Argumentative Essay On War On Drugs

The war on drugs began in 1971 by Richard Nixon. Although the intension of the war on drugs was really to target certain groups of people, its outward appearance was to curve drug usage. That being said, this war has gone on for over 40 years; yet, the results of drug usage seem to be unchanged. The war on drugs has done nothing but targeted ethnic minorities, costed over a trillion dollars, and has exponentially increased the size of the prison system. This being said, I will argue that the war on drugs has been unsuccessful and discriminatory. The war on drugs has costed the United States trillions of dollars. There is a drug war clock that shows the amount of money the United States spends. The site states, “The U.S. federal government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $500 per second” (“Drug War Clock,” 1). In fact, the federal and state government has spent over 11 billion dollars just this year for this effort. The government puts so much of our tax dollars into this war, yet they don’t focus on other things that …show more content…
The proportion of people incarcerated for a drug related charge in state prison who are black or Latino is 57 percent. These groups of people use and sell drugs at similar rates to whites even, yet they are arrested more. What makes this statistic even worse is that these groups of people only make up 20% of the population. This mere fact should show that racial minorities are being targeted in this drug war. Over the years there has been a stereotype of drug users and sellers. The reason that a lot of minorities get arrested as opposed to white people is because law enforcement focuses on urban areas, lower-income communities, and on communities of color (“Race and the Drug War” 1). There is a blatant depiction of the injustices that is happening in the legal system when you go into a prison. The prison population is predominantly full of