Give me Librium or give me Meth

America’s track record for winning wars hasn’t been exactly stellar since defeating the Axis powers in 1945. Pretty much every war in which America has engaged since then, it has lost or ended in a stalemate. No wars America has ever fought have failed as dismally as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs. Both are ongoing and every year conditions worsen. Billions is being spent on the War on Drugs and all that’s been achieved are an increase in violence and corruption, as well as wealthier drug cartels.

It’s time for America to declare victory in the War on Drugs and act to legalize and regulate their use. In the process the country could save $2.4 billion a year just on funding the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) alone and earn untold billions more from taxing the drugs. Most of the arguments against legalizing drugs are self-serving tautologies designed to propagate a law enforcement bureaucracy whose effectiveness is at best dismal and at worst criminal in its incompetence. But then, it’s hard to believe that eradicating the trade in illegal drugs has ever been at the forefront of the government’s goals. It’s much more likely that the DEA’s real purpose is to keep up the appearance that something is being done about illegal drug trafficking. Just as the repeal of the 18th Amendment (the Volstead Act) basically put criminal bootleggers out of business, legalizing all drugs would sound the death knell of the cartels victimizing entire nations (Mexico is the current poster child of the DEA’s abject defeat by narco-terrorists).

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I have personally lived in a number of jurisdictions that were “dry” at one time, forcing those who wanted a drink to deal with their local bootlegger. And every time a proposition to legalize alcohol was put on the ballot, two groups vehemently worked to ensure that it didn’t pass—the cops and the bootleggers. Support for the continued criminalization of drugs is likely to be strongest among the law enforcement community as well as drug dealers. Cannabis, cocaine and heroin are all basically naturally occurring substances that can be cultivated for next to nothing. The only reason that these drugs are so expensive and hence so lucrative for drug dealers is that they are illegal and their merchandising and use pose significant risk of prison. Additionally that risk is exacerbated by turf wars among the various cartels that add a sudden and violent death to the equation. Take away the risk and the price plummets meaning that a lot of inner city crack dealers would be economically better off serving up Big Macs than selling rock. The War on Drugs is a war that cannot and will not be won—ever. In a time when culturally the only things that seem to matter are self-gratification and the pursuits of pleasure, prohibiting the use of drugs through legislation and heavy-handed enforcement is a joke. The canard that legalization would lead to mass addiction is a myth, just as the belief that criminalizing the use of alcohol would reduce alcoholism, familial misery and crime was equally misguided. When the President of the United States famously headed up the “choom gang” in his younger years with a near fanatical devotion to the use of cannabis, then the whole idea of having statutes against the use of drugs becomes a cynical exercise in hypocrisy.