by Daniel Spichtinger

About the author: Daniel Spichtinger works as a journalist and webmaster in Austria.

Drugs are often, especially in the mass media, portrayed as a threat of enormous proportions. They are held responsible for all sorts of problems like crime, (assumed) moral decay and unemployment, to name only a few. Thus, more and more extreme measures are introduced to win the war on drugs. This essay will not only try to define the somewhat vague term “war on drugs”, it will also give the major theories about the true purpose of the war and it will present alternative models of how to deal with the drug problem.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan held a speech in which he officially declared the war on drugs using metaphors of war, illness, crusades and religious righteousness...