Throughout history, time has crumbled before us making us relive and regret our past decisions. Since the beginning of time there has always been two things; treasure and the brutality and devastation of war that comes with it. For around the past 50 years drugs have been this treasure and the war that came with it many have come to believe is unwinnable. The majority of people think drugs are just pills or powders but drugs can be considered any addiction that effects one's body physiologically. The War on Drugs is one of the most discussed and researched topics among society today. This war has many sides to it and that is why I find it so fascinating. Like any truly interesting topic there is always multiple sides. Ever since I can remember I was told constantly how bad drugs were for you and how I should never consider using any type of illegal drug, and believe it or not I listened. I know many people that have encountered drugs and either hated it or liked it they gave in to the hype, and peer pressure. To be considered qualified to just talk about the War on Drugs all you have to do is have access to the internet or television and simply be at least a human being in today's world. My research on this topic has narrowed down my topic even more, from the War on Drugs, to why we have not won the War on Drugs and why we need to, to addiction itself, and finally to racism in the drug war. All of this reading, learning and watching about the War on Drugs have brought me to a conclusion. There are two main problems with the War on Drugs, the supply and the demand. In order to truly end the War on Drugs we need to eliminate both the supply and the demand, which seems obvious but is unfortunately harder than it sounds. When we consider who demands the product many suspects come to mind but the real people who demand drugs are users or addicts. Addiction is a misunderstood term and is used to judge and criminalize people who usually are addicted to illegal substances. However, addiction is just the opposite of connection and when you take away an addicts bonds with their environment the problem becomes even worse. On the other hand, the suppliers are the big "kahunas" who use violence, money and persuasion to move up in the ranks and become some of the most powerful criminals in the world. In order to eliminate the supply is more of a challenge. But the answer is quite simple, get rid of the risk, decriminalize drugs and use the government to sell the drugs. If this is done correctly you will solve both problems. In sum, the War on Drugs can be won by decriminalizing all drugs.

Through my long hours of research I found it was easier to listen and watch instead of reading word after word. I invested in TED Talks, and I found a couple of worthy speeches. The first one is by Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance which is the leading organization in the U.S. promoting alternate ways to the War on Drugs. Nadelmann received his B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Princeton University for seven years and has wrote two books on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement  --  Cops Across Borders and Policing The Globe  --  and his writings have appeared in most major media outlets in the U.S. as well as top academic journals. Nadelmann plays a key role as drug policy advisor to George Soros and other prominent philanthropists as well as elected officials ranging from mayors, governors and state and federal legislators in the U.S. to presidents and cabinet ministers outside the U.S. He and his colleagues have played pivotal roles in most major legislative and ballot initiative campaigns in the United States on issues ranging from medical marijuana and marijuana legalization to prison reform, harm reduction, drug treatment and reform of asset forfeiture laws. With all of that being said, Nadelmann is more than qualified to talk about the War on Drugs which is why I chose his speech as a source. Nadelmann discusses many topics in his speech, "Why we need to end the War on Drugs." The War on Drugs is a disastrous movement that has caused pain all over the world. Murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, and so many other parts of the planet, overflows prisons in the United States and other countries, police and military sucked into an unwinnable war that goes against any elementary rights, and ordinary citizens pray every day they do not get put in the crosshairs, all while more and more drug users appear every day. According to one of Britain's highest profile billionaires, Richard Branson, in his article "War on drugs a trillion-dollar failure" Branson includes many detailed statistics and facts about the War on Drugs including "that if the illegal global drug trade was a country it would be among the top 20 economies in the world ...  worth $320 billion." In Branson's article was a plea written by H.L. Mencken in 1925, "Prohibition has not only failed in its promises but actually created additional serious and disturbing social problems throughout society. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic but more. There is not less crime, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished" (Branson). The risk is the rush people get when they do something illegal, almost like a small high after the use of a drug. This is what causes crime. Later in Nadelmann's speech he discusses the supply and demand aspect of the War on Drugs. Nadelmann interviewed hundreds of DEA and law enforcement agents around Europe and the Americas about international drug control got two answers. In Latin America, he would get, "you can't really cut off the supply the problem lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand." However, when he returns to the U.S. and talks with people in anti-drug efforts they would say, "You can't really cut off the demand the answer lies over there, you've got to cut off the supply." Finally, Nadelmann went to talk to people at customs, the ones who try to stop drugs at the borders, and of course he got, "you're not going to stop it here the solution lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand." So what is the real answer, well I believe the answer is both. You cannot win the war if the supply and demand are not eliminated (Nadelmann).

Another interesting side of the argument is racism. Is the War on Drugs racist? Well Nadelmann discusses this as well. Back in the late 19th century, when the majority of illegal drugs nowadays were legal, the principal consumers of opiates were middle-aged white women, using them to cure aches and pains when few other solution were available. However, nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put "Grandma" behind bars. All of a sudden when boat loads of Chinese started showing up working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in their country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada occurred, driven by racist fears of "Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves." The same goes for the first cocaine prohibition laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. Not forgetting the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. Nadelmann goes on to declare "if the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you five to 10 years behind bars." While in another article in Harper's Magazine titled, "War on Drugs Invented to Destroy Blacks, Anti-Vietnam Left" written by David Downs who is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He has covered, arts, technology and culture since 1996 and appears in Wired, Rolling Stone, and The Onion. He contributes the weekly column "Legalization Nation" to the Express and co-edits the Marijuana Business Report. In this article Downs discusses the history of how the War on Drugs started. In 1994 journalist Dan Baum interviewed John Ehrlichman, President Nixon's domestic-policy adviser. Ehrlichman was a Watergate co-conspirator who spent a year and a half in prison. In this interview, Ehrlichman simply admitted that the war on drugs was purposely designed to destroy Nixon's perceived enemies. Baum included this in his piece, "You want to know what this was really all about?" [Ehrlichman] asked with ...  little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people ...  We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did" (Downs). Racism is a "fear" that is still around today and may never disappear. Unfortunately people have a tendency to stereotype and associate certain things with certain races and this is the cause of many problems, and the War on Drugs is one of those problems. 

One side of the argument is the demand side or the addicts. When we consider what addicts are we tend to overlook them for criminals or just bad people. However, in a TED Talk titled "Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong" the author, Johann Hari, discusses what the term addiction really is. Hari spent three years researching the war on drugs. Hari has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the New Republic, the Nation, Slate, and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a columnist for the British newspaper the Independent for nine years. Yes the author is trustworthy, he did not only do his research but he is an award winning journalist. Hari uses many examples to back up his claim that addiction is the opposite of connection. The first example that interested me was an interesting experiment conducted be Professor Bruce Alexander. Alexander is a professor of psychology in Vancouver who tries to come to a conclusion of what we conceive addiction to be. "This experiment is quite simple, you get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly." However Professor Alexander discovered something, "we're putting the rat in an empty cage ...  It has nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different." Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which is heaven for rats. They have tons of cheese, plenty of colored balls, tunnels everywhere and friend's lots of friends. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water, in fact the rats almost never use it. None of the rats ever use it compulsively and none of them overdose. From almost 100% overdose while isolated to 0% overdose when they have joyful and connected lives. Now you may be wondering how rats and humans relates, well there is a real world application that occurred in the year 2000. Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. In fact 1% of the population was addicted to heroin. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together and set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out how to solve this problem. The only conclusion this genius panel could come up with was "decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but, take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society." Portugal participates in; residential rehab, psychological therapy, and a massive program of job creation for addicts, and loans for addicts to set up small businesses. It is about 16 years since that experiment began, and the results are: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by a whopping 50%. Overdose and even HIV are both drastically down among addicts (Hari). 

Though these previous sources are magnificent, some may argue something else. What about the medical side, what about some real opinions from a Doctor. Well Doctor Sanjay Gupta did just that. Dr. Gupta is an American neurosurgeon and media reporter. He also serves as an associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. He recently wrote an article entitled "It's time for a medical marijuana revolution." In this article he argues that he sees a wide change everywhere when it comes to the use of marijuana. I know everywhere in today's society everyone is trying to legalize marijuana but Dr. Gupta is not trying to persuade anyone to legalize it. Dr. Gupta is simply giving the facts about the good things it does for people, in the medical sense. For example, he says "the new surgeon general cites data showing just how helpful [marijuana] can be." Many marijuana users will consider this source reliable. In addition, Dr. Gupta states that, "for the first time a majority, 53%, favor its legalization, with 77% supporting it for medical purposes." With the majority of people favoring and supporting the effects of marijuana, sooner later the whole country will be legalizing marijuana. Also, the government is changing its political views as well. This is highlighted when Dr. Gupta says, "politicians who once preferred to play it safe with this explosive issue are now willing to stake their political futures on it" (Gupta). Dr. Gupta is a perfect example of how decriminalizing a drug as "harmless" as marijuana can be beneficial. However, I asked myself what would happen to the economy, and would the government sell the drugs or would we still get them from our local dealer. I discovered an article title "Let's be blunt: it's time to end the drug war" written by Art Carden who is an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University. Professor Carden discusses how absurd the War on Drugs is and he addresses a textbook he actually uses in his class. He uses Modern Principles of Economic written by Cowen and Tabarrok to introduce economics to his classes and he uses an interesting quote from the textbook to defer what he is discussing. "The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater are drug industry revenues. So, more effective prohibition means that drug sellers have more money to buy guns, pay bribes, fund the dealers, and even research and develop new technologies in drug delivery (like crack cocaine). It's hard to beat an enemy that gets stronger the more you strike against him or her" (Carden). These two sources are from two distinctly different people but they both are professionals in their field of study.

There is one more side of this argument that needs to be addressed, the supply side. I watched another TED Talk titled "The deadly genius of drug cartels" which clearly illustrated the big players in the drug trafficking and producing world. Business Professor Rodrigo Canales demonstrates the three specific Drug Cartels in Mexico; Los Zetas, The Knights Templar, and finally the famous Sinaloa Cartel. Canales teaches the core MBA course on innovation at Yale, sits on the steering committee of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT and advises several startup companies in Mexico and he also earned his MBA and Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management (Canales). I also read a Harvard International Review entitled "Winding Down the War on Drugs: Reevaluating Global Drug Policy." This article was written by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno who is the US program co-director at Human Rights Watch. Sanchez uses cultural values of the South American country of Colombia. In the 1980's Colombia was home to probably the most notorious drug syndicate in history, the Medellin Cartel. The government calls the groups that are now in charge "criminal gangs" rather than paramilitaries, but the problem remains. The groups are engaged not only in drug trafficking, but also in serious abuses against communities to maintain their control. Violence fluctuates by region and overtime, and in many cases the paramilitaries' successors have opted for more low-profile forms of control -- such as threats and forced disappearances. But in other places the abuses are flagrant (Sanchez). 

In conclusion, the War on Drugs is a heartless and disastrous war that needs to be ended, or won. It should have not have turned out the way I did and through my research I have come to a result that most if not all experts agree. Through many years of unnecessary violence and resources wasted and money spent we are not much closer to winning however now people are starting to wake up and realize what the right thing to do is. Yes, there are many aspects of the War on Drugs like; racism, supply and demand and addiction but I have finally concluded that the real and only way to win the War is to decriminalize all drugs. Not at once and not all over the world but gradually progress into what Portugal has become today. I am not for the legalization of drugs however I am for peace. To achieve peace we need to win this War and end the suffering.

