The War on Drugs: Can We Finally Admit This Isn’t Working?
- alex50414
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Hey, you.
Yes, you.
Libertarian. Conservative. Progressive. Independent. Person who stopped paying attention to politics sometime around the invention of TikTok.
I have a modest proposal:
Can we agree to stop doing something that hasn’t worked for more than half a century?
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” and America launched what became known as the War on Drugs.
We brought money.
We brought police.
We brought prosecutors, prisons, mandatory minimums, task forces, helicopters, drug-sniffing dogs, catchy slogans, and apparently an inexhaustible supply of acronyms.
Over the decades, America spent roughly $1 trillion fighting drugs.
So naturally, after spending a trillion dollars, you would expect the problem to be pretty much solved.
Small complication:
It isn’t.
Not even close.
By 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, roughly 2.2 million adults were incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails.
Around that time, America spent more than $80 billion a year on corrections at the federal, state, and local levels.
In 2012 alone, there were approximately 1.3 million arrests for drug possession.
Meanwhile, addiction did something extremely inconsiderate.
It kept growing.
In the late 1960s, the United States was estimated to have roughly 750,000 people addicted to opioids.
By 2016, approximately 2.5 million Americans had an opioid use disorder.
And overdose deaths kept climbing.
So perhaps we should conduct the sort of performance review we would give any other trillion-dollar government program.
Goal: Reduce drug addiction.
Amount spent: Approximately $1,000,000,000,000.
Result: More drugs. More addiction. More incarceration. More death.
At some point, this stops being a strategy and starts becoming a very expensive hobby.
What If We Tried Something Completely Radical?
Not communism.
Not libertarianism.
Not socialism.
Not MAGA.
Not whatever political ideology your uncle discovered on Facebook last Tuesday.
I’m suggesting something much more controversial:
Pragmatism.
What if America created a drug policy that borrowed ideas from across the political spectrum?
Not bipartisan.
Tripartisan.
The Civil-Liberties Argument
We could begin by asking a very uncomfortable question:
Should adults be imprisoned simply for possessing a drug they intend to put into their own bodies?
Portugal took an important step in 2001 by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use and shifting much of the response from the criminal-justice system toward health and social services.
That doesn’t mean selling fentanyl next to the Snickers bars at 7-Eleven.
Trafficking can remain illegal. Selling drugs to children can remain illegal. Driving intoxicated can remain illegal. Crimes committed while using drugs remain crimes.
But addiction itself?
Maybe a jail cell isn’t our most sophisticated medical intervention.
The Fiscal Argument
Then there is the money.
For anyone concerned about government spending, the War on Drugs should be fascinating.
We spend billions every year enforcing drug laws.
Then we spend tens of thousands of dollars annually incarcerating individual people.
Then many of those people leave prison with the exact same addiction they entered with, except now they may also have a criminal record, no job, and significantly fewer housing opportunities.
The government calls this “efficiency.”
Instead, reduce enforcement and incarceration for nonviolent possession.
Regulate where appropriate.
Tax legal markets.
Redirect the savings.
Depending on assumptions about enforcement reductions, incarceration savings and tax revenue, the fiscal benefit could amount to tens of billions of dollars annually.
Which brings us to the most important part.
Spend the Money on the Actual Problem
Addiction.
Imagine taking a substantial portion of those savings and dramatically expanding:
Addiction treatment
Mental-health services
Medication-assisted treatment
Prevention
Recovery housing
Peer support
Harm reduction
Family services
Employment programs
Long-term recovery support
Here’s the revolutionary concept:
When someone has an addiction, treat the addiction.
We don’t arrest people for diabetes.
We don’t handcuff someone because chemotherapy didn’t work the first time.
We don’t tell a person with severe depression, “You had therapy three months ago. Why aren't you cured?”
Yet with addiction, a chronic condition famous for relapse, we repeatedly act surprised when people relapse.
Then we punish them for showing one of the disease's defining characteristics.
Brilliant.
Surrender the War. Start Solving the Problem.
America has spent more than 50 years fighting the War on Drugs.
Maybe surrender isn’t weakness.
Maybe surrendering a failed strategy is simply intelligence.
We can still aggressively prosecute violent crime, organized trafficking, exploitation, and people who knowingly poison communities.
But we should stop confusing drug use with drug trafficking, addiction with criminality, and punishment with treatment.
The objective shouldn't be to become “soft on drugs.”
The objective should be to become smart about addiction.
There is an old quote attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt:
“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
We tried something.
For half a century.
For roughly a trillion dollars.
I think we have enough data.
The War on Drugs lost.
Now perhaps we can start a war on addiction—and this time use treatment, science, compassion, accountability, economics, and common sense as the weapons.
That might be one war worth winning.
—Alex Shohet
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