How Is Trump's War on Drugs Going?

While President Donald Trump and his cabinet are consistently winning on the issues they care about, it’s going to take a lot of time and patience to clean up most of the mess Barack Obama left in his wake. One such issue is the war on drugs -- something that was virtually nonexistent during the previous presidency.

At the end of the Obama presidency, statistics and reports showed that drug-induced deaths were on the rise, as was the use of drugs among American youth. As David W. Murray of the Weekly Standard suggested in December 2016, this is anything but coincidental.

“Simply put, it appears inescapable that the two sets of findings are related,” Murray notes, “in that the flood of commercial, high-potency marijuana unleashed by legalization in the states has served as a ‘gateway’ to the opioid problem, both by priming greater drug use by those who initiate with heavy, developmentally early marijuana use, and further by empowering the illicit drug market controlled by criminal cartels.”

While the left would argue differently -- and there’s certainly a case to be made for their opinion -- Obama was extremely lax on drugs and drug abuse. Not only did the decriminalization of marijuana in many states happen under his watch, but Obama was very vocal on treating drug addiction “as a public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol.”

While Obama was certainly correct in his belief that you can’t arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people, he used this as an excuse for basically turning away from the problem and leaving people to their own devices.

the flood of commercial, high-potency marijuana unleashed by legalization in the states has served as a ‘gateway’ to the opioid problem

Completely wrong. "Medical marijuana legalization was associated with 23% (p = 0.008) and 13% (p = 0.025) reductions in hospitalizations related to opioid dependence or abuse and OPR overdose, respectively" - Medical marijuana policies and hospitalizations related to marijuana and opioid pain reliever, Shi, Yuyan, Drug & Alcohol Dependence , Volume 173 , 144 - 150

The best “war on drugs” is to improve overall American morale. Then fewer people will feel dumpy enough to resort to drugs.

There was rampant addiction after the civil war... this (below) isn't the article I was looking for but it addresses the issue. The article I read years ago dealt with the fact that once northern soldiers were back after the war - and found jobs - most 'dropped' their addictions. That supports your theory. Of course today's drugs are much more addictive. I don't remember Trump saying anything about a 'war' on drugs... just helping people who were addicted.

Article:

https://journalofthecivilwarera.org/2016/11/civil-war-veterans-opiate-addiction-gilded-age/

In November 2015, two Princeton economists, Dr. Angus Deaton and Dr. Anne Case, published a startling report, which indicated that the mortality rates of poorly educated middle-aged white Americans had skyrocketed. These mortality rates, Deaton and Case argued, were not being driven by the usual suspects of diabetes or heart disease, but by suicide, alcoholism and opioid addiction. Among 45 to 54 year olds, with no more than a high school education, death rates increased by 134 per 100,000 from 1999 to 2014. This sad revelation has been billed as unparalleled in American history, with Dr. Deaton himself unable to find a historical comparison.[1]

However, rampant opioid addiction rates do have a historical parallel: here in the United States, and especially the American South, after the Civil War. Southern whites during the Gilded Age arguably had the highest addiction rates in the country, and possibly the world. How do we know? Some of the evidence is anecdotal. For instance, in the Opium Habit, published in 1868, Horace B. Day estimated that 80,000 to 100,000 Americans were addicted to opium.[2] Some of the evidence is more empirical. In 1915, Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, which required anyone who imported, produced, sold or dispensed narcotics to register, pay a tax and keep detailed records. David Courtwright, a historian of addiction, analyzed these records from the Harrison Act and demonstrated that addiction rates in the South were much worse than anywhere else. In Atlanta, for instance, 2 out of every 1,000 people were addicted to an opioid. The worst southern city, though, was Shreveport, Louisiana, where almost 10 out of every 1,000 were addicted to opium or morphine.

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