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The Never-Ending War on Drugs

By Jeralyn, Section Crime Policy
Posted on Fri Aug 26, 2005 at 07:53:21 PM EST
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The Wall St. Journal today has an article about the mis-direction of the supply-side oriented war on drugs.

...don't be confused by the facts. There's a whole army of Washington bureaucrats paid to fight America's drug habit by cutting off supply. A cynic might even suggest that career drug warriors have an incentive to see the "war" go on forever. One glance around this town and you can see that, barring a change in policy, it probably will.

Reporting from Guatemala, it seems things have never been better for sellers:

Here profitable consequences of the "drug war" are prominently displayed; it's just that they're not the ones that Richard Nixon had in mind when he declared the "war" more than 30 years ago.

A fertile mix of incentives -- high demand for cocaine "up north," the prohibition against buying and using and U.S. insistence on interdiction -- has pushed lucrative trafficking operations off traditional routes and onto paths that pass through places like this. Locals here say that everybody and his uncle is getting into "transporting" and they're all getting rich.

The War on Drugs has a current pricetag of $40 billion a year.

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    The Never-Ending War on Drugs | 12 comments (12 topical)
    Re: The Never-Ending War on Drugs (none / 0) (#1)
    by scarshapedstar on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:02:48 PM EST