Of the deliberate federal attacks on African Americans, one particular policy stands out to modern historians – a policy so profoundly falsified, it's legacy remains a point of contention to this day. The enigma in concern is the notorious “war on drugs”. African Americans made no injury to the United States; their only provocation for their suffering was their existence -- suffering that continues to be elaborately prolonged. They built the South from the ground up and in return for their plight they sustained more terror, lynching, disenfranchisement, segregation, and redlining. The aforementioned concepts sound ancient since their abolition and criminalization; but as we shall see, they frequently find their way back into policy through cunning, manipulation, and selfishness of our representatives. Those are the very roots of the war on drugs.

Even the very name of the “war” is discrepant with its real purpose – it was never about drugs, and one couldn’t refute the notion more eloquently than how John Ehrlichman, Assistant of Domestic Affairs to president Nixon, unintentionally did: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news” (Vera Institute). Moreover, since implementation in 1971 by Nixon, the policy was judged a failure by quite literally all “intended” measures of drug control” (Laguna Treatment Center). This leads us to the question: why was the war on drugs so targeted with African American communities – were they the main dealers, the users?

Actually, African Americans constitute less than 15% of the US’s population and consume drugs at similar rates to other races (UNODC 2015) – one would hence reasonably expect a proportional demographic of incarceration in the aftermath of the war on drugs, but the truth is disappointing. “Black people comprise 30 percent of those arrested for drug law violations – and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations,” said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in its rather depressing 2015 report. Other independent sources concur the existence of disparities – “Systemic causes (of African American overrepresentation in prison systems) range from a history of racial and ethnic subordination to ongoing police tactics that unfairly ensnare people of color into the system, and also include charging and sentencing practices that create stiffer punishments for people of color” (Sentencing Project 2024).

One cannot discuss the war on drugs though without the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 by Bill Clinton (also popularly known as the “Three Strike Act”). An important note to make, however, is that the war on drugs was announced by the Republican president Nixon, and received perhaps its greatest reinforcement from the Democratic president Clinton – highlighting a national, bipartisan concern, and a decades long failure of our government’s tackle on the issue, regardless of party or color ties worn at the White House. The act’s expansion of the Three Strikes Rule to mandate life sentences for nonviolent third offenses also drastically and disproportionately impacted African Americans: in fact, they suffered 13.3 times the imprisonment for a “third strike” than their white counterparts (CJCJ 1996). The racially disparate impact and inherent injustice of nonviolent “third strike” life sentences was not only obvious, but intentional by government officials – getting “druggies off our streets” with this inclusion of nonviolent offenses was really a clever rebranding of “getting Blacks off our streets”. The abundance of evidence signifying not only the failure of the war on drugs but also its undemocratic motive of locking away an entire minority provokes questions – how did this “war” come around to be implemented and, moreover, earn bipartisan support?

Nixon and his cabinet masterminded this “war” by linking African Americans to crime, overrepresenting their arrests on television, and creating a perceived exigence for “being tough on crime”. In his presidency, a new precedent established toughness on crime as a desirable branding for candidates. This set a ruthless intensity in crackdowns on drug abuse under the popular guise of making “streets safer” despite the reported violent crime rate showing a strong correlation with increased measures by the war on drugs with a record 800 violent crimes reported per 100,000 people in the peak of the war on drugs in 1990 compared to the 150 in the “pre war” 1960s (Tupy & Bailey 2023). Candidates following Nixon would engage in promise bidding wars of sorts to be viewed as the stronger, tougher leader than the rest; oftentimes with little regard to the racial implications of the ineffective legislation they’re promising. In those decades, it was clear that as long as the war on drugs continued to be shown as a fight for “good” – for the health of our children, safety of our neighborhoods, etc. – the concept of being tough on crime (and inherently detrimental to African Americans) would continue to be lucrative to candidates. What started as a method to target African Americans got carried away into a policy candidates competed to endorse more than the rest; at the cost of lives, even entire communities.

In fact, the legacy of the war on drugs leaves us not only with disproportionate prison populations, but with an almost 5-fold increase in overdose deaths among Americans (Alvarez & Marsal) – yet another obvious failure in drug control and a demonstration of the candidates’ chase for electorate victories rather than any form of responsibility or accountability that they are, after all, representing the people – including the African Americans they are warehousing in prisons. The ultimate takeaway from the war on drugs is that we might elect the government, but we ultimately do not control the government. We the people have no position in checks and balances – so long as we allow politicians to distort narratives and create political campaigns that ill resolve the issues at hand, we can expect no resolution. Too often we’ve observed representatives prioritize political survival over justice and the rights of those they claim to serve – the decades of the war on drugs being just one example of officials’ conscious (though with an apparent lack of a conscious) decision to win at the cost of the very people they represent. It is our time and duty to learn from the past, to question the motives of officials, and to protect fellow people of America from similarly disguised injustices