The War On Drugs: 50 Years Later

Will wipes away sweat on a hot day while walking down Willow Street in Lynn, Mass., as he looks to distribute safety supplies to drug users on the street. Jesse Costa/WBUR hide caption

Huntington was once ground-zero for this opioid epidemic. Several years ago, they formed a team that within days visits everyone who overdoses to try to pull them back from the brink. The county's overdose rate plummeted. They wrestled down an HIV cluster. They finally felt hope. Then the pandemic arrived and it undid much of their effort: overdoses shot up again, so did HIV diagnoses. David Goldman/AP hide caption

Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) in The Wire HBO hide caption

Mike Marshall is the co-founder and director of Oregon Recovers. He says he's concerned the state is failing to expand addiction treatment capacity in a strategic way. "So we put the cart before the horse," he says. Eric Westervelt/NPR hide caption

During the War on Drugs, the Brownsville neighborhood in New York City saw some of the highest rates of incarceration in the U.S., as Black and Hispanic men were sent to prison for lengthy prison sentences, often for low-level, nonviolent drug crimes. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption