It has been more than 33 years since President Richard Nixon declared war on illegal drugs and called drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Hundreds of billions of dollars later, with more than two million Americans behind bars, we are no closer to Nixon’s dream of a drug-free nation than we were in 1971, says a Drug Policy Alliance commentary on alternet.org
You won’t hear John Kerry or George W. Bush talking much about it this fall, but the producers of the upcoming “American Candidate” series on Showtime have made drugs a key issue of this televised campaign. As former Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) once said, the drug war is “the most important social issue in America today that has an easy, politically possible solution.”