It has cost untold billions in police resources, prison and jail space and expenses, and law enforcement corruption. Drug profits have financed violent crime, a weapons black market, foreign terrorist movements, gangs, and organized crime families. The drug war has cost innocent police officers and civilians their lives. It has brought police and sheriff's departments into a major game of confiscation profiteering which has gotten both cops and innocent citizens killed across the country. The chief agencies which are charged with stemming the traffic have actually become the chief conduits for drugs entering the country.
Drugs are easier and cheaper to get than ever.
Moreover, the drug war has put many of our best and brightest young people in prison, ruining their lives far beyond what drug use itself naturally does. A third of our young Black men are held enslaved to the prison and the justice system as a result. And we are fast becoming a terrorist and corrupt police state of the type we always pledged to fight during the Cold War. And all for drugs. I don't propose legalization as a panacea.