17 June 1971: USA declares ‘War on Drugs’

President Nixon points to a reporter during his televised news conference in the East Room of the White House

(Image credit: Bettmann / Getty Images)

The 1960s were a time of mind expansion, free love and tiresomely earnest discussions about the nature of the universe, all fuelled by drugs.

But The Man wasn't having it. Less than two years after the Sixties finally shut up and went to bed, Richard Nixon declared on this day in 1971 that he was going to wage a war on drugs.

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The sensible solution might have been to pull out of Vietnam and give some serious counselling to the traumatised young fighters. But when it comes to drugs, sensible rarely enters into the conversation.

Drugs were named public enemy number one', and the USA led the world in throwing money and legislation at the problem, seemingly having learned nothing from its disastrous experiment with prohibiting alcohol.

As with most wars, it wasn't going to be cheap either in monetary terms, or the number of lives lost or ruined. And with the global drugs trade worth £435 billion a year, it was facing a formidable foe.

Since Nixon's speech, the USA has spent over $1 trillion in fighting drugs. A quarter of the people in jail in the US, some half a million people are there because of drug offences, and $41 billion a year is spent on enforcing America's drug laws, according to CNN.

But if currently illegal drugs were to be taxed on the same basis as tobacco and alcohol, it's estimated that the country could raise nearly $50 billion a year. Indeed, Colorado, which legalised the sale of cannabis for recreational use in January 2014, raked in over $91 million in taxes and fees in the year to the end of April 2015. And in the year to April 2016, that figure has risen to over $142 million.