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.