Stage 7

   An End to the Drug Wars

    As I said before in a recent commentary of one of my colleagues, the war on drugs has proven to be a a spectacular failure. According to a summarization from a New York Times article "Despite billions spent on measures from spraying coco fields high in the Andes to jailing local dealers in Miami or Washington, a gram of cocaine cost about 16 percent less last year than it did in 2001" which just further confirms my point. 

   Even if people believed all the misconceptions out there about drugs, and lets say just they were real. That would mean that drugs are very bad, but that doesn't mean the war on drugs is a good thing.

   It is essentially just a prohibition, and with that I believe the war on drugs is also very counterintuitive.  Why you may ask? When you stop the sale of drugs, that just means it costs more to sell. Therefore higher prices means  higher revenue for the dealers to buy guns, buy more drugs, and used to bribe officials. 

  Again, referring to the summarization from the Times "almost one in five inmates in state prisons and half of those in federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations. Four out of five arrests were for possession. Nearly half were for possession of often-tiny amounts of marijuana." Sounds a tad over the top there, but what does the government care? It's just your taxpayer money paying for the prisons.  

Numbers Tell of Failure in Drug War