No country in the world incarcerates more of its citizens than does the United States. taxpayers have paid more than $2.5 trillion to fund this “war.” Curiously, despite the escalation of mass incarceration rates of minorities for soft drug crimes since the 1970s, violent crime rates have steadily decreased in the United States over the past several decades.

When President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, he effectively criminalized drug addiction this led to the mass and disproportionate incarceration of primarily non-violent drug offenders from disadvantaged minority populations - over sixty-five percent of whom are African-American and Latino. These claims have dominated legislative enactments since the 1970s, virtually ignoring those who argue that drug addiction should be viewed as a public health issue rather than a criminal enterprise. Politicians such as Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Nelson Rockefeller each advocated for harsh drug laws and severe criminal sanctions because they argued a strong correlation existed between drug addiction and crime. Since declaring a War on Drugs, domestic incarceration rates have exploded, particularly in the African-American and Latino populations. Since that time, an explicit “War on Drugs” has dominated the political imagination of the United States. In 1971, President Richard Nixon named drug abuse as “public enemy number one” in the United States.

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