Other Notes
I am against drug abuse on a deeply personal level, but I am against drug prohibition on every level, personal and political. But it doesn't matter that I am or that The Wire reflects this, because our political culture cannot and will not produce the selfless courage necessary for a political leader to address the problem honestly. Our political culture only produces politicians and it serves only the relentless ambition of those willing to tell us what we think we want to hear. David Simon, Co-creator of "The Wire".
Was a war ever fought, for so long, and with such poor results, as the war on drugs?
It was started over 40 years ago by Richard Nixon, as part of his law and order campaign, a successful appeal to middle America, in the belief that more resources and money and manpower could eliminate the scourge of drug addictions. In fact the opposite has happened: drug smuggling, sales, and use are more pervasive than ever before. The initial reduction in the amount of drugs entering the country resulted in increased prices which resulted in increased imports, more dealers, more runners, more robbery and murder, and more addiction. The war on drugs was a compete failure.
Now, in a normal situation, people might look at a program, at it's goals and methods, and it's expectations, and decide whether or not it was a success. And if it was a failure, they would abandon that program and try something else.
But the thing about drugs is that America can always imagine that it could be worse. It's not easy to analyze the drug problem from the point of view of what the untold billions of dollars the war on drugs is costing America could do if they had been spent on treatment instead of interdiction.
As Simon observes, there is almost no politician with the guts to admit that the war on drugs is a complete failure even though, by any reasonable measure, it obviously is. Except, perhaps, for Ron Paul, who has more or less declared that if anyone wants to destroy himself with drugs, why should the government get in the way?