If the war on drugs has proven to be a failure, why are most governments focused on incarceration instead of rehabilitation?
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The “war on drugs” has not failed – in fact, it has been a massive success! See, the thing is that it was not intended to reduce drug use or sales, so you can’t judge it based on those measures. It was intended to punish hippies and African Americans, and that’s exactly what it has done.
Sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, right? Don’t worry, you don’t have to believe Some Random Dude On The Internet. We’ll let Nixon’s adviser John Ehrlichman explain – in his own words, quoted directly, on the record:
>”The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? 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.”
After that, Reagan created rules to massively increase civil asset forfeiture in drug-related cases, and increased the FBI’s drug enforcement budget by literally 1,180%. Why such a massive increase? Because “civil asset forfeiture” means that if someone is accused of dealing drugs, the authorities are allowed to seize any property or cash that they think is connected to the drugs. The person doesn’t have to be *convicted* of dealing drugs, either, just *accused*, so spending more money on enforcement means that you can seize a lot more assets and make a massive profit – a report from 2014 said that the Justice Department had taken in *five billion dollars* that year from civil asset forfeitures, for example.
Now, consider the for-profit prison system, where privately-owned prisons are specifically set up to make money off of having as many people as possible people in jail. And, hey, look, the war on drugs was already set up to throw huge amounts of people in jail, and it even specifically targeted people who were more likely to be poor and therefore less able to fight against the legal system! It’s a great match for a corporation that needs lots of people in lots of jail cells so that it can make the largest possible profit.
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