“Drug abuse is one of the most vicious and corrosive forces attacking the foundation of American society today. It is a major cause of crime and a ruthless destroyer of human lives. We must fight it with all the resources we have. This administration has declared a total, global war against the drug menace… “Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get the original essay On March 28, 1973, then-President Richard M. Nixon appeared before Congress as he established the Drug Enforcement Administration and was trying to gain support for its growing war on drugs. Since then, the consequences have become clear. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people lost their lives. The United States has become the country with the most incarcerated people per capita. In the United States, black people and modern "hippies" face increasing discrimination from the government, the justice system, and law enforcement. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, police, military and powerful drug cartels incite violence linked to corrupt power struggles, while civilians are caught in the crossfire. And looking back, it appears worryingly that the thousands of deaths and millions of wasted taxpayer dollars were all in vain. The war on drugs in North America has been a disaster and failure for everyone involved and in every country where it has taken place, and policy must adapt to help drug users instead of punishing them. Shortly after Nixon began the war on drugs, attention turned to Colombia's cocaine industry as drug traffickers killed 40 people in one weekend in response to the seizure by authorities Colombians of 600 kilograms of cocaine with the help of the United States. This was the beginning of the violence that would ravage the war on drugs and which continues to this day. In 1975, Operation Condor began, during which the United States government used the war on drugs as a pretext to silence opponents of capitalism in Latin America. Around 60,000 people were killed. Support for criminalization grew after the discovery of marijuana at a 13-year-old's birthday party in August 1976, leading to the 1978 amendment to the Prevention and Control Act. comprehensive control of drug abuse, allowing law enforcement to seize all money and/or “other things.” of value provided or intended to be provided to any person in exchange for a controlled substance [and] all proceeds attributable to such exchange. On July 11, 1979, the first fatal drug-related shooting occurred in Miami, where a Colombian drug dealer was shot dead along with his bodyguard in the Dadeland Mall. Shortly after, in 1981, Ronald Reagan was elected president, continuing Nixon's war on drugs. Between then and 1997, U.S. incarceration rates for drug offenses jumped about 70 percent, and about 400,000 people were incarcerated that year. In August 2000, President William Clinton provided $1.3 billion in U.S. aid to Colombia to finance the war on drugs. In 2006, Mexico followed the United States to become the second country to use the military in the war on drugs under the Mérida Initiative. Soon after, the situation in Mexico turned violent. On January 31, 2010, armed men broke into a birthday party in Ciudad Juárez andkilled 13 teenagers in the city's ongoing turf war. On March 19 of that year, Mexican soldiers accidentally killed two graduate students in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, during a shootout against drug traffickers. The soldiers attempted to trap the students and destroyed the security camera that was recording the event. About two months later, on May 31, 55 bodies were found and removed from a mass grave near Taxco, Guerrero. On July 25, 2010, more than 70 bodies were removed from mass graves near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. Autopsies showed that most had been shot and others showed signs of torture. On November 5, 2010, more than 100 people died in the shootout between Mexican security forces and the Gulf Cartel in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Conditions continued to deteriorate throughout the following year. On May 14, 2011, in the state of Durango, 340 bodies, all bearing signs of torture, were removed from mass graves by Mexican police. And in June of that year, a Global Commission on Drug Policy, made up of former presidents, senior advisers and a former UN secretariat, declared that the global war on drugs had failed . in fact, former US President Barack Obama and current President Donald Trump (at the time of writing) both agreed to continue and escalate the destructive policies of war. The economic cost of the war on drugs alone is immense. Every year, more than $47 billion is spent in the United States alone on the war on drugs. In total, $1 trillion has been spent by the U.S. government since 1971 on the war. Every dollar spent on funding is equal to a dollar taken away from possible drug treatment, health care, defense, education, infrastructure, energy, science, trade or agriculture . This slows down development in all sectors. Incarceration and law enforcement are closely linked to the cost of the war on drugs. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Prisons, the average annual cost per federal inmate in 2016 was $31,977.65. Considering that approximately 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States and a fifth of them are in prison for drug crimes; this represents a cost of approximately $14.7 billion each year. In 2017, there were 1,632,921 arrests in the United States for drug law violations. 85.4% of these arrests were for possession only. Every 25 seconds, someone is arrested in the United States for drug possession. This surprisingly high arrest rate contributes to America's position as the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Worse, Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than their white peers. According to the NAACP, black people make up about 30 percent of all drug arrests, while they make up only 12.5 percent of drug users. There is a cynical reason for this. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House thereafter, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people...We knew we could not make it illegal to be against the war. or blacks, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then heavily criminalizing both, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, search their homes, interrupt their meetings and defame them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs?.