“Every 25 seconds, someone in America is arrested for drug possession.”
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU
America’s War on Drugs dates back to 1971 and is estimated to have cost our nation more than $1 trillion, sent millions of people to prison for low-level and non-violent offenses, and seriously eroded Constitutional-protected liberties and civil rights. Wrong-headed drug laws and excessively-harsh, mandatory sentencing, particularly for crack cocaine, have also resulted in profoundly unequal outcomes for communities of color.
Attracted by its profitability potential … yearly revenues from illicit drugs trafficking is valued at $750 billion worldwide and in the United States, the largest market, estimated at roughly $450 billion … individuals, organizations and even some nation states will always find ways to meet this insatiable global demand!
More interested in sounding tough on crime than solving the problem, politicians seem to have forgotten or never learned from history. Like the doomed crusades to eliminate prostitution, alcohol (with America’s short-lived prohibition experiment), and until recently gambling (until public pressures and cash-strapped state governments discovered its revenue potential), efforts to eradicate drugs by focusing resources almost exclusively on the supply side has been an abysmal and costly failure.
Once again, Americans will ultimately discover neither border walls nor other draconian and potentially extra-constitutional efforts to stop the flow of illegal and dangerous drugs, particularly fentanyl, into the United States and rather will be just the latest in the series of futile and expensive attempts to solve the problem.
One has to wonder if the trillion-plus dollars spent attacking the supply chain had been deployed to address drug education, related mental-health issues, and rehabilitation for those addicted would more progress might have been made, greatly reduced the number of lives lost or ruined, eliminated needless criminal convictions, and preserved civil liberties!
However, that would take creative and rational thinking as well as political courage, character traits increasingly absent in Washington and most state capitols.
