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Budget And Policy Paper
Budget and Policy Paper
War on Drugs

Bridget Brown, Shaketra Jones, Matt Anderson, Jerry Carter,

and Lisa Rivers

CJA/464

Matthew Kite

October 20, 2014

More than 45 years ago President Richard Nixon announced and declared the nation is at war, that war was the "War on Drugs". Nancy Reagan campaigned heavily in the fight against drug use as well; her fight was that of teaching young children the slogan of “Just Say No”. The goals of the criminal justice system in the war on drugs have been a never ending fight against the sale of illicit drugs and that of combating drug abuse. We will discuss the increased resources spent on law enforcement and rehabilitation while making an attempt in understanding why the war on drugs has steadily increased.
From a law enforcement perspective, the responsibility is to get rid of and stop drug trafficking business. This reaches across the range of drug activity. Law enforcement intends to disturb the drug marketplace by putting sellers and users alike out of business. By ripping to pieces drug trafficking organizations by weakening their leadership. The intention is to stop the structure of these criminal businesses by seizing and forfeiting the enormous profits and proceeds derived from their illegal activities.
The war on drugs is an expression used to describe the American approach in reducing drug use and abuse in the United States. President George Bush SR, televised a national message that drug abuse was "our nation's most serious domestic problem" (Beckett, 1997: 6). President Reagan had diverted more than $700 million from education, treatment, and research to law enforcement programs to fight the war on drugs. Reagan also gave more money to prisons and to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the federal agency responsible for preventing illicit drug use (Kraska, 1990: 117). The federal government spends more than $20 billion fighting the drug war which does not include state and


References: Department of Government and Justice Studies, 2013. Retrieve by http://gjs.appstate.edu/media-coverage-crime-and-criminal-justice/drug-war Katherine Beckett. 1997. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics, Oxford University Press. Published in the Crime and Public Policy Series, edited by Norval Morris and Michael Tonry. Peter Kraska, “The Unmentionable Alternative: The Need for and the Argument against Discriminalization of Drug Laws, “ in Drugs, crime and the Criminal Justice System, ed. R. Weisheit (Cincinnait, Ohio: Anderson, 1990), 117. Drug trafficking. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/drug-trafficking/
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