The Longest War We Never Declared

Human beings have sought altered states of consciousness for as long as we have possessed consciousness to alter. The archaeological record is unambiguous: there is no known civilization that did not discover and ritualize the use of some psychoactive substance. The Sumerians recorded opium cultivation on clay tablets dating to 3400 BCE. The Rigveda devotes an entire book of hymns to Soma, a psychoactive substance whose identity scholars still debate. Indigenous peoples of the Americas chewed coca leaves for millennia. Mesoamerican civilizations consumed psilocybin mushrooms in sacred ceremonies, calling them teonanacatl – “flesh of the gods.” The ancient Greeks had their wine-soaked symposia and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which may have involved an ergot-derived psychedelic. Everywhere humans settled, they found something in the local flora to smoke, brew, chew, or ferment. This is not a bug of human civilization. It appears, by every measure we can apply, to be a feature.

Ancient Rome offers a particularly instructive case study. Roman wine culture was pervasive and central to social, religious, and political life – consumed at every meal, offered to the gods, prescribed by physicians, distributed to soldiers as a standard ration. Yet Rome also regulated intoxicants in ways that reveal an early version of the tension that persists today. The Bacchanalia – ecstatic rites associated with Bacchus – were violently suppressed by senatorial decree in 186 BCE, not because the Romans objected to wine or even drunkenness, but because the unsanctioned, secretive, cross-class nature of these gatherings was perceived as a threat to social order and state authority. The substance itself was not the target; the uncontrolled social behavior surrounding it was. Rome enforced differential access: enslaved people and women faced restrictions that freeborn men did not. The pattern – regulate not the substance per se, but who uses it, how, and under what social conditions – echoes across every subsequent century of drug policy.

The modern American relationship with drug regulation begins in the late nineteenth century, and it is inseparable from anxieties about race, immigration, and social control. Opium was widely available in patent medicines throughout the 1800s, consumed by middle-class white women, and largely unregulated. It was only when opium smoking became associated with Chinese immigrants – and specifically with lurid, racially charged fantasies about Chinese men corrupting white women in opium dens – that anti-opium laws proliferated, first in San Francisco in 1875 and then across the country. Cocaine followed a similar trajectory: widely used and even an ingredient in early Coca-Cola, it became the target of prohibition only after newspapers published sensationalized stories about cocaine-fueled Black men supposedly becoming impervious to bullets. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, the first major federal drug regulation, was propelled in significant part by these racial narratives. The pattern was set: the legal status of a substance in America has never been determined purely by its pharmacological properties but always also by who is perceived to be using it and what social anxieties that use triggers.

Prohibition remains the most instructive experiment in American drug policy. The Eighteenth Amendment attempted something no major nation had tried: the complete criminalization of a psychoactive substance consumed by the vast majority of adults. Alcohol consumption did decline initially, and some public health metrics improved. But the law also spawned a massive black market, empowered organized crime, corrupted law enforcement at every level, overwhelmed the courts, eroded public respect for the law, and created a poisoned supply that killed thousands. Prohibition was repealed not because Americans decided drinking was virtuous, but because the costs of criminalization came to exceed the costs of the behavior itself. This cost-benefit framework would be invoked again and again – by reformers arguing that the same logic applies to other substances, and by enforcement advocates arguing that alcohol was a unique case.

The modern War on Drugs is most commonly dated to June 17, 1971, when Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.” In 1994, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman reportedly told journalist Dan Baum that the administration had two enemies – the antiwar left and Black people – and that by associating hippies with marijuana and Black people with heroin, “we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” Whether this quote represents a candid confession or a bitter ex-convict’s embellishment is debated, but the disproportionate impact on communities of color is not. Nixon also devoted significant resources to treatment, a fact that complicates simplistic narratives. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed marijuana in Schedule I alongside heroin – a classification that most pharmacologists then and now regard as scientifically indefensible but that has proven politically almost impossible to change.

The crack epidemic of the 1980s represents perhaps the starkest example of drug policy functioning along racial lines. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine: five grams of crack triggered a mandatory minimum five-year sentence, while it took 500 grams of powder to trigger the same. Since crack was used predominantly in Black communities and powder in white ones, the effect on Black incarceration rates was predictable and devastating. The U.S. prison population quadrupled between 1980 and 2000, from roughly 500,000 to over 2 million, making America the most incarcerated nation on earth. It is important to note, however, that the 1986 law was not opposed by the Congressional Black Caucus; many Black community leaders, faced with crack-related violence, supported harsh penalties. The historical record does not support a narrative in which enforcement was simply imposed on unwilling communities. It was a policy that many communities initially demanded and then came to regret as its collateral consequences became clear.

The marijuana legalization movement represents the most dramatic shift in American drug policy in fifty years. In 1969, only 12 percent of Americans supported legalization. By 2023, that figure exceeded 70 percent. As of this writing, the majority of states have legalized for medical or recreational use, while the substance remains technically illegal under federal law. The predicted catastrophes have largely not materialized, though concerns about youth access, potency, and corporate commercialization remain legitimate. What has become painfully apparent is that the benefits of legalization have not been evenly distributed: the marijuana industry is overwhelmingly white-owned, while the people incarcerated for marijuana offenses remain disproportionately Black and brown, many still sitting in prison for conduct that is now legal and profitable in the state next door.

The opioid crisis offers a mirror image of the crack epidemic – and the differences in response are instructive. When Purdue Pharma and others flooded communities with prescription opioids, the initial victims were disproportionately white and rural. The response was markedly different: rather than mandatory minimums and militarized policing, the dominant framework was public health, treatment, and compassion. The language shifted from “junkies” and “criminals” to “patients” and “victims.” The racial dimensions of that difference are impossible to ignore. The crisis then mutated: as prescription opioids became harder to obtain, users turned to heroin and then to illicitly manufactured fentanyl, driving overdose deaths past 100,000 Americans per year – more than were killed in the entirety of the Vietnam War, every single year.

Portugal’s decriminalization experiment, begun in 2001, has become the most cited international model. Facing an acute heroin crisis and soaring HIV rates, Portugal decriminalized personal use and possession of all drugs – not legalization, but a shift from criminal to administrative penalties, paired with a massive expansion of treatment and harm reduction. Drug-related deaths declined, HIV infections among users plummeted, and overall use did not increase significantly. More recently, the picture has grown complicated: deaths have risen from their lows, and critics note that Portugal’s model exists within a European welfare state context that may not transfer to America. Nevertheless, the experiment demonstrated that decriminalization need not lead to societal collapse, and it forced advocates of criminalization to grapple with a real-world counterexample.

What the long arc of this history reveals is not a story of good guys and bad guys, but a persistent tension among three deeply held values: personal liberty, public health, and social order. Every drug policy in history represents a particular balancing of these three, and every era’s consensus eventually breaks down because none can be fully honored without partially sacrificing the others. The Romans who suppressed the Bacchanalia, the Progressives who championed Prohibition, the legislators who passed mandatory minimums, the voters who legalized marijuana, and the public health officials distributing naloxone are all responding to the same irreducible dilemma. The question is not whether there are trade-offs, but which trade-offs a society is willing to accept.

It is into this dilemma that five Americans now speak – each carrying a different piece of the truth, each blind to pieces carried by the others.