Fifty years ago this month, America started a new kind of war.

America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new or out of fence.

June 1971, President Richard Nixon ushered in a new national strategy to fight drug addiction in America

on a kind of military footing. Over the decades, the US spent hundreds of billions of dollars on

this effort. It locked up millions of mostly black and brown Americans on drug charges,

which meant building a vast new system of jails and prisons. Congress created whole new

bureaucracies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and funded new armies of federal

agents and local police. And yet, half a century later, drug use is as high as ever,

and overdoses are at record levels with 90,000 drug deaths last year alone.

What we've been doing for the last number of decades has completely failed. It's gotten us to

this point where D.A. Mike Schmidt is the prosecutor for Oregon's largest county, Multnomah,

which includes the city of Portland. People like him have been on the front lines of the war on

drugs for decades. Now, that war may finally be at an inflection point, where health care and

harm reduction replace prohibition, interdiction, and mass incarceration. Criminalization keeps people

in the shadows. It keeps people from seeking out help, from telling their doctors, from telling

their family members that they have a problem. Consider this. 50 years later, there's still no

winner in America's war on drugs, but there are many losers, which is why one state is trying

a different strategy.

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