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War On Drugs Research Paper

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War on Drugs

Ever since the Nixon administration “took on the challenge of the war on drugs” in the late ‘60s, almost every president succeeding him made it their mission to be tough on drug crime. However, as stated in the article “The New Jim Crow”, this war on drugs “had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics”. Racial politics is the practice of political figures exploiting the issue of race to forward an agenda; this unethical practice has always been a part of the American government since it was created. By covertly using racial politics, the Republican Party created a system that showed working class white voters, who still had the mindset of the Jim Crow Era, that black people were the main thing corrupting their perfect lifestyle; eventually white politicians would refer to this system as “The War on Drugs”. This system would ultimately lead to black men, and the inner-city communities, being the main targets in the War on Drugs …show more content…
Statistics is what all the authority figures care about; if their city or state has a high number of drug related arrests they fool people into thinking they’re winning the drug war. However the drug kingpins and violent offenders are still out there easily recruiting more and more people, while good police are wasting their time arresting people for possession. As stated in the documentary, The House I Live In, “Over the past 40 years, the War on Drugs has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for more than 45 million arrests”, and with these numbers one would think the war on drugs should have already be won. Instead of going at the root of the drug problem, politicians are wasting good police, who are required to meet a certain number of arrests, just to look good for the

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