$1 Trillion And 50 Years Later, Is The DEA's War On Drugs A Failure?

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) turned 50 this week, marking five decades and over $1 trillion in its unsuccessful attempt to enforce the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) by means of what is widely viewed as a failed War on Drugs.

Why Unsuccessful?

The CSA, created on Richard Nixon’s watch in 1970, classifies drugs and sets criminal penalties for possession, use and distribution. 

A 2016 Harper’s Magazine cover story provided some important details on those early days of drug prohibition, how it became a national obsession and how the DEA, despite its annual budget of $25 billion, has never gotten it right and likely never will.

The War On Drugs: John Ehrlichman

Author Dan Baum began his article, “Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs,” with quotes from a 1994 interview he'd done with Nixon’s top adviser, John Ehrlichman in which he asked how the U.S. entangled itself in a drug prohibition policy that "yielded so much misery and so few good results.”

Ehrlichman’s response: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," said Ehrlichman who died in 1999. 

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did,” Ehrlichman said. 

Enter The DEA 

This policy put the U.S. on a punitive path led by the DEA that resulted in disproportionate drug arrests, mass incarceration and the decimation of many communities across the country. It continues to target minority communities. 

Black Americans are 3.8 times more likely to be arrested for drug possession than white Americans, even though they use drugs at similar rates, according to the Sentencing Project, which also points out that 2023 marks the 50th year since the U.S. prison population began its unprecedented surge.

The U.S. now has the highest prison population per capita in the world. 

Thousands Of Pot Prisoners

The Pew Research Center notes that there are more than 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. for drug offenses, making up about 46% of the total prison population. The majority are nonviolent offenders and at least 40,000 of them are serving time for cannabis. 

What Now, DEA?

With the proliferation of science confirming the benefits of cannabis and the fact that it is legal in some form in 40 states, it behooves the DEA to remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I drugs on the CSA (which it shares with such drugs as heroin, LSD, meth, ecstasy and peyote).

It would also help if President Biden undertook his own directive from last October when he pardoned some 6,500 federal cannabis possession prisoners and famously said, "No one should be in jail just for using marijuana."  

DEA Photo: Honduras Military Police handout