President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. By the 1980s, the link between minorities, drugs, and crime was firmly cemented in American rhetoric. Media hysteria about an unsubstantiated crack epidemic among Black communities prompted Congress to pass draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws against crack cocaine. The war on drugs has sent millions of people to prison for low-level offenses, and seriously eroded our civil liberties and civil rights while costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year, with nothing to show for it except our status as the world’s largest incarcerator.