The War on Drugs Is a War on People of Color
- WULR Team
- Apr 19
- 5 min read
Half a century later, the war on drugs stands as one of the most successful tools of systemic oppression and racial control.
Published April 19th, 2026
Written by Ellena Engel
June 17th, 2026 marks 55 years since the Nixon administration declared drug abuse “public enemy number one,” states the ACLU. The term “war on drugs” describes the federal government’s decade-spanning campaign against illicit drug use, marked by the perpetual rollout of punitive drug policies. This “crack down” bears primary responsibility for the national prison population quadrupling since 1980, according to Human Rights Watch. Policy changes including mandatory minimum sentences and sanctions for those with relationships to drug dealers, have increased imprisonment for even minor drug offenses. For people of color, the community most targeted by these policies, the impact has been particularly devastating. Trillions of tax dollars spent, millions incarcerated and yet drug use persists at relatively consistent rates across racial lines. If the war on drugs were designed to eradicate drug use, it has failed miserably. If, instead, the crusade served to maintain racial order, it has succeeded.
The carceral system has always been essential to the construction and maintenance of racial order in the United States—one of its trademarks being the legitimization of biological racism narratives under the guise of public safety. In the 1960s, amid rising recreational drug use and increased anti-war sentiment, fear for public safety pervaded the white majority. The key to Nixon’s presidential election: capitalizing on that fear. His first piece of legislation, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (CSA), emerged from a bipartisan push to clarify federal drug laws. The CSA created five classifications or “schedules” of drugs based on potential for abuse. Some hoped this move would encourage a public health approach to drug policy, but half a century later, 50% of those serving time in state prisons meet the criteria for a substance use disorder, as reported by the Prison Policy Initiative. In practice, the public acceptance of CSA rankings was racially charged, rather than backed by scientific fact. The cheapest substances and those most easily accessible to people of color were given the highest penalties. For Nixon, the CSA was a great success, a way to manipulate which types of drugs were criminalized to target minority communities directly. On June 17, 1971, he announced that drug addiction had become a “national emergency.” Within two years, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was in full effect, a national policing body designed specifically for drug enforcement. With it came the legalized surveillance of people of color. Historically, narratives of inherent criminality are used to target people of color. Under Jim Crow, states justified segregated institutions by attributing inferior cultural attributes to impeding the economic and educational success of Black communities. Behaviors like loitering and recreational drug use are disproportionately perceived as suspicious and indicative of criminality when conducted by these individuals. Already facing this criminal stigma, people of color quickly became the DEA’s most surveilled, detained, and imprisoned.
In 2016, Harper’s Magazine published a 22-year-old interview with John Ehrlichman—one of Nixon’s top advisors and a Watergate co-conspirator—where he made the first public acknowledgment of the racial sentiments of the war on drugs. Ehrlichman exposed the Nixon administration for touting a war on illicit substances while furthering the systemic oppression of Black people. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against the [Vietnam] war or black [people],” Ehrlichman admitted, “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.” Here, the court of public opinion bolstered the goals of the Nixon administration. The association of Black people and “hippies” with illicit substances and criminality seamlessly allowed for the persecution of those communities without blood on Nixon’s hands.
During the Carter administration, the crusade momentarily stilled. Though once the Reagan era began, this pause only bolstered the fervor and urgency to “crack down” on drugs. Nixon had laid the groundwork, priming the fearful public to unquestionably accept Reagan’s crack cocaine directive. With the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act came mandatory minimum sentencing that entrenched racial disparities in the criminalization of drug offenses. Nowhere was this disparity more visible than in the differential sentencing of crack versus powder cocaine. Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, possessing just 5 grams of crack cocaine—a drug disproportionately consumed by Black Americans—carried a 5-year minimum sentence. To warrant the same sentence for powder cocaine—predominantly consumed by a “richer and whiter” population—would require possession of 500 grams, as reported by the ACLU. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act legitimized narratives of racial inferiority, saddling people of color with devastating prison sentences while allowing white individuals with the same drug habits a hall pass. Between 1980 and 1997, incarceration rates surged from 50,000 to over 400,000, according to Human Rights Watch. The percentage of Black arrestees among all those arrested on drug charges increased from 27% in 1980 to 42% between 1989 and 1993. With Black people only making up 13% of the U.S. population, these disparities are stark. How the criminal justice system interprets conduct and whose behavior is criminalized reflects the reinforcement of the racial order over time.
Racial oppression is cyclical. The war on drugs is a seminal case. When one mechanism is outlawed or becomes ineffective, white society will find a new way to maintain racial order. In the absence of chattel slavery, states empowered white citizens to self-police. Soon after, a formal carceral framework developed, increasing restriction, surveillance, and exclusion policies to regain hierarchical balance. Half a century later, war on drugs policies continue to allow police and prosecutors to racially target individuals under the law. Today, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. Black people make up 34% of the national prison population today and nearly 40% of those serving time in state or federal prison for drug-related offenses, as reported by the Drug Policy Alliance. While men continue to represent the majority of the prison population, the war on drugs has also increased the racial divide in incarceration rates amongst women. Despite similar rates of drug use across racial groups, Black women are still exponentially more likely to be arrested on drug-related charges than white women, as reported by Students for Sensible Drug Policy. For more than five decades, these policies have shaped outcomes and defined the livelihood of people of color, their families, and communities.
The legal doctrines of the war on drugs have maintained racial order for the last 55 years. By legitimizing biological racism narratives that frame people of color as inherently criminal, it has created a one-way ticket to the criminal justice system. By signaling that these individuals are “naturally” corrupted and beyond help, welfare and social services are abandoned, community funding is pulled back, and low-level, non-violent offenders are fed to the prison system. Overshadowed by pervasive policies, the stark reality of addiction at the center of drug offenses remains ignored and untreated. The history of the war on drugs is not a fight against substances—it prevails as a war against people of color.
Comments