US Drug War Has Met None Of Its Goals

by Martha Mendoza - May 13th, 2010 - Associated Press

After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

The article also quotes one of the supporters of the drug war with their constant mantra about criticism, "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcement, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."

Yes. That is correct. Good intentions do not equate to results. All the good intentions of the people who support the war on drugs does not alter that the consequences have not just been useless. They have been evil.

You cannot reduce the prevalence of a vice by increasing the profits. The more you attack drugs and other vices, the more profitable you make it, and the harder it is to control. Don't want your kids to take drugs? Do not make the profits so high that the drug dealers will set up on the corners next to schools because you have made risk worth it.

Prohibition should have taught us something. It did not. Well intentioned idiots continue to insist that their good intentions must trump sanity. It doesn't. It won't. It never will.