June marked the 55th anniversary of what has come to be known as “the war on drugs,” although five decades into this battle, it is fair to ask whether any progress has been made.
It’s hard to see it when modern scourges like fentanyl have been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in recent years.
Since 2000, in fact, more than 1.35 million Americans have died of a drug overdose. And more than 574,000 of those deaths occurred in just six years, between 2020 and 2025.
Those numbers actually understate the problems that drug addiction has brought to our country, since the vast majority of people who get hooked on narcotics don’t die from a single dose. The never-ending compulsion to alter our senses has brought all sorts of other changes to society: a large prison population, drug courts and addiction treatment centers.
The drug problem may always be with us. The good news is there are many ways to help addicts get clean. But despite many success stories, the trend of the past 55 years is a wave of disappointment. We have spent a lot of money trying to discourage and interrupt drug use. In all candor, it hasn’t worked very well.
An interesting column on The Washington Post website dug into the history of the war on drugs. Emily Dufton, author of “Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs,” wrote that, contrary to public opinion, President Richard Nixon never used the “war on drugs” phrase. Instead he called drug abuse “Public Enemy Number One” when he announced a “new, all-out offensive” against narcotics on June 17, 1971.
During his first two years in office, Nixon spoke regularly about the importance of arrests and prison time for drug abuse. But Dufton wrote that his new, all-out offensive mostly addressed the other side of the equation.
“Instead of mandating the construction of more prisons, Nixon announced the largest expansion of addiction treatment in U.S. history,” she wrote. One simple goal was to get treatment for any heroin addict who wanted it.
The emphasis on treatment was surprising because heroin use, and the accompanying crime, both were increasing in many cities. Overdose deaths were rising, too. And in May 1971, reports estimated that as many as 15% of American servicemen in Vietnam were addicted to the pure, cheap heroin available there.
It was the perfect setup for a law-and-order guy like Nixon to call for throwing junkies in jail. Yet his new initiative focused on treatment. And there was some success.
When drug treatments became widely available, Dufton wrote, “the effects on the street were noticeable. Overdose deaths declined. Drug-related emergency room visits fell. Drug use dropped, as did drug arrests, and in cities nationwide crime rates fell for the first time since their dramatic rise in the 1960s. Heroin addiction did not disappear, but the crisis that prompted Nixon’s intervention eased considerably.”
Things changed in the late 1970s and 1980s, when the federal government began giving states money for their own treatment programs. Over time, strings of sensational drug-related crimes, along with new products like crack cocaine, prompted elected officials from Congress on down to focus more on jailing the sellers than helping the addicts.
Today we have narcotics that are more powerful than ever — lethal in the smallest doses. And we have videos of missiles blowing up boats suspected of bringing drugs into the United States, even though narcotics trafficking is not a death-penalty crime.
The best observation of Dufton’s column is that “the most enduring — and most forgotten — legacy of Nixon’s 1971 drug war was that it was not a war of punishment at all.”
“Instead, faced with a national drug crisis, Nixon concluded that law enforcement was not enough and built the largest addiction treatment system in U.S. history instead.”
We have spent half a century trying to disrupt the drug suppliers. Maybe it’s time to spend even more money helping the demand side of the drug market: the buyers. The war on drugs’ original focus on addiction treatment was the right move. There’s plenty of treatment available today, but it’s pretty obvious we need more of it.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
