End the War on Drugs

End the War on Drugs

Radley Balko posted this video over on The Agitator. It is produced by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).


You may have noticed a similar theme from Penn and Teller. From the LEAP website:

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and increasingly punitive policies, our confined population has quadrupled over a 20-year period making building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated. In the last five years we have arrested 9 million people for nonviolent drug offenses--far more per capita than any country in the world. The United States has 4.6 percent of the population of the world but 22.5 percent of the world's prisoners. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost the United States another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and much easier to get than they were 36 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before.

The stated U.S. drug policy goals of lessening the incidence of crime, drug addiction, and juvenile drug use, while stemming the flow of illegal drugs into this country, have not been achieved. Fighting a war on drugs has magnified our problems many fold but the U.S. still insists on continuing the war and pressuring other governments to perpetuate these same unworkable policies. This scenario is the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!

Darn tootin'.

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