Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) took to the House floor last week to ridicule the 40th anniversary of the U.S. war on drugs.

"The war on drugs was initiated by President Richard Nixon," Cohen said. "... And the fact is 40 years later, we've spent nearly $1 trillion on the war on drugs, we have just as much as drug use in this country as ever before, we've incarcerated millions and millions of people for victimless crimes, and when we get people who sell drugs, which we need to do, all that happens is like a shark's teeth, they're replaced by the next in line ... somebody else wanting to make money from a program that the public endorses and supports."

This is in direct contradiction to the White House, which this month said the war was making an impact.

"Drug use in America is half of what it was 30 years ago, cocaine production in Colombia has dropped by almost two-thirds, and we’re successfully diverting thousands of nonviolent offenders into treatment instead of jail by supporting alternatives to incarceration," Rafael Lemaitre, communications director of the White House drug policy office, said June 2.

Cohen said "the war on drugs has been a terrible mistake," mostly because "our approach in treating it as a law enforcement and not as a health matter, a healthcare issue, has led to prison populations increasing, racial disparities ... in the arrest process, and a lost generation of people with no education and no job prospects because those arrests haunt them for the rest of their lives."

The Southerner pointed to the mighty metropolis of New York to see how the war on drugs was working: