It’s no secret America has a drug problem. Like the black sheep of the first-world family, Americans spend over $100 billion annually on illicit drugs. Despite a voracious appetite for uppers, downers, and everything sideways, the United States government has spent over a trillion dollars fighting an endless “War on Drugs.”.
Dr. Benjamin Boyce—a communications professor at CU Denver, who specializes in drug and alcohol policy and its relation to mass-incarceration—believes the beginning of the drug war began with modernization
“Industrialization was changing the way Americans lived their lives,” Boyce says. According to him, with machine development came the capitalization of drugs. Suddenly, with industrial and economic improvements in the 1870s, heroin appeared on American streets—more potent than its precursor: opium harvested from poppy plants.
But it wasn’t just improved opioids that spiked America’s thirst: industrial distillation techniques yielded stronger spirits, leaving, as Boyce puts it, “Timmy shitfaced in the middle of the street at 10AM.” A problem because factory owners couldn’t risk little Timmy losing an arm in the mechanical loom—they would certainly be blamed for such a transgression—instead, “it was the forces of industrialization coming together with a political and moral movement to give people a target,” Boyce says.
Indeed, the original catalyst of the War on Drugs was neither former presidents Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan, but Harry Anslinger—a government commissioner in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger enforced drug policy for 32 years, spanning from the presidencies of Herbert Hoover to John F. Kennedy, criminalizing cannabis, heroin, cocaine, and opium through various tax acts, and promoting sensationalized stories that allocated the weight of the “drug crisis” on African and Asian Americans and Mexican immigrants.
While the birth of the “War on Drugs” falls on Anslinger’s racist pleas with White Americans, former president Reagan picked up where Anslinger left off, instituting a new “War on Drugs” that generated success through the commodification of morals, leaving a bullseye on the backs of “addicted people and drug users.”
Using author of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s theory that, “criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate,” Boyce sees that “addicted populations are the ones we’re allowed to be disgusted by.”
For many drug and alcohol policy scholars like Boyce, it seems Reagan used the War on Drugs to generate support for big business. Neoliberalism—the idea that we should deregulate government, advocating for free-market capitalism because what works in the private sector should work in the public—at work.
But it wasn’t just neoliberalism that inspired the War on Drugs reprise; for Boyce, Reagan’s War on Drugs was a plot to “strip the rights of people who posed the biggest threat”—people of color living in America. In Reagan’s eyes, it was easy to deprive oppositional forces of rights by arresting them for drug use; if there were no Americans of color to vote due to incarceration, the Republican party could reign eternally.
Flash forward to the present, and Boyce is inside President Trump’s head, predicting that the 47th president will enact neoliberal policies, circumventing his and his family’s own illicit drug use.
“He’s taking advantage of a group of people,” says Boyce. “It’s where he gets power from.”
But for Boyce, it remains clear that the War on Drugs kills “multiple birds with one stone,” tying racism in with xenophobia to accomplish a feat of neoliberalism.
“It’s not Canada bringing in fentanyl precursors, it’s China. So, honestly, I don’t think Trump cares about [actual drug use],” Boyce continues, explaining that President Trump is an “industrialist and neoliberal,” and will thus offset corporation’s responsibility for possible drug-induced work accidents to drug users. For Boyce, this is the extent Trump cares about the War on Drugs.
In terms of drug policy, Boyce sees President Trump neoliberalizing treatment for synthetic opioids, supporting the implementation of pain relief drugs like Methadone and Suboxone, which aim to wean drug users off drugs yielding harsh detoxes, like heroin and methamphetamine. But when it comes to Ketamine or MDMA, Trump will most likely keep these drugs because, according to Boyce, “they breed industry, they have taxes.”
“They’re used by people who go to work every day—if it all goes good, one person will get rich from the work of a thousand people,” he explains, referring to the heads of corporations reaping the benefits of an entire company. “That is Trump.”
There is business behind the neoliberalization of drugs. With deregulation of government, comes the expense of private corporations—Americans are now being charged with doctor’s fees on top of pharmacy costs, coupled with high insurance premiums. While serving time in a Michigan prison, Boyce explains he was never offered Suboxone for heroin withdrawal, but nowadays, that’s different.
“People who hadn’t used heroin in 20 years are now being put on Suboxone because they got it offered to them,” he explains.
The War on Drugs has quickly become a bipartisan-supported issue, legislated with few checks and balances, because it allocates people to assigned spaces, instituting discipline and punishment as remedy for disobedience. In Boyce’s eyes, the war against drugs breeds capitalism: if drug users “get better,” they can return to work, feeding economic growth, playing into the deregulated system to generate corporate profit.
Under Trump’s first term as president, opioid overdose deaths reached an all-time high of 72,000 and were the leading causes of death in over two-thirds of the total deaths for 2019.
Drug policy doesn’t just affect drug-users; Boyce describes an interesting phenomenon, in which Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico in early February, only to rescind these executive orders in exchange for cooperation with the War on Drugs.
But even if you “intercept 99 percent of the cocaine imported to the United States,” Boyce says, “the price of cocaine would double.”
Boyce encourages people to remember their past to better inform as to where they should go in the future.
“The things that got us to where we are as humans,” said Boyce, “were a love for drugs.”
