From Nixon to Trump, the ‘War on Drugs’ Has Been a Disaster for Americans’ Freedom

The United States government first launched a War on Drugs on June 17, 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared: “America’s public enemy number one…is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive…This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of supply.”

The war has ebbed and flowed over the past 54 years, but the results are clear. Drugs won. But instead of learning the requisite lessons, the Trump administration is ramping up anti-drug-war rhetoric to lunatic levels. The president recently issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” He’s empowered the military to destroy Venezuelan boats that likely aren’t carrying that synthetic opioid or even headed to the United States.

The administration’s rhetoric is mind-numbingly off the rails. For instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi in April claimed during congressional testimony that Donald Trump’s policies have saved the lives of 258-million people. It’s highly unlikely that 75% of America’s population would have died from drug overdoses, just as it’s highly unlikely that, per Trump, each boat strike saves 25,000 lives.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained, “Trump assumes that any given amount of drugs would be evenly divided into lethal doses, each of which would be consumed in one sitting by a different person.” By similar thinking, the feds could shut down the entire alcohol industry in the United States and save everyone’s lives, given there’s enough of it out there for every American to die of alcohol poisoning. The administration’s fabulism only undermines any faith one might have in its anti-drug policies.

Yes, the nation does have a serious fentanyl problem. In 1971, 3.3 Americans died of a drug overdose per 100,000 population. In 2023, the numbers hit 31 per 100,000, with the death rate on a steady upward trajectory since Nixon’s speech. The good news: those rates fell 27% in 2024. The reasons are inconclusive, but likely involve expanded drug treatment and the increased availability of overdose-reversing naloxone. Taking a public-health strategy to address a largely public-health problem might be more effective than labeling drugs as WMDs.

The nation’s fentanyl scourge—and there’s always some new, potent drug epidemic, from crack cocaine to Ecstasy—is a prime example of the Iron Law of Prohibition. In his testimony before the U.S. Senate in February, the Cato Institute’s health expert Jeffrey Singer explained it this way: “Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes.” Now “other highly potent synthetic opioids are becoming more attractive for drug trafficking organizations to produce and sell.”

Drug-warriors ignore how their own policies helped create the latest crisis. The feds began cracking down on prescription opioid analgesics (OAs) to combat their overprescribing to people with pain issues. “Unfortunately, opioid dependence and addiction do not simply dissipate with the contraction in the availability of OA pills…Instead, individuals who lost access have turned to cheaper, more accessible and more potent black market opioid alternatives,” per a 2017 article in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The prime alternative was heroin. The feds cracked down on that, too, and then black markets shifted to fentanyl.

That War on Drugs has had myriad other ill effects, although they are so commonplace that most of us don’t notice. It has led to the militarization of police forces, which increasingly view themselves as invading armies rather than community peace officers. The administration’s green light to aggressive policing tactics (as well as its deployment of the military in cities) only compounds this dangerous shift.

A stepped up drug war could also be a pre-text for a real shooting war, with The New York Times reporting the administration might actually be more interested in Venezuela’s oil reserves than its basically non-existent drug infrastructure.

At home, the drug war has undermined our property rights. One prominent drug-war tool, civil asset forfeiture, has allowed law-enforcement agencies to discard due process and take people’s cars, homes and cash based on an officer’s mere suspicion those items are tied to a drug offense. Victims need to prove their innocence, which turns our constitutional system on its head. The original policy was designed to deprive drug cartels of ill-gotten gains, but now is deployed mostly against ordinary Americans, with the agencies keeping the proceeds from the takings.

Most Americans are aware of the foolhardy nature of alcohol Prohibition, which empowered organized crime, led to alcohol poisonings as illicit operations rarely have great quality control, corrupted police agencies and politicians, and caused prison overcrowding. We see similar results after a half-century of drug prohibition.

Sensible leadership would try to figure out the reasons for the past year’s drop in overdoses and build on that rather than double down on decades of bad policies that have made our country more dangerous and less free.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.