Category Archives: War On Drugs

The War on Drugs

Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs

The War on Drugs is an American indie rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, formed in 2005. The band consists of Adam Granduciel (vocals, guitar), David Hartley (bass), Robbie Bennett (keyboards), Charlie Hall (drums), Jon Natchez (saxophone, keyboards) and Anthony LaMarca (guitar).

Founded by close collaborators Granduciel and Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs released their debut studio album, Wagonwheel Blues, in 2008. Vile departed shortly after its release to focus on his solo career. The band's second studio album Slave Ambient was released in 2011 to favorable reviews and extensive touring.

Written and recorded following extensive touring and a period of loneliness and depression for primary songwriter Granduciel, the band's third album, Lost in the Dream, was released in 2014 to widespread critical acclaim and increased exposure. Previous collaborator Charlie Hall joined the band as its full-time drummer during the recording process, with saxophonist Jon Natchez and additional guitarist Anthony LaMarca accompanying the band for its world tour.

In 2003, frontman Adam Granduciel moved from Oakland, California to Philadelphia, where he met Kurt Vile, who had also recently moved back to Philadelphia after living in Boston for two years.[3] The duo subsequently began writing, recording and performing music together.[4] Vile stated, "Adam was the first dude I met when I moved back to Philadelphia in 2003. We saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things. I was obsessed with Bob Dylan at the time, and we totally geeked-out on that. We started playing together in the early days and he would be in my band, The Violators. Then, eventually I played in The War On Drugs."[5]

Granduciel and Vile began playing as The War on Drugs in 2005. Regarding the band's name, Granduciel noted, "My friend Julian and I came up with it a few years ago over a couple bottles of red wine and a few typewriters when we were living in Oakland. We were writing a lot back then, working on a dictionary, and it just came out and we were like "hey, good band name so eventually when I moved to Philadelphia and got a band together I used it. It was either that or The Rigatoni Danzas. I think we made the right choice. I always felt though that it was the kind of name I could record all sorts of different music under without any sort of predictability inherent in the name"[6]

While Vile and Granduciel formed the backbone of the band, they had a number of accompanists early in the group's career, before finally settling on a lineup that added Charlie Hall as drummer/organist, Kyle Lloyd as drummer and Dave Hartley on bass.[7] Granduciel had previously toured and recorded with The Capitol Years, and Vile has several solo albums.[8] The group gave away its Barrel of Batteries EP for free early in 2008.[9] Their debut LP for Secretly Canadian, Wagonwheel Blues, was released in 2008.[10]

Following the album's release, and subsequent European tour, Vile departed from the band to focus on his solo career, stating, "I only went on the first European tour when their album came out, and then I basically left the band. I knew if I stuck with that, it would be all my time and my goal was to have my own musical career."[5] Fellow Kurt Vile & the Violators bandmate Mike Zanghi joined the band at this time, with Vile noting, "Mike was my drummer first and then when The War On Drugs' first record came out I thought I was lending Mike to Adam for the European tour but then he just played with them all the time so I kind of had to like, while they were touring a lot, figure out my own thing."[11]

The lineup underwent several changes, and by the end of 2008, Kurt Vile, Charlie Hall, and Kyle Lloyd had all exited the group. At that time Granduciel and Hartley were joined by drummer Mike Zanghi, whom Granduciel also played with in Kurt Vile's backing band, the Violators.

After recording much of the band's forthcoming studio album, Slave Ambient, Zanghi departed from the band in 2010. Drummer Steven Urgo subsequently joined the band, with keyboardist Robbie Bennett also joining at around this time. Regarding Zanghi's exit, Granduciel noted: "I loved Mike, and I loved the sound of The Violators, but then he wasn't really the sound of my band. But you have things like friendship, and he's down to tour and he's a great guy, but it wasn't the sound of what this band was."[12]

The band's second studio album, Slave Ambient was released to favorable reviews in 2011.

In 2012, Patrick Berkery replaced Urgo as the band's drummer.[13]

On 4 December 2013 the band announced the upcoming release of its third studio album, Lost in the Dream (March 18, 2014). The band streamed the album in its entirety on NPR's First Listen site for a week before its release.[14]

Lost in the Dream was featured as the Vinyl Me, Please record of the month in August 2014. The pressing was a limited edition pressing on mint green colored vinyl.

In June 2015, The War on Drugs signed with Atlantic Records for a two-album deal.[15]

Adam Granduciel and Mike Zanghi are both former members of founding guitarist Kurt Vile's backing band The Violators, with Granduciel noting, "There was never, despite what lazy journalists have assumed, any sort of falling out, or resentment"[16] following Vile's departure from The War on Drugs. In 2011, Vile stated, "When my record came out, I assumed Adam would want to focus on The War On Drugs but he came with us in The Violators when we toured the States. The Violators became a unit, and although the cast does rotate, weve developed an even tighter unity and sound. Adam is an incredible guitar player these days and there is a certain feeling [between us] that nobody else can tap into. We dont really have to tell each other what to play, it just happens."

Both David Hartley and Adam Granduciel contributed to singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten's fourth studio album, Are We There (2014). Hartley performs bass guitar on the entire album, with Granduciel contributing guitar on two tracks.

Adam Granduciel is currently producing the new Sore Eros album. They have been recording it in Philadelphia and Los Angeles on and off for the past several years.[5]

Current members

Former members

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The War on Drugs (band) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James

This is full on sh%t, I'm currently facing charges for weed posses/supply 3 pounds & use dangerous weapon to avoid lawful apprehension... I have priors for advance cultivation for comercial purpose (weed again). Including the time I have already spent in before granted bail on a section 32 i'm looking at 2 years, I live in Australia. This mind you is without making any deals with the crown/DPP, because snitching where i'm from has a much better chance of getting you killed than prison does!!!

After the short period of time in prison, i'm in a position now to think before getting involved in drugs again... I have had a drug problem since I was 12, i'm 25 now. through out the years starting off with weed then moving onto speed, X, LSD, Cocain, and on occasions heroin and Ice. My trial has dragged on nearly a year now and I've stayed clean and drug free since getting arrested, through the help of treatment I found on my own accord whilst out on bail that could not be obtained inside and strick bail conditions. I'm even half way through completing my HSC equiverlant in a program at University.

Locking people up for a third of there life is a complete joke! Drugs run rambit through the system anyway, so all they do is move the problem from one place to another in a bid to raise revenue. Besides that the longer you lock someone up for the less chance they have to get back on there feet, plus adjusting to life outside isn't as easy as you may think after a long lagging. All the system has done in that time has given them an advanced criminal education so to speak. You put a group of criminally minded men together for long enough that spend all day talking and all night thinking is only shooting yourself in the foot. The amount you can learn in there even in a short amount of time is unbelieveable and forget Facebook or Myspace... If your a crim it's the best place for networking. Plus it doesn't take long for any support you have on the outside to die off too. So your mentality changes if it hadn't already to f@%K it, you get out allot smarter and believe you have no other choice but crime to support yourself and chances are prison has made you a 1000 times more violent and connected. Anyone with an IQ over 70, can use everything they have learnt to there advantage. They are now no longer petty street crims, they are hardend criminals more than likely connected with prison gangs and hate one thing more than anything else, POLICE!

Obviously the war on drugs isn't working, and while everyday american's let in some cases just unfortunate people trying to support there family the only way they can or trying to mask a painfull history with drug abuse go to prison for crazy sentences when there's a possiblity for rehabilitation, the people in power are going to continue to exploit the poor and uneducated as a means of making profit and eventually while you think F@%k them (junkies/dealers) It's going to strike close to your heart when a father, mother, bother, sister, son, daughter will be behind bars, and when you realise that they are people too, it's too late. My question is why, when there are alturnatives that work... Take my case for example

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The War on Drugs: The Prison Industrial Complex - Top ...

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War on drugs news, articles and information: - NaturalNews

According to Fox 45 Now, a classy upstanding citizen was robbed & assaulted in an alley by her drug dealer, Tutu after asking him to turn away while s...

Brian Smith

Native New Englander now residing in South Carolina

I love our president, his passion and I appreciate his proposal to heal the epidemic of opioid abuse, but I believe the bigger picture goes beyond treatment centers and expanding scope of practice. We need to assist our patients from the inside, the roots, only then can they truly begin to heal.

Erica Benedicto

Root-Cause Integrative PA-C, Yoga Teacher, Storyteller, Community/Clinical Curator, Speaker, Thinker, Doer, Rapscallion

Becoming a mother has really opened my heart. Besides being with family, I notice the compassion most when I am teaching yoga. One of my favorite plac...

Pia Artesona

Los Angeles-based yoga teacher, writer, life coach and mother-to-be

A robust public conversation is currently unfolding led by the formerly incarcerated and seized by President Obama himself to reflect on our current criminal justice system and the lasting stigma and damage it causes those who have been in contact with it. But does a nation of second chances include those of us who are immigrants?

Tania Unzueta

Legal and Policy Director for Mijente and the #Not1More Campaign

Iceland may be the world's most progressive country at reducing teenage substance abuse. In the more than 4 decades that I have studied, researched ...

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Louisiana remained number 1, among the 50 states, with 38,030 in prison, a rate of 816 per 100,000 o...

There are two problems with threatening long sentences to extract cooperation from low-level drug offenders. This strategy is ineffective in impacting the drug trade. It also inflicts immense collateral damage on innocent people and low-level offenders, while letting the guiltiest offenders off more easily.

Amos Irwin

Training Director at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Boy, it isn't every day you get to write a headline like that! But those are the kinds of feelings Ted Cruz seems to bring out in everyone -- left, right, and center.

During my imprisonment I had tried to commit suicide, been stuck with a knife, and was beat down with a pipe--but nothing hurt me more than my separat...

Anthony Papa

Manager of Media & Artist Relations, Drug Policy Alliance

Jason Hernandez never thought he would see the outside world again.

Today, drug cartels are playing the political activism game and are increasing their support base by appealing to the hearts and minds of millions of people through the widespread social discontent and the ideal of social justice.

Ana Davila

Masters in Science in Global Affairs and Transnational Security Candidate at New York University

The disdain that the Amish faithful feel for family members who reject their all-encompassing religious worldview is such that they refuse to dine with them at the same table.

Kathleen Frydl

Historian studying US state power, policies, and the institutions that shape American life.

In the United States, while there are shifting patterns of drug use, there is no simple relationship to the severity of the nation's drug laws. The caveat is that from the European study, relaxing penalties had equally unpredictable results. Annan's statement needs that bit of context. We rate this claim Mostly True.

Undeniably, the world is splintering. Geopolitical blocs are forming once again, the nuclear arms race is reigniting and religious war rages. Globalization is in retreat as publics across the planet suspect trade agreements, politicians talk about building walls and refugees are turned away. Yet, as Parag Khanna, author of the new book, "Connectography," writes this week from Singapore, "the same world that appears to be falling apart is actually coming together." (continued)

While mostly ignored by the media (and almost completely ignored in the debates), the issue is going to become a lot more important in the general election, as many states will have recreational legalization ballot initiatives to vote on.

LISBON, Portugal -- This week's U.N. summit on the global drug problem is already a turning point in our collective journey toward improving global drug policy. Whatever the final formal conclusions, reforms are on and history is in the making.

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War On Drugs: Pictures, Videos, Breaking News

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In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon formally launched the war on drugs to eradicate illicit drug use in the US. "If we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely in time destroy us," Nixontold Congress in 1971. "I am not prepared to accept this alternative."

Over the next couple decades, particularly under the Reagan administration, what followed was the escalation of global military and police efforts against drugs. But in that process, the drug war led to unintended consequences that have proliferated violence around the world and contributed to mass incarceration in the US, even if it has made drugs less accessible and reduced potential levels of drug abuse.

Nixon inaugurated the war on drugs at a time when America was in hysterics over widespread drug use. Drug use had become more public and prevalent during the 1960s due in part to the counterculture movement, and many Americans felt that drug use had become a serious threat to the country and its moral standing.

Over the past four decades, the US has committed more than $1 trillion to the war on drugs. But the crackdown has in some waysfailed to produce the desired results: Drug use remains a very serious problem in the US, even though the drug war has made these substances less accessible. The drug war also led to several some unintended negative consequences, including abig strain on America's criminal justice system and the proliferation ofdrug-related violence around the world.

While Nixon began the modern war on drugs, America hasa long history of trying to control the use of certain drugs. Laws passed in the early 20th century attempted to restrict drug production and sales. Some of this history is racially tinged, and, perhaps as a result, the war on drugs has long hit minority communities the hardest.

In response to the failures and unintended consequences, many drug policy experts and historians have called for reforms: a larger focus onrehabilitation, thedecriminalization of currently illicit substances, and even the legalization of all drugs.

The question with these policies, as with the drug war more broadly, is whether the risks and costs are worth the benefits. Drug policy is often described as choosing between a bunch of bad or mediocre options, rather than finding the perfect solution. In the case of the war on drugs, the question is whether the very real drawbacks of prohibition more racially skewed arrests, drug-related violence around the world, and financial costs are worth the potential gains from outlawing and hopefully depressing drug abuse in the US.

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The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific aim is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade making drugs scarcer and costlier, and therefore making drug habits in the US unaffordable. And although some of the data shows drugs getting cheaper, drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making the substances less accessible.

The prices of most drugs, as tracked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Between 1986 and 2007, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 54 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.

Much of this is explained by what's known as the balloon effect: Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn't necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs. Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

The balloon effect has been documented in multiple instances, includingPeru and Bolivia to Colombia in the 1990s, the Netherlands Antilles to West Africa in the early 2000s, and Colombia and Mexico to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in the 2000s and 2010s.

Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan. The US spent$7.6 billion between 2002 and 2014 to crack down on opium in Afghanistan, where a bulk of the world's supply for heroin comes from. Despite the efforts, Afghanistan's opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013.

On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began.The Monitoring the Future survey, which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In 1975, four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, 30.7 percent of high school seniors reportedly used drugs in the previous month. In 1992, the rate was 14.4 percent. In 2013, it was back up to 25.5 percent.

Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal. A 2014study by Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren't available through easy means one can't just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping somedrug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple,although he told me it could go much higher.

But there's also evidence that the drug war is too punitive:A 2014 study from Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there's no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn't do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.

Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.

The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferation of violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it's not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.

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The US uses what's called thedrug scheduling system. Under theControlled Substances Act, there are five categories of controlled substances known as schedules, which w
eigh a drug's medical value and abuse potential.

Medical value is typically evaluated through scientific research, particularly large-scale clinical trials similar to those used by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceuticals. Potential for abuse isn't clearly defined by the Controlled Substances Act, but for the federal government, abuse is when individuals take a substance on their own initiative, leading to personal health hazards or dangers to society as a whole.

Under this system, Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Schedule 2 drugs have high potential for abuse but some medical value. As the rank goes down to Schedule 5, a drug's potential for abuse generally decreases.

It may be helpful to think of the scheduling system as made up of two distinct groups: nonmedical and medical. The nonmedical group is the Schedule 1 drugs, which are considered to have no medical value and high potential for abuse. The medical group is the Schedule 2 to 5 drugs, which have some medical value and are numerically ranked based on abuse potential (from high to low).

Marijuana and heroin are Schedule 1 drugs, so the federal government says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. Cocaine, meth, and opioid painkillers are Schedule 2 drugs, so they're considered to have some medical value and high potential for abuse. Steroids and testosterone products are Schedule 3, Xanax and Valium are Schedule 4, and cough preparations with limited amounts of codeine are Schedule 5. Congressspecifically exempted alcohol and tobacco from the schedules in 1970.

Although these schedules help shapecriminal penalties for illicit drug possession and sales, they're not always the final word. Congress, for instance, massively increased penalties against crack cocaine in 1986 in response to concerns about a crack epidemic and its potential link to crime. And state governments can set up their own criminal penalties and schedules for drugs as well.

Other countries, like the UK and Australia, use similar systems to the US, although their specific rankings for some drugs differ.

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The US fights the war on drugs both domestically and overseas.

On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs. Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug dealing organizations.

"[Federal] assistance helped us take out major drug organizations, and we took out a number of them in Baltimore," said Neill Franklin, a retired police major and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs. "But to do that, we took out the low-hanging fruit to work up the chain to find who was at the top of the pyramid. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins."

Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.

Although the focus is on criminal groups, casual users still get caught in the criminal justice system. Between 1999 and 2007, Human Rights Watch found at least 80 percent of drug-related arrests were for possession, not sales.

It seems, however, that arrests for possession don't typically turn into convictions and prison time. According to federal statistics, only 5.3 percent of drug offenders in federal prisons and 27.9 percent of drug offenders in state prisons in 2004 were in for drug possession. The overwhelming majority were in for trafficking, and a small few were in for an unspecified "other" category.

Mexican officials incinerate 130 tons of seized marijuana.

Internationally, the US regularly aids other countries in their efforts to crack down on drugs. For example, the US in the 2000s provided military aid and training to Colombia in what's known as Plan Colombia to help the Latin American country go after criminal organizations and paramilitaries funded through drug trafficking.

Federal officials argue that helping countries like Colombia attacks the source of illicit drugs, since such substances are often produced in Latin America and shipped north to the US. But the international efforts have consistently displaced, not eliminated, drug trafficking and the violence that comes with it to other countries.

Given the struggles of the war on drugs to meet its goals, federal and state officials have begun moving away from harsh enforcement tactics and tough-on-crime stances. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy nowadvocates for a bigger focus on rehabilitation and less on law enforcement. Even some conservatives, like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, have embraced drug courts, which place drug offenders into rehabilitation programs instead of jail or prison.

The idea behind these reforms is to find a better balance between locking up more people for drug trafficking while moving genuinely problematic drug users to rehabilitation and treatment services that could help them."We can't arrest our way out of the problem," Michael Botticelli, US drug czar,said, "and we really need to focus our attention on proven public health strategies to make a significant difference as it relates to drug use and consequences to that in the United States."

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The escalation of the criminal justice system's reach over the past few decades, ranging from more incarceration to seizures of private property and militarization, can be traced back to the war on drugs.

After the US stepped up the drug war throughout the 1970s and '80s, harsher sentences for drug offenses played a role in turning the country into theworld's leader in incarceration. (But drug offenders still make up a small part of the prison population: About 54 percent of people in state prisons which house more than 86 percent of the US prison population were violent offenders in 2012, and 16 percent were drug offenders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.)

Still, mass incarceration has massively strained the criminal justice system and led to a lot of overcrowding in US prisons to the point that some states, such asCalifornia, have rolled back penalties for nonviolent drug users and sellers with the explicit goal of reducing their incarcerated population.

In terms of police powers,civil asset forfeitures have been justified as a way to go after drug dealing organizations. These forfeitures allow law enforcement agencies to take the organizations' a
ssets cash in particular and then use the gains to fund more anti-drug operations. The idea is to turn drug dealers' ill-gotten gains against them.

But there have beenmany documented cases in which police abused civil asset forfeiture, including instances in which police took people's cars and cash simply because they suspected but couldn't prove that there was some sort of illegal activity going on. In these cases, it's actually up to people whose private property was taken to prove that they weren't doing anything illegal instead of traditional legal standards in which police have to prove wrongdoing or reasonable suspicion of it before they act.

Similarly, the federal government helped militarize local and state police departments in an attempt to better equip them in the fight against drugs. The Pentagon's 1033 program, which gives surplus military-grade equipment to police, was created in the 1990s as part of President GeorgeHW Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The deployment of SWAT teams, as reported by the ACLU, also increased during the past few decades, and 62 percent of SWAT raids in 2011 and 2012 were for drug searches.

Various groups have complained that these increases in police power are often abused and misused. The ACLU, for instance, argues that civil asset forfeitures threaten Americans' civil liberties and property rights, because police can often seize assets without even filing charges. Such seizures also might encourage police to focus on drug crimes, since a raid can result in actual cash that goes back to the police department, while a violent crime conviction likely would not. The libertarian Cato Institute has also criticized the war on drugs for decades, because anti-drug efforts gave cover to a huge expansion of law enforcement's surveillance capabilities, including wiretaps and US mail searches.

The militarization of police became a particular sticking point during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the police shooting of Michael Brown. After heavily armed police responded to largely peaceful protesters with armored vehicle that resemble tanks, tear gas, and sound cannons, law enforcement experts andjournalists criticized the tactics.

Since the beginning of the war on drugs, the general trend has been to massively grow police powers and expand the criminal justice system as a means of combating drug use. But as the drug warstruggles to halt drug use and trafficking, the heavy-handed policies which many describe as draconian have been called into question. If the war on drugs isn't meeting its goals, critics say these expansions of the criminal justice system aren't worth the financial strain and costs to liberty in the US.

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The war on drugs has created a black market for illicit drugs that criminal organizations around the world can rely on for revenue that payrolls other, more violent activities. This market supplies so much revenue that drug trafficking organizations can actually rival developing countries' weak government institutions.

In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have leveraged their profits from the drug trade to violently maintain their stranglehold over the market despite the government's war on drugs. As a result, public decapitations have become a particularly prominent tactic of ruthless drug cartels. As many as 80,000 people have died in the war. Tens of thousands of people have gone missing since 2007, including 43 students who vanished in 2014 in a widely publicized case.

But even if Mexico were to actually defeat drug cartels, this potentially wouldn't reduce drug war violence on a global scale.Instead, drug production and trafficking, and the violence that comes with both, would likely shift elsewhere, because the drug trade is so lucrative that someone will always want to take it up particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won't be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

In 2014, for instance, the drug warsignificantly contributed to the child migrant crisis. After some drug trafficking was pushed out of Mexico, gangs and drug cartels stepped up their operations in Central America's Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. These countries, with their weak criminal justice and law enforcement systems, didn't seem to have the capacity to deal with the influx of violence and crime.

The war on drugs "drove a lot of the activities to Central America, a region that has extremely weakened systems," Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin Americaexplained. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been a strong commitment to building the criminal justice system and the police."

As a result, children fled their countries by the thousands ina major humanitarian crisis. Many of these children ended up in the US, where the refugee system simply doesn't have the capacity to handle the rush of child migrants.

Although the child migrant crisis is fairly unique in its specific circumstances and effects, the series of events a government cracks down on drugs, trafficking moves to another country, and the drug trade brings violence and crime is pretty typical in the history of the war on drugs. In the past couple of decades it happened inColombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador after successful anti-drug crackdowns in other Latin American countries.

The Wall Street Journal explained:

Ironically, the shift is partly a by-product of a drug-war success story, Plan Colombia. In a little over a decade, the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion to back Colombia's efforts to eradicate coca fields, arrest traffickers and battle drug-funded guerrilla armies such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Colombian cocaine production declined, the murder rate plunged and the FARC is on the run.

But traffickers adjusted. Cartels moved south across the Ecuadorean border to set up new storage facilities and pioneer new smuggling routes from Ecuador's Pacific coast. Colombia's neighbor to the east, Venezuela, is now the departure point for half of the cocaine going to Europe by sea.

As a 2012 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime explained, "one countrys success became the problem of others."

This global proliferation of violence is one of the most prominent costs of the drug war. When evaluating whether the war on drugs has been successful, experts and historians weigh this cost, along with the rise of incarceration in the US, against the benefits, such as potentially depressed drug use, to gauge whether anti-drug efforts have been worth it.

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Enforcing the war on drugs costs the US more than $51 billion each year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. As of 2012, the US had spent $1 trillion on anti-drug efforts.

The spending estimates don't account for the loss of potential taxes on currently illegal substances. According to a 2010 paper from the libertarian Cato Institute, taxing and regulating illicit drugs similarly to tobacco and alcohol could raise $46.7 billion in tax revenue each year.

These annual costs the spending, the lost potential taxes add up to nearly 2 percent of state and federal budgets, which totaled an estimated $6.1 trillion in 2013. That's not a huge amount of money, but it may not be worth the cost if the war on drugs is leading todrug-related violence around the world and isn't significantly reducingdrug abuse.

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In the US, the war on drugs mostly impacts minority, particularly black, communities. This disproportionate effect is why critics often call the war on drugs racist.

Although black communities aren't more likely to use orsell drugs, they are much more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses.

When black defendants are convicted for drug crimes, they face longer prison sentences as well. Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

TheSentencing Project explained the differences in a February 2015 report: "Myriad criminal justice policies that appear to be race-neutral collide with broader socioeconomic patterns to create a disparate racial impact Socioeconomic inequality does lead people of color to disproportionately use and sell drugs outdoors, where they are more readily apprehended by police."

One example: Trafficking crack cocaine, one of the few illicit drugs that's more popular among black Americans, carries the harshest punishment. The threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence of crack is 28 grams. In comparison, the threshold for powder cocaine, which is more popular among white than black Americans but pharmacoligically similar to crack, is 500 grams.

As for the broader racial disparities, federal programs that encourage local and state police departments to crack down on drugs may create perverse incentives to go after minority communities. Some federal grants, for instance, previously required police to make more drug arrests in order to obtain more funding for anti-drug efforts. Neill Franklin, a retired police major from Maryland and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, said minority communities are "the low-hanging fruit" for police departments because they tend to sell in open-air markets, such as public street corners, and have less political and financial power than white Americans.

In Chicago, for instance, an analysis byProject Know, a drug addiction resource center, foundenforcement of anti-drug laws is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which tend to have more crime but are predominantly black:

"Doing these evening and afternoon sweeps meant 20 to 30 arrests, and now you have some great numbers for your grant application," Franklin said. "In that process, we also ended up seizing a lot of money and a lot of property. That's another cash cow."

The disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates have clearly detrimental effects on minority communities. A 2014 study published in the journal Sociological Science found boys with imprisoned fathers are much less likely to possess the behavioral skills needed to succeed in school by the age of 5, starting them on a vicious path known as theschool-to-prison pipeline.

As the drug war continues, these racial disparities have become one of the major points of criticism against it. It's not just whether the war on drugs has led to the widespread, costly incarceration of millions of Americans, but whether incarceration has created"the new Jim Crow" a reference to policies, such as segregation and voting restrictions, that subjugated black communities in America.

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Beyond the goal ofcurtailing drug use, the motivations behind the US war on drugs have been rooted in historical fears of immigrants and minority groups.

The US began regulating and restricting drugs during the first half of the 20th century, particularly through thePure Food and Drug Act of 1906, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. During this period, racial and ethnic tensions were particularly high across the country not just toward African Americans, but toward Mexican and Chinese immigrants as well.

As the New York Times explained, the federal prohibition of marijuana came during a period of national hysteria about the effect of the drug on Mexican immigrants and black communities. Concerns about a new, exotic drug, coupled with feelings of xenophobia and racism that were all too common in the 1930s, drove law enforcement, the broader public, and eventually legislators to demand the drug's prohibition. "Police in Texas border towns demonized the plant in racial terms as the drug of 'immoral' populations who were promptly labeled 'fiends,'" wrote the Times's Brent Staples.

These beliefs extended to practically all forms of drug prohibition. According to historian Peter Knight, opium largely came over to America with Chinese immigrants on the West Coast. Americans, already skeptical of the drug, quickly latched on to xenophobic beliefs that opium somehow made Chinese immigrants dangerous. "Stories of Chinese immigrants who lured white females into prostitution, along with the media depictions of the Chinese as depraved and unclean, bolstered the enactment of anti-opium laws in eleven states between 1877 and 1900," Knight wrote.

Cocaine was similarly attached in fear to black communities, neuroscientist Carl Hartwrote for the Nation. The belief was so widespread that the New York Times even felt comfortable writing headlines in 1914 that claimed "Negro cocaine 'fiends' are a new southern menace." The author of the Times piece a physician wrote, "[The cocaine user] imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims." He later added, "Many of the wholesale killings in the South may be cited as indicating that accuracy in shooting is not interfered with is, indeed, probably improved by cocaine. I believe the record of the 'cocaine n----r' near Asheville who dropped five men dead in their tracks using only one cartridge for each, offers evidence that is sufficiently convincing."

Most recently, these fears of drugs and the connection to minorities came up during what law enforcement officials characterized as a crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and '90s. Lawmakers, judges, and police in particular linked crack to violence in minority communities. The connection was part of the rationale for making it 100 times easier to
get a mandatory minimum sentence for crack cocaine over powder cocaine, even though the two drugs are pharmacologically identical. As a result, minority groups have received considerably harsher prison sentences for illegal drugs. (In 2010, the ratio between crack's sentence and cocaine's was reduced from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1.)

Hart explained, after noting the New York Times's coverage in particular: "Over the [late 1980s], a barrage of similar articles connected crack and its associated problems with black people. Entire specialty police units were deployed to 'troubled neighborhoods,' making excessive arrests and subjecting the targeted communities to dehumanizing treatment. Along the way, complex economic and social forces were reduced to criminal justice problems; resources were directed toward law enforcement rather than neighborhoods real needs, such as job creation."

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THE WAR ON DRUGS EXPLAINED Vox