The Prohibitive Costs Of The Drug War

EWRT1A-16
2/12/14
Discourse Paper
Final Draft

The Prohibitive Costs of the Drug War On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon committed what is arguably one of his most significant and lasting executive acts when he issued a special message to Congress regarding the growing drug abuse problem within the United States. Although this message was significant in many ways because of the public acknowledgment that the Federal Government was not doing enough to combat drugs and their associated ills, this message is mostly remembered as the origin of the term the War on Drugs. We are now over forty years removed from that “declaration of war,” and not only has the United States ' drug problem remained, it has grown to unthinkable proportions,
The United States federal government has maintained a policy of outright prohibition of narcotics since the early twentieth century. Prohibition criminalizes the manufacture, transportation, sale, and even the mere possession of a banned item or substance. As a concept, prohibition makes perfect sense; but in reality, it is not always possible to enforce. The federal government has attempted it previously and failed. During the 1920s, the prohibition of alcohol created a huge black market, which helped spawn powerful transnational networks of violent criminal organizations (ex: La Cosa Nostra) that exist to this day. According to a poet and author of the time, Charles Hanson Towne, “In a study of more than thirty major U.S cities during the Prohibition years of 1920 and 1921, the number of crimes increased by 24 percent. Additionally, theft and burglaries increased by 9 percent, homicides by 12.7 percent, assaults and battery rose by 13 percent, drug addiction by 44.6 percent, and police department costs rose by 11.4 percent. This was largely the result of “black-market violence” and the diversion of law enforcement resources elsewhere. Despite the Prohibition movement 's hope that outlawing alcohol would reduce crime, the reality was that the Volstead Act led to higher crime rates than were experienced prior to Prohibition and the establishment of a black market dominated by criminal organizations.” Thinking that
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