Through most of modern day America, the war on drugs have affected more than just a few lives. It has disrupted communities, invaded families, and engendered national gregarious unrest. The substructure of the drug war had been imbedded in the government’s posture towards certain minority groups during the Nixon administration. In 1971, Nixon proclaimed that drugs were the number one public enemy. The incrementation of the drug use in the 1960’s led Nixon to create the Drug Enforcement Admiration (DEA). But what the public didn’t know was the true cause for the drug war. In a quote by John Ehrlichman, he expounded how the government’s main enemy was “the antiwar left and black people” (Baum, “Legalize It All”). Since the government couldn’t declare war on those groups, they decide to associate marijuana with “hippies” and heroin with black people. After criminalizing both drugs heavily, the government could finally take an action against people within these groups to put them away in jail. The DEA could break in to …show more content…
Unless the main goal was to promote racism and for the upper class to make more money from the Mexican drug cartels. The cumulative effect from the war on drugs aided government efforts to push back the country’s social growth towards equality. Instead of given the incarcerated a way to pick up their lives and move on, the mandatory minimums continued lives, families, and communities. Fast forwarding to today, President Obama worked towards lower mandatory minimums and changing federal spending towards treatment place, the current administration is taking the country to a 1980’s era of drug war. One of the main reason the wall is being talked about is to keep drugs out of the country. But looking at the bigger picture, the entire world is humanity and the borders people place are manmade. Progress towards a better community starts with science or compassion, not political