To Whom It May Concern

The War On Drugs, Is It Worth It?

I wonder how much money the United States has spent fighting the war on drugs over, well, let's say the last 30 years. Experts figure that the cost runs into the area of 50 billion dollars a year trying to stop the drug traffic, and 100 billion per year when you factor in the cost of putting drug offenders thru the court system. The monetary reason alone of course is not the only reason that drugs should be legalized, there are many other reasons why the war on drugs is not worth the time, money, and effort that is spent on it.

Legalizing drugs would free up police and other law enforcement resources to be used in other areas, fighting non drug related crimes. Statistics show that 1/3 to 1/2 of law enforcement is used in the drug prevention and interaction support. This money could be served much better by going after offenders involved in rape, murder, robbery, and other violent crimes. Also, many violent crimes are committed as a result of the criminal trying to support the drug habit, because the cost of drugs is so highly inflated by the illegality of the drugs themselves. Let's say a kilo of cocaine costs $8000 in Columbia, it would sell wholesale for $75,000, and go for $750,000 on the streets of the United States. The more expensive the habit, the more difficult it is to obtain that 'fix' that a drug user wants, this results in more crime to obtain ways of getting the drug.

Prisons within the United States are horribly overcrowded, and the single largest category of prisoner is the drug user, in most cases a non violent crime, such as possession of a controlled substance. Legalizing drugs would free up much of this prison space, in turn costing the tax payers less money. Money would also be saved in the judicial system, because not only would it eliminate petty drug court cases, but also a lot of violent crime related to getting the drug, making our streets safer also. Burglaries and theft to support habits would decrease by at least 50% if drugs were legalized because the price of the drugs would go down so much. Gang crime related to drugs would become nearly non existent, because the money would no longer be there for gangs to collect. How often do you see street gangs in a rival war over cigarettes? You don't, because as a legal commodity, cigarettes do not carry near the market value to entice black market interest. This in turn would cripple organized crime, which relies heavily on the street value of illegal drugs to market it's operations.

I'm not for capitalism or free trade of drugs though, I believe the government would be the only entity given the right to sell drugs, and we all know the government is unable to make money at anything, so God knows no one will be able to undersell them. As the price of drugs goes down, crime will also go down, and no one can compete with the government to try and make money off of drugs if they are priced around the same as cigarettes. Even if drugs were prices a mere 5 times what cigarettes are priced, that is still 20 times cheaper than black market prices for illegal drugs now, and would still be so cheap that organized crime would be unable to compete, how can you compete with the government? Our government has a long and proud tradition of losing tons of money, nothing is going to change now!!!

Those who buy drugs from the government would have a profile for their drug use and be required to attend intervention classes and discussion meetings with others who use drugs in order to help those addicted to drugs, rather than just tossing them in prison with very little intervention. I suppose you could say this isn't really "legalizing" drugs, more like subsidizing drugs to the public, but it's for damn sure better than what we have going on now. People who are in these programs would have to show some sort of progress to get over their need for drugs, through a lot of therapy, one on one and group. Oh, you might say, what about the cost of all of this on the taxpayer? Well, it's unlikely that the amount of money we spend as taxpayers on programs such as this would come even close to the amount of money spent the way things are going right now, I doubt even 1/10th of the money we spend now would be needed. Plus money collected from the sale of drugs would be used to fund the programs too.

But what about the movie stars and other people who are well known who use drugs, they will refuse to enter programs for interdiction? These people aren't normally the people you see car jacking and robbing others to support their habits, the low chance that you will see someone with money committing violent crimes would supersede a huge need for them to enter programs to help them with their drug addictions.

I am not advocating drug use by any means, and I think it's sad that people have to resort to the use of illicit drugs rather than finding responsible, natural highs to make life enjoyable. This is probably my most controversial post to date, but as I look in the paper and on TV every day and see all the bad things that happen as a result of illegal drug use, and all the money that is dumped into fighting illegal drugs, I realize that our nation has really done nothing to actually curtail either the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, nor the use of the drugs by the American public, so something different has to happen.