At the time the war on drugs looked unwinnable. Which is why the joke about the war on drugs was that it was always a losing war. And then at some point in 2000s we ended the war on drugs.

In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.

Yes, The fear with the war on drugs was that a large majority of the population would become addicted to hard drugs. The fear was the the US population would become like China in the 1800s and the communist aligned countries where drugs were produced would have massive trade and power imbalances over the US population. China had as much as 25% of the population addicted to British opium in the 1800s. The US war on drugs has been very successful in keeping the percentage of Americans abusing highly addictive drugs very low.

Imagine the strength of the cartels with 10-20x the customer base and far more frequent usage among them.