Were the Say NO to Drugs poster contests successful?

I remember winning an award for a Say NO to Drugs poster contest when I was an elementary school student in the 80s. I made a slot machine with 3 skulls as the jackpots with the headline “Drugs! A LOSING COMBINATION!” When you’re a kid and you have artistic ability it gives you a level up over other kids. I did grow up through school to not use any drugs or even smoke weed until I graduated high school at 17. But then….muah ha ha ha. It’s really hard to even believe that we are hearing Jeff Sessions quote Nancy Reagan’s Say NO to Drugs propaganda with fervor as if it was something that worked. The only difference is that I’m not a 10 year old poster winner anymore, I’m a 41 year old recreational drug user who spent of those 20 years smoking weed. It’s been revealed what hijinx the Reagan administration were actually up to when creating that campaign to distract people from noticing that the government was actually creating crack cocaine to imprison Black people and filling prisons to fundraise for the wars that were happening in Central America. This has been revealed to not be conspiracy but fact. It’s almost like Dejavu. Session’s is even calling marijuana a gateway for opiates! Beyond shaking our heads, we should actually not be surprised. This administration is going to spend money building a wall across the U.S Mexico border when dealers are digging and traversing through tunnels and using U.S passport holders to traffick drugs across the legal border checks. The volunteer militia that patrols the war on illegals with their legal arms is absolutely no match for the desperation that poverty brings and being outnumbered. Trump is hell bent on building his wall and stopping illegal immigrants from bringing in drugs. I agree that this is happening at an alarming rate and the violence that has resulted in cartels running product has resulted in great amounts of death and mayhem in the U.S. In Japan, an island country almost all drugs that one can think of aside from Advil level painkillers are illegal. If you are a Japanese citizen, you will be shamed publicly in media, your parents will have to apologize on TV and you will probably spend months in jail for 1 gram of marijuana. If you are a foreign citizen, you will be banned from returning to Japan for up to 3 years. Women who give birth are not given epidurals (this might be a good thing) and if you have chronic sports injuries or anything else pretty much the only thing that you can get is of the Advil level. But there are synthetics drugs that can be made by streetwise chemists. It’s been confirmed that many of the elements of Fentanyl are made from things that were imported to the U.S from China and Japan. Japan is a limited land mass that has a population that can simply not afford to let immigration slide. The drugs do come in, but in much smaller amounts than the U.S. Drug Violence and Gang wars do not have an impact, guns are not legal here and the social stigma and family burden keeps the people here totally living in fear, working overtime with no pay and no relief, people with legitimate pain that are unable to medicate in any way but alcohol. Trump’s war on drugs is a war on facts totally ignoring the track record of what has been done before because he is set on doing the complete opposite of what has been done before him, except repeating the exact same unsuccessful strategy in preventing drug use and addiction in the 80s. Perhaps marijuana can be a gateway, but in this case the gateway that I see it symbolizing is a gateway to legalization of drugs. I’m honestly not sure what total legalization of all drugs like opiates would end up looking like, as currently it’s not hard to get, doctors were easily prescribing to patients who got addicted and started cutting pills on the street, and it appears that more people are dying than getting arrested. I remember going with one of my boyfriends on his pain pill runs to sell off. He was my driver in between and we’d cut up a pill and snort it before some good sex but neither of us ever got addicted, luckily. Being tough on crime doesn’t help eliminate addiction, but creating strict penalties to the source of the prescription might keep doctors accountable. Being extremely strict on immigration has really helped Japan. This is not only an immigration border issue, but it restricts the ability for an illegal immigrant to survive in Japan. You can’t get an apartment, hotel room or even rent a public computer without showing a passport with a tourist visa or a resident card that is valid. There are no throwaway temporary phones and hardly any under the table cash jobs because the person who breaks the law of illegal hiring or selling a burner phone pays a huge fine. This is how Japan is tough on crime and tough on SHAME! But, their tough on crime doesn't result in filling and building prisons because, again Japan hasn't got the land to do such a thing. I was lucky that I came with my sex work skills but I still didn’t make enough to survive on that alone for very long. Even though I have 2 undocumented adult chosen daughters that I adore and who live relatively straight edge Dreamer type lives in LA, I do think that the U.S can slowly be more effective in siphon off illegal immigration with more success by following the steps that Japan has taken more effectively than building a stupid wall. But because it is possible to millions every day to not only cross the border repeatedly and also eek out a living if you are undocumented in America, it is a systemic and purposely tolerated epidemic with barking dogs like Trump and Sessions to create a distraction of what really will offer no change but break up more families, spend more of the national budget and "alien"ate the relationship between South and North America. Shoot, I brought a marijuana pipe into Canada and I’m practically banned to even drive through or stop over on a passing flight without prior permission from the Canadian consulate so I don’t get detained. I barely want to ever go back to Canada. If someone gets caught illegally crossing the U.S border, they are photographed and dropped back into Mexico. I used to think that a free for all was a good idea, but I think the violence in America in easy comparison to the violence in Japan has changed my mind. Deporting families, border patrols, building walls, filling prisons is not the answer, let's try something new. We already have walls. Our priorities are not in the right order and there could be non violent administrative solutions which can be enforced that would “create more jobs” which is Trump’s favorite idiom but in about 5 ways that would be much easier than building a gigantic border wall. I am curious to see what the legalization of marijuana does to the cartel industry of at least marijuana trafficking, this is one of the main reasons that now even majority Republican support legalization in 2018. Is it possible to change the policies of immigration without affecting the treatment of the millions of undocumented people that live in the U.S today? I used to believe that the borders should be open, but this just isn't an effective national policy because we all live under some government and we don't operate in a cowboy society. I do think that we should change our immigration policy but I don't see anything changing for the better under this administration who is literally taking us back to the 80s, and not in a fun Footloose big hair shoulder pads kind of way.