War On Drugs In The 1970s

Over the past forty years, the United States government's stance on drugs has changed dramatically. Society went from a strange, drug-infused 1960s which encouraged the assumption of many different drugs coming new to mainstream America including: marijuana, LSD, and crack-cocaine. For quite a long time in the United States these drugs were legal. As the 1970s arrived, many looked back upon the 1960s with shame. These were a time of the “flower children” and rebellion against the government, especially against the Vietnam War.

The 1970s took a drastic turn. Under President Nixon, there was the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency on July 1, 1973. This is where the war on drugs began. The message was clear but the carrying out of the idea

Schoolchilren are sudued to the “Just Say No” and D.A.R.E campaigns from past presidents that are still effect to this day. The name “War On Drugs” is supposed to simplify an act passed by the United States government to crack down more harshly on drugs, drug users, and drug dealers. Anyone caught with an illegal substance could face long prison sentences. The plan began to also help stop drug smugling from happened along the US-Mexico border. The premise of the act is very solid, but the way it is carried out is what has in the simpliest words ruined the last forty years of law regulation, school systems, prisons, and helped create a paramilitary police force to which has become commonplace across the United

John Elrichman, has openly admitted that then plan from the very beginning was to target African-Americans. The original plan was coaxed and hidden, though. Not many suspected much until the late 1970s when one could see the clear difference in the sentencing and the selection of who to arrest. Unfortunately, not much has changed in the legal system. Today, African-American men are 13x more likely to be arrested than white males and in some states/cities the rates may even go up from there. The racial difference in drug related crimes is quite obvious. Together, African-Americans make up almost a low 29% behind bars, but when specifying the crime such as drug charges, it increases to almost 75% (Newman, 2013). The CIA has done some things that the public eye would see as concerning. This organization, specifically during the last forty years, has committed questionable acts. One of the most questionable acts performed by the CIA under President Jimmy Carter was funding a guerrilla group, called the Sandinistas, in Nicaragua. This plan backfired dramatically as a crack-cocaine pandemonium was unleashed in the United States, which would in effect take hold of the cartels in Mexico and create a separate problem on its own (Schou,