maximizing profits for a prison means maximizing the number of inmates being held within. Prisoners are forced to do manual labor, which increases profits even further, since money is paid for work done by their inmates. More inmates results in more free labor, and nothing is cheaper than free labor. One of the most appalling aspects of the prison system is that stocks on wall street for privately run correctional institutions are traded based on the number of inmates currently being held. So it is in the best interest of these correctional institutions to be completely filled at all times. From a business perspective, filling prisons with drug offenders makes more sense. Over half of the drug offenders have had no history of violence. An excess of drug offenders makes for a non violent, non problematic labor force.

No other drug offenders in our society are less problematic than users of cannabis. Stoners, potheads, hippies, call them what you will, but users of marijuana are rarely thought of violent law breakers. Marijuana users are the pinnicle of the non violent drug users. Many refer to cannabis as a gateway drug to other, harder more addictive illicit drugs. Although 85% of illicit drug users smoke weed exclusively, for the sake of argument let us say it is a gateway drug. The government can largely be attributed to marijuana users turning to other drugs, putting marijuana in the same category as such destructive drugs as methamphetamine.

Kids who try marijuana have been told by the media and government for years that it is as dangerous as meth and cocaine. So when weed is experienced first hand, and found not to be as serious as it was made out to be, common sense would tell a young person that harder drugs in the same category would be just as non addictive and harmless as marijuana.
Cannabis, plain and simple, has no physically addictive properties. A psychological dependence on marijuana can develop just as easily as an addiction to say, fast food. Yet we see a McDonalds in every town and city across the nation. There has never been a death attributed to the use of marijuana in the history of the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone die from alcohol and tobacco use, yet they are still legal. The main funders for the partnership for a drug free America are the tobacco and alcohol industries. Millions upon millions are spent by big tobacco and liquor companies to reinforce the distinction between legal and illegal drugs. Cannabis was almost all together erased from US history, but has actually played a large part in constructing our country.

Marijuana, more commonly known in history as hemp, can be traced 5000 years back to ancient china. The fiberous properties of hemp have been used for thousands of years. Ancient china was one of the first civilizations to develop paper, not from wood, but the fibers taken from hemp plants. Paper was the main force that drove the civilization of ancient china to rapidly surpass all other societies.
Other civilizations throughout the world slowly attained the technological advantages provided by hemp. The word canvas is actually Dutch for cannabis, and many of the Van Goghs and Rembrants we enjoy today were painted on hemp. Bibles, maps, Betsy Ross’s American flag, and the first drafts of the Declaration of independence, were all made with hemp. Ben Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America, which produced paper made from hemp. Henry ford built his Model T from hemp, and it ran on hemp fuel. Hemp was in fact the largest cash crop in America until the 20th century. In retrospect, It could be said that marijuana is the most American plant in our history.

The reasons for making this incredible plant illegal as usual, lead back to big business. A single acre of hemp (which can be regrown annually) could make the equivalent amount of paper as four acres of trees. William Hurst and the Hurst paper manufacturing owned vast acherage of timberlands, and stood to lose billions from hemp. Hurst soon began referring to hemp as marijuana, an obscure Mexican slang. This in turn did two things: it associated marijuana with Mexicans and played on the American public’s racist fears, as well as misleading the public to think hemp and marijuana were two different things.
A second main contributor to the prohibition of hemp was the Dupont chemical company. In 1937 Dupont patented the process to make plastics from oil and coal. If still in use, hemp would have ruined 80% of the Dupont company, which today is the world’s second largest chemical company.

Andre Mellon was the secretary of treasury for president Hoover in the early 1930s. Mellon was a primary investor of the Dupont company, and together pushed false horrors of marijuana with propaganda in order to gain anti-weed public support. Propaganda films such as “reefer madness” portrayed a man killing his entire family with an axe while under the influence of marijuana.
On April 14th 1937, the prohibitive marijuana tax law was brought to the house ways and means committee (the only committee that can introduce a bill to the house floor without it being debated by other committees). The chairman of this committee, Robert Doughton, was a huge Dupont supporter, and in September of 1937 hemp became illegal.

Dr James Woodward testified to late on behalf of the American medical association. Woodward told the house the reason the AMA had not denounced the prohibitive marijuana tax law was because they had just found out that marijuana and hemp were in fact one in the same.