War on Drugs

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The War on Drugs is an initiative undertaken in the United States to carry out an "all-out offensive" (as President Nixon described it) against the non-medical use of certain prohibited drugs.

The Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress noted in a 1989 report that the nation's war on drugs could be considered to have started in public policy dating to November 1880, when the U.S. and China completed an agreement which prohibited the shipment of opium between the two countries. By February 1887, the 49th Congress enacted legislation making it a misdemeanor for anyone on American soil to be found guilty of violating this ban.

Around the turn of the 20th century, a perception of widespread abuse of cocaine caused policy-makers in the U.S. to consider drug abuse a serious public problem rather than as cases of personal failures.

Nixon's modern-day "War on Drugs" began in 1971. In 1988 the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was created to combat drug abuse, which he characterized as "America's public enemy number one." Nixon's new initiative was another milestone for the U.S. in the consideration of drug addiction as a public problem.

For U.S. public policy purposes, drug abuse is any illegal use of a substance in order to alter mood or behavior. The definition includes legal pharmaceuticals if they are obtained by illegal means or used for nonmedicinal purposes. This differs from what mental health professionals classify as drug abuse per the DSM-IV, which is defined as more problematic drug misuse, both of which are different from drug use.

One important way of analysing a policy of drug prohibition is to test whether the decrease in the social costs of drug abuse outweighs the cost of prohibition itself. US Government Agencies do not always make helpful contributions to this analysis. For example, the ONDCP estimated that the cost of drug abuse in 2000 was over $160 billion (1.6% of GDP); but they included losses in productivity due to incarceration, crime, drug-related illness, and other reasons accounting for over two-thirds of that amount. The publication of such figures can only have been intended to confuse the cost of drug abuse and the cost of trying to prevent it through prohibition. Prohibition is largely responsible for the cost to society.

[edit]