Quote:“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

Quote:We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Quote:Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.

Quote:Over the past 40 years, the United States has spent more than $1 trillion combatting illicit drug trafficking across the globe, focusing on tactics of eradication and interdiction. Despite the high economic and human cost of these policies, drug use has remained relatively stable and drug revenues continue unabated. Estimates vary widely, but the Organization of American states says $320 billion is generated annually by the illegal drug trade.

While the environmental impacts of drug crop cultivation have been discussed in policy circles — the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC) recognized that the herbicides and fertilizers used to grow and process coca are damaging to the environment, and more than 700,000 acres of forest were lost to coca crop cultivation between 2001 and 2013 — there has been little discussion about how drug policy itself is driving environmental degradation.