Part one

Since President Richard Nixon coined the phrase “the war on drugs” in 1971, successive US Presidents have introduced legislation and taken actions designed to destroy the international trade in international narcotics. However, instead of achieving their stated goal, they have helped to incarcerate American citizens at an alarming rate, targeted poor people and ethnic minorities and spent more than a trillion dollars. After forty years, illegal drugs are more readily available, cheaper and purer than at any time since the war on drugs began. This is a series explaining how the biggest victims of the war on drugs are actually the people it was meant to protect.

 

Part two

For more than forty years, politicians around the world have waged a war against the illegal narcotics trade. In that time they’ve spent a vast amount of money, trampled on human rights, killed a huge number of people, destroyed ecosystems, criminalised an entire culture and created health problems. While all this has been going on the people who produce and traffick drugs have often become wealthier and more powerful and drugs themselves are purer, cheaper and more readily available than at any time since the war on drugs began.