Solving the War on Drugs—Part 2: More Drugs, More Death, More of the Same

Friends,

Thanks to everyone who read Part 1 of this series on how to solve the War on Drugs. We looked at why public messaging and persuasion—like Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No”—have failed to stop people from wanting drugs.

This week, let’s turn to the other half of the equation: the supply side. For decades, the U.S. has tried to fight drugs by seizing shipments and locking people up. Has it worked?

Let’s take a closer look.

Part 2: Stop the Dealers, Save the Nation?

We have already seen that the demand for mind altering substances goes back at least 50,000 years and that campaigns to talk people out of wanting alcohol or drugs, like “Just say no,” have failed. We have also tried to stop the other side of the economic equation, the supply—“seize and jail.”

Let’s see how that’s going.

Drug Laws and Enforcement—Seize and Jail

The first drug law in the U.S banned San Francisco Chinese opium dens in 1875 (and the Chinese are still doing it 150 years later). By the 20th century Coca Cola and others were selling cocaine legally when the Bureau of Internal Revenue was charged with enforcing rules against narcotics.

In the 1930s, marijuana was called, “one of the most dangerous and depraving narcotics known” where “the consumption of one marihuana cigarette is sufficient to push the psycho-neurotic type of person from sanity to madness.”

By the 1960s, President Johnson formed the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs under the Department of Justice (DOJ). Following Johnson, President Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970 and funded the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to enforce it. In 2024, the DEA budget was $3.3 billion with10,000 employees.

Currently, in state, local, and federal prisons, one in five people are incarcerated for drug crimes with about 350,000 in jail on any given day. About half of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drug trafficking and most of the prisoners are also doing drugs. It’s not just the US; globally, the use of drugs has reached an all-time high.

Currently, enforcing the drug control system costs at least $100 billion a year and, since the war on drugs began in 1971, we have spent over $1 trillion.

In addition to domestic crime, drug trafficking generates billions of dollars of profits for international terrorists such as the, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hizballah, and Al-Ittihad al-Islami, Somalia’s largest militant Islamic organization. It is widely known that terrorists use this revenue to pursue terrorism, create instability, and affects the socioeconomic lifestyle of the poor resulting from war, terrorism, and corruption.

Drug Deaths Surge

After over half a century of efforts to reduce demand and interdict supply, the result is more people than ever are dying from drugs, as detailed in the chart below.

Centers for Disease Control: Figure 1. Age-adjusted rate of drug overdose deaths, by sex: United States, 2001–2021

More Potent Drugs

In addition to more drugs, marijuana now has a THC concentration that has gone from 2% in the 1960s to over 95% today. Synthetic cannabinoids are made with human-made chemicals that are sprayed or dried on plant material that can be smoked in e-cigarettes or other devices. Adverse effects from the new psychoactive substances include hallucinations, muscle damage, breathing and gastrointestinal problems, vomiting, suicidal thoughts, headaches, depression, kidney failure, seizures, elevated blood pressure and possibly death. Street names include K2, Spice, Skooby Snax, Skunk, and Fire.

Of course, we also have opioids, like fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin or morphine. It is lethal. It has also been found mixed into legal drugs like Adderall. Most of it (90%) comes from China through Mexico although some now also comes from India.

Nitazines are also emerging as they are 10 times stronger than fentanyl. Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid that is 100 times more potent than fentanyl. Finally, there is Krokodil, a Russian invention recently found in the United States that is described as a flesh-eating drug that can cause gangrene and necrosis. In 2022, there were 76,000 deaths from synthetic opioids.

A recent article in The San Francisco Chronicle lamented that “California’s fentanyl problem is getting worse. Nobody is sure what to do.

Exactly.

How Do Drugs Work?

When people take opioid drugs, the drug enters the central nervous system of the brain and binds to opioid receptors that are the “reward pathway,” causing euphoria and releasing dopamine that signals the brain’s neurons to create a high.

The two sides of drug dependency are wanting drugs (the addiction side) and experiencing drugs (the pleasure side). Those are controlled by different centers in the brain and scientists have found tools to reduce the “wanting” while maintaining the “pleasure.”

People will always seek out the pleasure. As long as we keep relying on “Just say no” and “Seize and jail” we’re just going to get more of the same.

What else can we do?