More than 50 years ago, in the summer of 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one” and announced what would soon be known as the country’s “war on drugs”.

The policy promised to cleanse streets across the United States of narcotics, dismantle trafficking networks and deliver a safer environment for Americans.

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Instead, decades of punitive policing and militarised crackdowns left the US with record overdose deaths, one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and more than $1 trillion spent with little measurable impact on drug availability or demand, according to estimates by the Center for American Progress.

In the US, the war on drugs helped reshape policing and criminal justice, disproportionately sweeping Black communities into prisons. Abroad, it fuelled a parallel conflict across Latin America, where US-backed operations deepened cycles of corruption and organised crime.

Today, overdose deaths driven by fentanyl have reached historic highs and many states have moved to legalise cannabis.

Now, as the Donald Trump administration appears poised for military action against Venezuela over accusations that the South American nation’s government is driving narcotics trafficking into the US – claims that Washington has not backed with evidence – here’s a look at how the war on drugs started, and its effects in the US and regionally.

How did it begin and where does it stand now?

Nixon launched the war on drugs at a turbulent political moment in the US. The late 1960s had brought rising heroin use among soldiers returning from Vietnam, growing drug use among youth, and years of protest and growing antiwar sentiment.

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Nixon’s administration laid the groundwork for a punitive system, including new federal agencies, tougher penalties and a rhetoric that framed drug use as a threat to national stability.

The political logic behind the move was later revealed by John Ehrlichman, a Nixon aide, who in 2016 told a reporter that the administration saw two main “enemies” – the antiwar left and Black Americans. Since the government could not criminalise dissent or race, it instead associated “hippies” with marijuana and Black communities with heroin, and then heavily criminalised both.

The aim, he said, was to disrupt and discredit those communities by raiding homes, arresting leaders and vilifying them on the news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” he said.

The campaign intensified dramatically in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 toughened sentences for marijuana possession.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 introduced minimum sentences, but also put in place penalties that ultimately led to major racial disparities in imprisonment rates. The law punished those found with 5gm of crack cocaine with a minimum of five years behind bars. Those found with 500gm of the much more expensive powdered cocaine also faced the same minimum sentence.

After the passage of the law, the rate of imprisonment of Black Americans jumped fivefold – from 50 in every 100,000, to 250 in 100,000.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, successive administrations upheld these approaches. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill expanded federal funding for prisons, led to more aggressive policing and introduced a controversial “three-strikes” approach: a mandatory life sentence for a third violent felony conviction.

Not much changed under the Bush and Obama administrations.

It was not until the 2010s that the conversation around drug use started to change, especially as cannabis legalisation expanded, and the opioid crisis – driven by prescription painkillers – showed that punishment couldn’t curb addiction.

Now, Trump, while maintaining many of the domestic policies that were introduced over the past half-century, has also turned his attention to America’s extended neighbourhood. In recent weeks, Trump authorised US military strikes on dozens of boats in the Caribbean near Venezuelan waters, framing the escalation as a renewed crackdown on “narco-trafficking”, even as critics say the move is a pretext to enforce regime change and oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

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The US has not presented any public evidence so far to back its claims that the boats its military has bombed were carrying narcotics or that they were headed to its territory.

Mass imprisonment and arrests

From the mid-1970s onwards, drug criminalisation became a major driver of mass imprisonment in the US.

At its peak, police made 1.6 million drug arrests per year, mainly for possession. These arrests helped drive the US prison population from about 300,000 in the early 1970s to more than two million four decades later, according to federal data.

Black communities were hit hardest. Despite drug use being prevalent among various racial groups, Black Americans have long been a lot more likely to be arrested. According to The Sentencing Project, Black people account for more than one in four drug arrests in the US, though they constitute less than 15 percent of the national population.

As of 2010, they were 3.7 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession.

According to research from Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the sentencing disparity it introduced between those punished for possession of crack and powder cocaine played a major role in this racial imbalance in punishment rates.

Since crack was cheaper and more accessible in poorer, predominantly Black neighbourhoods, many more Black users were jailed than wealthier, white users of powder cocaine.

Meanwhile, one of the larger arguments behind focusing on drugs – that this would also bring down overall crime rates – fell flat. Homicide rates in the US actually rose after the passage of Reagan’s 1984 crime law, and continued to go up until 1991.

At the same time, the US continued to fail in treating addiction as a public health issue. As enforcement ramped up, investment in treatment and mental healthcare fell behind. Instead of reducing use, the environment helped drive people into other forms of consumption.

That emphasis on penalising possession as the way to curb narcotics-related crimes hasn’t changed. In 2020, police made more than 1.1 million drug-related arrests, mostly for possession. The Prison Policy Initiative estimates that roughly 360,000 people are currently imprisoned on drug charges nationwide, with hundreds of thousands more on probation or parole for drug-related offences.

It hasn’t helped. Today, the US faces its deadliest drug crisis ever, with more than 100,000 overdose deaths each year, largely driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18–44.

How the ‘war on drugs’ spilled into Latin America

The war on drugs did not stay limited to the US and its borders. In the 1980s, Washington funded and trained militaries and police forces across Latin America to fight drug trafficking at its source.

In Colombia, the US invested at least $10bn from 2000 under what was known as Plan Colombia, according to the Latin America Working Group, much of it directed to security forces and the fumigation of coca crops.

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According to Colombian human rights organisations and the country’s Truth Commission, while the state succeeded in weakening some armed groups, coca cultivation eventually returned to record levels, but civilians paid a high price. Between 1985 and 2018, an estimated 450,000 people were killed in the conflict.

In Mexico, a government offensive launched in 2006, supported by US intelligence and equipment, caused a wave of cartel fragmentation and turf wars. Since then, more than 460,000 people have been killed, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, and tens of thousands more have disappeared.

Cartels diversified into extortion, fuel theft and human smuggling, while corruption spread among police forces as well as local governments.

These crackdowns shifted trafficking routes elsewhere, mainly through the Central American nations of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Today, the US continues to carry out military operations targeting alleged traffickers. More than 83 people have been killed in the 21 known military strikes the US has conducted on alleged drug smuggling vessels since September 2 in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.