what is the war on drugs?

because if you're going to oppose it, defining it first is important.

where i come from, it's been generally understood that the war on drugs - much like the war on terrorism after it and the war against communism before it - was mostly just an excuse to advance american geostrategic interests, mostly in latin america. to the extent that much of anything associated with the war on drugs had anything to actually do with drugs, the focus appears to have mostly been to control the supply, in order to inflate the price. and, there seems to be good evidence that the drugs were introduced into specific communities by the government itself, in an attempt to control and in some cases enslave certain segments of the population. from that perspective, talking about ending the war on drugs in 2019 is somewhat of an anachronistic position - the war on drugs largely turned into the war on terrorism, in the sense that the propaganda shifted.

i would oppose the war on drugs in this sense, which basically means no longer propping up dictatorships in latin america. i bet bernie could have a long discussion about this, giving that he lived through it and i don't really remember it, first hand. but, if that's what he meant, he may have confused people.

if you're referring to abolishing actual domestic drug laws when you talk about the "war on drugs", which i think is what the term is likely to mean to a contemporary audience, then you're moving into the libertarian right in a way that is going to lose a lot of people. and, it's a strange thing to hear from a guy that's threatened to put pharmaceutical executives in jail as a corollary of the opiate crisis. there are certain drugs - opiates, methamphetamines, crack/cocaine -  that are just an absolute scourge on society and that a war truly needs to be fought against. while i may agree that we should take more intelligent tactics in our war against these drugs, which may require changing certain laws, the idea of ending that war is not something i'm in favour of at all.

i just think this is a language thing: that term, war on drugs, may not mean the same thing to you as it does to bernie sanders, or it does to me. and, some clarification is required on everybody's behalf.