The US incarcerated very significant percentages of its black male population under the guise of the "war on drugs" and I'm not sure if it made much of a difference. Drug use in the US is certainly not lower than in comparable countries, so I'm not sure if you could conclude that removing people from society in order to address the "drug problem" is necessarily an idea backed by solid data.
Only 20% of state and federal prisoners (those serving more than a one year sentence) have drug crimes as their most serious conviction.
80% of prisoners are serving time for violent (47.7%), property (17.1%), or public order crimes (13.8%) that no one would argue are victimless.
While some of the other crime is related to drugs, the point is that 80% of the prisoners in the US have grievously victimized our fellow citizens and residents and are not innocent "[people removed] from society in order to address the 'drug problem'" as the parent comment stated.
Presumably, at least some proportion of that 80% is related to the legal status of drugs. E.g. robbery to support payment of inflated black-market prices, protection of production operations, etc.
