Pros And Cons Of Operation Intercept

On September 21, 1969, President Nixon initialized the first of many anti-drug measures during his presidency. This anti-drug measure, Operation Intercept aimed to reduce importing marijuana to the point of elimination across the Mexican-United States border. This policy increased surveillance and, more significantly, mandated at least three-minute inspections of every passing vehicle passing the U.S. border from Mexico. This policy proved to be mostly a failure. In response to the policy’s shortcomings, in 1970, the Nixon admiration declared a war on drugs through the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. This policy extended previously laws set into effect in 1914 through the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act with a goal of enforcing

Many critics believe that because of the way drugs are looked down upon society, they become ever more enticing to buy them even through illegal and dangerous means. For instance, President Richard Nixon said in 1971 that “America’s public enemy number one in the United States [was] drug abuse,” and because of this, “it [was] necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive” (Sharp, 1994). Another drugfree advocate, William Bennett, who served in office as the Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan, blamed the drug problem squarely on the loose and unethical morals of corrupt people. Another reason that Nixon’s War of Drugs was ineffective was in that the federal government could only prosecute national crimes, handing over the responsibility to the local law enforcement to keep the streets safe, meaning it would have to cross state lines to be under federal judication. Operation Intercept’s main contribution to the drug trade has been the restructuring of how drugs were exported. If the drug routes distributors drug traffickers were using were being watched, they found new routes to import their drugs and ways of hiding them more efficiently. The high demand coupled with these restrictions created even more problems, and more the demand increased resulted in more the federal government spent on the war against

hundreds of billions of dollars. For instance, “$120 billion [dollars] during the [George H. W.] Bush years alone,” which is more than citizens paid for private health insurance over the same period (Baum, viii). The U.S. spends more money on the war against drugs than the joint total of the Commerce, Interior, and State Departments budgets. Despite the exorbitant cost of the drug budget, it still remains to be reduced. The Bureau of Prisons reported in 2015 that 207,847 people incarcerated in federal prisons and that 48.6 percent are drug offenders (United States Sentencing Commission). To house these prisoners, more federal money must be allocated to build prisons than to build schools. If the same money was spent on improving education instead of on housing more prisoners, more Americans would be productive and contribute to