No, it wasn’t Reagan who started the “war on drugs,” it was Nixon.
The DEA was created by an EO signed by Nixon.
The DEA got a big boost during the Reagan administration when Reagan retained the services of Wm. Bennett, a sanctimonious whinge and preening moralizer to be “drug czar.”
Then the statism really took off. It takes a Catholic to really make statism take off, (look at their early examples to the western world with the Inquisition) and in Bennett, Reagan found the perfect statist who had also been to Harvard Law School, and therefore knew how to try to fat-finger his policies past the courts.
I wasn't expecting that.