Monthly archive for September 2011

Click here to view this News Release as a PDF.
After 40 years of selling more than $1 trillion worth of War on Drugs to American taxpayers as an effective treatment for the drug problem, more and more taxpayers are questioning the soundness of this investment. Has the government delivered the product as promised? Has the problem been solved, or at least reduced?
By the numbers, the War on Drugs is an abject failure. The costs in dollars and human life are steep. Most current studies show that increases in inner-city drug-law enforcement appear to create spikes in urban violence. Drug offenders, the vast majority of them nonviolent, comprise half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. Locking them up cost taxpayers $450 billion, and that does not include the cost of local jails and state prisons. So far this year, there have been approximately 900,000 drug arrests — more than half (about 464,000) of those arrests involved only marijuana, an estimated 412,960 of those for simple marijuana possession. Read more →