Bush's 'war on drugs', an extension of Reagon's earlier battle, had 'clogged the courts, filled the prisons, corrupted the officers "justice, compromise... civil liberties", and criminalized important sectors of American society. 1 Compared to the leniency experienced in the late 1960s under Nixon, where a "specific subculture of some 68,088 identifiable heroin addicts" who, subject to arrest for heroin possession and successfully convicted, were "sentenced to treatment at Lexington Federal Hospital, Kentucy. »2 After the three drug wars, civil liberties were compromised; The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution regarding “unreasonable searches and seizures” was violated. Drug checks can be conducted on any motorist on interstate highways, and land residents are subject to summary searches.3 As The House We Live In has shown, any driver caught with a minimum of $5,000 in cash will have their money and vehicle -- often a truck -- seized and taken in accordance with current U.S. foreclosure law. Under this law, random searches are conducted during traffic stops and cars are stopped anywhere based on the suspicions of law enforcement officers. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, harsh mandatory minimum prison sentences were introduced. These lengthy mandatory minimum sentences were part of new state and federal laws that affected drug offenders and would distinguish between large-scale dealers and small-scale users. The “war on drugs” has led to an increase in the US prison population to “unprecedented levels”. “Under President Reagan's campaign, annual drug arrests in the United States doubled from 569,000 in 1977 to 1,155,000 in 1988; furthermore, only three-quarters of these arrests were for "simple" drug possession, including... middle of paper... seized for surgery. As this article explored, drug prohibition in the United States, since its inception, followed by the “war on drugs,” has failed. The repressive strategies implemented in the drug wars not only fail to deal with the inherently complex nature of the international drug trade, they have, as history has shown, exasperated the problem. Domestically, the effects of the “war on drugs” have been equally ineffective and socially damaging, with harsh mandatory minimum prison sentences and the highest imprisonment rate in the world. In this respect, the war on drugs has been a failure; however, in other ways it is a success. This is an achievement in that drug laws disproportionately affect minorities, particularly the black community; moreover, it exclusively targets the lower strata of society. As this article has examined, the “war on drugs” is a proxy genocide of the lower classes..