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The War on Drugs Should Have Never Of Happened

4 min readAug 1, 2026

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Decades of racism and prejudice from entire generations

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Photo by Kindel Media | Pexels

In 1971, the Nixon administration declared their “War on Drugs” — people stopped treating substance use like a human problem and started treating it like an enemy invasion. This “war” framing reinforced stigma by casting drug use as a moral failure instead of a condition people can become addicted to and then recover from.

Generations have inherited a screwed, broken, and — frankly, racist — system regarding drug use and drug addiction

Since the 70s, very little has been done to remove the racism and prejudice from these drug laws, with increased mass incarceration after the 1970s, to rioting, overcrowded jails today — with the worst impact being decades of shame, distraught families grieving lives that could have been totally different — not from the prevention of drug use, but from the broken system where taught and enforced shame kills hundreds every day.

THE TRUTH: Rich, white men sought to hold Black and brown communities responsible for the entirety of drug use problems in America — without there being any difference in the amount of drug…

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Seth Jantz
Seth Jantz

Written by Seth Jantz

Freelance writer with a master’s in psychology from the Midwest, exploring mental health, patterns, and human experience to support wellbeing and clarity.