The "War" on Drugs

More and more Americans are coming to the realization that the criminalization of most drugs -- especially marijuana -- is counterprodutive. The following articles are food for thought (and biased toward my opinion that marijuana should be legalized, or at the minimum de-criminalized.) If you are of the opinion that these view are incorrect, you may want to read these articles anyway to consider a different point of view.

A Brief History on the War on Drugs
It's a war without a clear enemy. Anything waged against a shapeless, intangible noun can never truly be won — President Clinton's drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey said as much in 1996. And yet, within the past 40 years, the U.S. government has spent over $2.5 trillion dollars fighting the War on Drugs. Despite the ad campaigns, increased incarceration rates and a crackdown on smuggling, the number of illicit drug users in America has risen over the years and now sits at 19.9 million Americans.

The "New" Drug Policy Spin
Hey, good news! We've got a new National Drug Control Strategy!  Yup, this "Blueprint for reducing illicit drug use and its harmful consequences in America," as our president described it, was just announced by Barack Obama and drug czar Gil Kerlikowske. So we can all breathe easier now. America is sure to make major strides in ridding our nation of this terrible scourge, right? Not so fast.

Drug Dealers Nightmare: Legal Pot
Holding dealers accountable sounds good – but the DEA’s actions are pointless. The government should acknowledge that it was criminalizing drugs that created the dealers in the first place.

Fresh Thinking on the War on Drugs
...Or was it a matter of more countries realising that, as drug reform advocate Ethan Nadelmann puts it, “looking to the United States as a role model for drug control is like looking to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal with race.”

War on Drugs program a colossal failure
The United States has spent over $1 trillion in taxpayer money in support of Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs program over the past 4 decades only to see drug use increase and the personal safety return on every dollar spent on the initiative dwindle to virtually nothing.

The War on Drugs Is a Failure
The war on drugs has failed. And it's high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.

The War on Drugs is Lost
Things being as they are, and people as they are, there is no way to prevent somebody, somewhere, from concluding that ``NATIONAL REVIEW favors drugs.'' We don't; we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor. But that said, it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization, even though we may differ on just how far.