Ronald Reagan War On Drugs

In “How About Low-Cost Drugs for Addicts?” (1995), Louis Nizer argues that drug addiction is a serious problem and we are losing the ability to gain control over drug addiction. Nizer suggests the government should create clinics that provide drugs free or at nominal cost and be staffed by psychiatrists. The benefits of the new approach will push the mob to lose the main source of its income, the drug dealers will run out of business, and the police or other law enforcement authorities would be freed to take care of other crimes. Nizer also believes that free drugs will win the war against domestic terrorism caused by addicts. On the other hand, Nizer provides some of the opposing arguments that providing free drugs would consign a person to

Yuzhuo Zhang (Mark) 1601068 EDS 1 Both conservative and liberal lawmakers intertwined thoroughly to control the crime as it was a domestic policy issue. Reagan spent more money than Lyndon on controlling the crime. Reagan’s War on Drugs were based on Johnson’s Crime on Crime. Reagan thought that drugs were an important reason why lots of crime happened. Their policies both leaded to the mass incarceration.

One of Nixon’s aide named John Ehrlichman admitted to the real reason why the War on Drugs was introduced, he stated “You want to know what this was really about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m

Due to the unprecedented expansion of the war on drugs by the Reagan administration started a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration. The huge number of offenders incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenders increased from 50,000 to 1980 to over 400,000 by the year 1997. In 1981, Nancy Reagan began a highly publicized antidrug campaign called “Just Say No”, as public concerns arose due to the portrayals by the media about people addicted to a smoke-able form of cocaine dubbed as “crack”. This campaign set the stage for zero tolerance policies implemented in the late 1980’s.

From 1947-1991 the Cold War lasted between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two Administrations responsible for the victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War are President Reagan and President Bush. President Reagan started his presidency in 1981, and after all his success while being president, he won re-election in 1985. Now, a key reason why the US remained successful with ending the Cold War after Reagan’s two terms was because in 1990 Reagan’s Vice President George H. W. Bush was elected President. This was a good turnout because Reagan and Bush shared a lot of the same ideas, so Bush was able to just pick up where Reagan left off.

Thus, Alexander argues that the War on Drugs was a coded way to appeal to working-class whites who resented the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. This wave of mass incarceration has had devastating effects on the African American community. It has imprisoned whole generations of young black men, deprived families of their fathers and sons, and brought the African American community great shame. In a supposedly post-racial America, where a black man can be elected president, the idea of "colorblindness" remains a

Wes Moore examines the affect of drugs in not only his community but other predominantly African American communities as well. “There was so much money to be made that… turf wars became deadly… In 1990, there was 2,605 [homicides in New York City] … and the victims were concentrated in a single demographic: young black men.” (51) As the demand for drugs heightened in the 70s, so did the supply, leading to greater and stronger drug rings.

Racial Profiling” as it’s known today was started in 1980’s under President Ronald Reagans’ “War on Drugs” (a war Reagan declared while drug use and crimes were both on the decline (4). Regan’s “War on Drugs” was a partisan show of force that he, Bush Senior and Junior and subsequent Presidents used to try and convenience people they were concerned with public safety and American citizens who had fallen victim to crimes committed by drug users and drug dealers. (Even, while it was widely reported Ronald Reagans’ son, Ronnie junior and former President George Bush Senior’s son, former President George Bush Junior were both smoking weed and snorting cocaine (4). While the “War on Drugs” was based on political motives, (that is not the full story) as the “war on drugs” in hindsight proved itself to be a social containment strategy and ultimately a “war” on black and brown surplus people ().

In order for America to afford the tax cuts and increase in defense spending, Regan reduced spending on important welfare and social programs, which only increased poverty in America and widened the gap between the rich and the poor. An example of a welfare program which Reagan reduced support towards, was food-stamps. In 1983, Reagan cut down the outlay on food stamps from $11.8 million to $9.6 billion, and the cuts would continue to be about $2-3 billion yearly for the rest of his presidency (Danziger, n.d). Bill Moyers, a former press secretary of the White House said that the cuts in food stamps are “putting people into a 1981 version of the bread line (Hayward, 2010).”

Throughout history, African Americans have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. The Jim Crow era made it extremely hard for African Americans to live a peaceful life. Today, if African Americans are wrongly convicted about a crime or an issue, they do not make it to trial. Their trial beings when they are assaulted by law enforcement, the new lynch mob, Police corruption and brutality has been an ongoing problem within the United States frequently. Though African American youth have been targeted by the police, these events are happening all too often.

First off, the war on drugs quickly increased the rate of incarcerations but in a very racially biased way. Although whites were more likely to deliver an array of different drugs, blacks were more likely

In 1972, former President Richard Nixon made his infamous statements regarding crime and drug abuse. In this speech, he declared a war on crime and drugs and intended to decrease the number of people using drugs and the amount of crimes that were committed. Since this declaration, incarceration rates in the U.S. have gone up by 500%, even though the amount of crime happening has gone down. One of the reasons why I feel our rates have risen, is because sometimes, we put people in jail when they don’t need to be there in the first place.

All of the changes Ronald Reagan made during the war on drugs relating to unjust prison sentences and misuse of funds made diverse communities suffer and prison sentences absurdly large. Ronald Reagan misused funds by prioritizing the drug war over public safety and created an absurd law that made the prison sentences cruel and overpopulated prisons all across America. We have already made efforts to reverse the effects of the drug war, but there is still more that we can accomplish with open minds and support. The drug war was a devastating period in American history, it was irresponsible and would never have happened with the right guidance. The drug war was catastrophic and created a lot of problems in the United States, but

Essentially, although drugs have been held accountable for gang violence and other acts of violence that have occurred within communities, the illegality of drugs indeed may have aggravated the situation. In addition, it has become evident that one of the primary objectives of the war on drugs, which is to limit supply and demand, has been largely ineffective. CSDP (2007) “ According to the United Nations, profits in illegal drugs are so inflated that three-quarters of all drug shipments would have

Some may not be too familiar with the war on drugs and the effects it has had on the society we live in. The war on drugs was started by the Nixon administration in the early seventies. Nixon deemed drug abuse “public enemy number one”. This was the commencement of the war on drugs, this war has lasted to this day and has been a failure. On average 26 million people use opioids.