There was really only one big difference between liberal drug warriors and conservative ones.
By Dr. Matthew D. Lassiter
Professor of History, Urban and Regional Planning, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
University of Michigan
For 70 years, politicians in both parties have fought an unwinnable war on drugs. In the latest chapter, the Biden Administration has labeled Mexican cartels the top criminal threat facing the U.S. and proposed devoting even more resources to trying to keep drugs from crossing the border — policies that historically have only made things worse. The Republican candidates for president want to go even further. They fantasize about invading Mexico, destroying the cartels, and shooting suspected smugglers at the border. Both sides see American drug users as innocent victims rather than the source of demand driving a lucrative illegal market.
This bipartisan consensus has two racialized foundations. Politicians have long competed to punish drug traffickers—whom they typically portray as foreigners and racial minorities. Meanwhile government policy historically has defined most white, middle-class illegal drug users (not just addicts) as both criminals and victims, to be arrested and forced into treatment. As a result, drug warriors have poured more than a trillion dollars into law enforcement and involuntary rehabilitation—with little more to show for it than a punitive and racially discriminatory system of mass incarceration.
This history exposes the truth: the drug war isn’t winnable, as the Global Commission on Drug Policy stated in 2011. And simply legalizing marijuana is not enough. Instead only a wholesale rethinking of drug policy—one that abandons criminalization and focuses on true harm reduction, not coercive rehabilitation—can begin to undo the damage of decades of a misguided “war.”
The modern drug war began in the 1950s, with liberals—not conservatives—leading the charge. In California, the epicenter of the early war on narcotics, white suburban grassroots movements prodded liberal politicians like Governor Pat Brown into action. They blamed “pushers,” usually perceived and depicted as people of color, and demanded that elected officials crack down on the drug supply. Legislators in California, Illinois, and New York responded by passing the nation’s first mandatory-minimum sentencing laws in an effort to save teenagers from these traffickers.
