That's because the purpose of the war on drugs is to "disrupt" and "criminalize" black and leftist communities. Obviously you can't just say the quiet part out loud, even though they have:
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing them both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night in the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” - Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, 1994.
The goal of the war on drugs was never to remove drugs from society or eliminate drug use. The US government introduced LSD to the 1960's counterculture through MKULTRA and crack cocaine into black neighborhoods. The US government funnels arms and money through drug cartels. The US government wants drugs on the streets, and wants them to be illegal, and wants drug laws to be arbitrary and cruel, because they know the specter of the angry black man and the dope-smoking communist will scare the mainstream so bad that they'll beg the government to be as violent and authoritarian as they like just to keep "law and order."
Doubt it. It may have started with this, but it didn't live its life like that.
Drug free societies are way better in every measurable way. You only have to live in one for long enough that returning from that place seems absurd to be ridiculed with drugs.
