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War on drugs is one of the biggest human rights and social justice atrocities currently in the United States. There are actually no winners in the war on drugs, not unless leaders of drug smuggling operations can be considered "winners." Law enforcement loses because their precious resources are being diverted from serious crimes to drug crimes. Ordinary citizens lose because police officers are overly concerned with non-violent drug possession and even distribution cases than they are with actual societal harm. Drug use causes no more harm than alcohol use, and it makes no sense to retain drug prohibition when harm reduction seems to call for more open approaches to drug regulation.
As Benavie (2009) points out, the damage caused by the war on drugs includes an uptake in violence because of the operations of organized crime, contaminated drugs like the recent fentanyl crisis leading to preventable deaths, property crimes due to the desperation needed to maintain an addiction to black market substances, loss of freedom and civil liberties, and widespread corruption. The desire to alter consciousness is a natural human instinct, which is why Prohibition failed -- and which is why the prohibition of drugs has also failed.
Gradually there are changes...
But these changes are insignificant compared to the sweeping reform that is actually needed to eliminate the war on drugs. Benavie (2009) outlines all the reasons why the war on drugs does more harm than good, preventing people from having access to safe drugs that have been tested by laboratories instead of relying on potentially tainted black market substances. Everyone loses in the war on drugs because drug use is not restricted to certain classes, genders, or ethnicities. Drug use patterns might differ in terms of what demographic prefers what drug, but even those patterns change over time.
Reactions to drug use are out of proportion to the harms that the drugs actually cause. The country did not learn its lesson from prohibition, during which initial alarmist sentiments influenced federal policy. When that policy proved to be a failure due to the proliferation of organized crime and driving alcohol production and sales underground, prohibition was repealed. Prohibition only lasted a few years; drug prohibition has lasted several generations with quantifiable deleterious effects. Benavie (2009) argues that the war on drugs is driven not by logic, reason, or scientific evidence…
References
Benavie, A. (2009). Drugs: America's holy war. In Charon, J. M., & Vigilant, L. G. (2012). Social problems: readings with four questions. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
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