There’s a dangerous myth in sections of the public that the war on drugs is coming to an end. It’s an idea that as cannabis legalization sweeps across the U.S. and many other nations around the world, legal prohibitions against drug use and abuse will soon be reduced or removed entirely.
In reality, the drug war has never been more ferocious, targeting minorities and the most vulnerable in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S. in 2018, there were more arrests for marijuana than in 2017, despite 11 states now allowing legal cannabis for citizens over 21 years of age. The FBI released figures that detailed 663,367 marijuana arrests in the country in 2018. The majority of Americans, according to a number of polls in the last years, now support marijuana legalization.
“Americans should be outraged that police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession,” National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Executive Director Erik Altieri said.
Cannabis is just the tip of the drug war iceberg. Although President Donald Trump has spoken regularly about escalating the war on drugs, blaming Mexico and drug cartels on the huge amounts of illicit substances entering the U.S., including heroin, cocaine, opioids and fentanyl, he ignores the elephant in the room: Millions of Americans want and need illegal drugs and illegality won’t stop them. According to a recent report from the RAND corporation, in 2016 alone U.S. citizens spent $150 billion on cannabis, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.
The opioid epidemic is the worst drug crisis in the country’s history, killing hundreds of thousands of people and costing trillions of dollars. It was partly caused by pharmaceutical companies that saw an opportunity to make a fortune. Some of the biggest players, such as the Sackler family, are set to walk away from multibillion dollar settlements with billions of dollars still in their bank accounts.
