The War on Drugs has maintained an accumulation of bans on illegal drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing strategies for drug offenders. Incarceration rates have also increased due to increased laws against illegal drugs. In Eugene Jarecki's film, The House I Live In, Jarecki states that the penalties for crack users were harsher than the penalties for regular cocaine users. This suggests that sanctions are more of a double standard theory. The “War on Drugs” is more of a failure that imposes restrictions and bans on drug offenders and has not necessarily shown a sense of equal stability; this leads to incorrect sentences, misinterpretations of the true purpose of this initiative and overpopulation of prisons. These sentencing strategies are more disproportionate when dealing with different drugs. For example, crack and plain white cocaine. “These guidelines called for disproportionately long sentences of 20 years for drug-related crimes and called for significantly longer sentences for crack-related crimes than for white powder crimes (Radosh, 2008). White powder cocaine is no different from crack cocaine, except that they are different in structure, shape, and the way the drug is consumed. This simply demonstrates one of the major weaknesses in the way these measures are approached. When President Richard Nixon first used the term “War on Drugs” in 1971, the primary intent was to imply the severity of drugs in the United States. This meant that an all-out initiative against drugs, drug trafficking, trade, sale, consumption and so on, would be carried out without any sense of leniency. What most people didn't expect from this “War on Drugs” was that the opposite would happen. Different circumstances... in the middle of the newspaper... overcrowded, and that doesn't seem to stop any time now. The sentences are more of a double standard theory when it comes to the amount of crack one person has versus the amount of cocaine the other has. It will take more than just introducing a term like the “War on Drugs” to actually rid the United States of drugs. Just like it was said in The House I Live In, drugs will never disappear and will always be there. Works Cited Radosh, PF (2008) RESEARCH ARTICLE. War on drugs: Gender and racial inequalities in crime control strategies. Criminal Justice Studies, 2, 167-178. doi: 10.1080/14786010802159830 Schoenfeld, H. (2012). The war on drugs, the politics of crime, and mass incarceration in the United States. The gender newspaper; Race and JusticeDrug Policy Alliance. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war