The War On Drugs : Mandatory Minimum Sentencing For Drug Possession And Distribution

Though president Nixon is often seen as having started the modern war on drugs, his administration’s actual role in drug policy legislation and enforcement never lived up to the inflated rhetoric surrounding the issue. The war on drugs, from a policy standpoint, was largely created under the Reagan administration. Despite having fewer than 2% of the American public reporting that they believed drugs were the most important issue the country faced (Alexander, 2010 p. 49), the Reagan administration announced its war on drugs in 1982. Unlike Nixon’s rhetorical war on drugs, the Reagan administration began creating impactful laws and enforcement mechanisms. Beginning by transferring funds from drug education and drug treatment programs into drug related enforcement mechanisms was only a small indicator of what was to come next.
The controversial Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced mandatory minimum sentencing for drug possession and distribution (Alexander, 2010). Controversy did not rise from the idea of mandatory minimum sentencing, but rather the obvious racial bias which arose from the disparities between sentencing for cocaine and crack. This legislation created a five-year mandatory minimum for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, yet to receive that same five-year mandatory sentence, the law required five hundred grams of cocaine (Vagins & McCurdy, 2006). With traditional cocaine use typically associated with upper class whites and crack cocaine use associated