Suppression of drug supplies by the authorities raises the prices of drugs, enticing people to become suppliers on the black market. Unable to resolve disputes legally and keen to retain their turf, dealers resort to violence. Police officers and the suspects they kill add to the toll. Innocent bystanders get killed, too, and as in Vietnam, many of them are children. Both wars witnessed psychological as well as violent tactics.
Truth is always the first casualty.
In Vietnam, military commanders inflated the body counts and reported fictitious light at the end of the tunnel. In the Drug War, the authorities, striving to stigmatize all drug use, have made little or no attempt to distinguish relatively harmless substances such as marijuana from more dangerous ones, such as heroin and crack cocaine. In each war, the public reacted to official mendacity by becoming more cynical about their leaders. Both wars rent the fabric of American social and political life, because each represented a policy that large segments of the public actively opposed. Antiwar protests grew and became more insistent.