Many people are familiar with the statement credited to Albert Einstein, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Perhaps someone needs to remind the United States government of this statement. For the past 50 years the United States continues to declare War on Drugs. This topic has been researched at great length. Thus, a natural question arises, why has the War on Drugs taken so long to win? Drugs need to be decriminalized in order to win the War on Drugs. 

According to Sheldon Richman and Jeffrey Miron, the war on drugs has failed despite the billions of dollars the United States government spends in their efforts of prohibition. Richmond is the Editor of the flagship publication of the Foundation for Economic Education, the Freeman Magazine. Miron is a Harvard Economist and Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute. Their combined efforts highlight the following: 

Decriminalization of drugs would reduce state and federal deficits by eliminating expenditures on prohibition enforcement.

In 2009, the government spent $2,094,510,000 housing drug related prisoners.

If drugs were decriminalized the government would annually save $25.7 billion in state and local expenses and $15.6 billion in federal expenses.

Every 19 seconds someone in the United States is arrested for a drug violation. Eighty two percent of these arrests are for possession alone.

After 50 years fighting the War on Drugs it is easier to buy marijuana than it is to buy a beer.

Over 35,000 people have been killed in just 4 years due to the violence related to Mexico's fight with their massive drug cartels.

These 6 statistics prove that our government wastes billions of dollars on unnecessary violence in order to win a war that has lasted over 50 years. Innocent people have fallen victim to this heartless and disastrous war and instead of taking money out of hard working Americans pocket, the government should stop wasting their time and money on an avoidable brutal war. 

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. "If the illegal global drug trade was a country it would be among the top 20 economies in the world ...  worth $320 billion (Branson)." I think that if drugs were decriminalized then that $320 billion dollars could be used towards things that will truly help our country, including people living in poverty, job creation for those addicted to drugs, and even building facilities that provide help and comfort to addicts. Also 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)." It seems the risk is the rush people get when they do something illegal, almost like a small high after the use of a drug. Why do people insist on taking risks to obtain illegal substance and participate in criminal activities? Why were drugs criminalized in the first place? I discovered an article entitled "To Legalize or Not To Legalize? Economic Approaches to the Decriminalization of Drugs," which gave me a conclusive answer. The author of this article, Anne Line Bretteville-Jensen, is an economist and has a PhD in Economics and works with The Norwegian Institute of Alcohol and Drug Research (SIRUS). Jensen's role at SIRUS is analyze the demand for drugs and drug deaths and overdose issues. Following one of her sources, Professor Anthony Culyer from the University of York, Jensen answers a question that is popular among more and more people, "Whether the costs to society and the individual users are not starting to outweigh the benefits of a prohibitive drug policy (Bretteville-Jensen)." Jensen states, "The amount of resources spent by society on drug control (police and customs) and on the legal system (prison administration and administration of justice) and the cost paid by the individual drug user in terms of harassments, stigmatizing, imprisonments, increased health risks, and so on are substantial (Bretteville-Jensen)." Based on Jensen's conclusion the amount of resources are substantial however, she goes on to describe how the cost-benefit analysis (CBA), "Which sums up the costs and benefits of a project or policy and then examines if the net benefit is positive and in this case also negative (Bretteville-Jensen)." Finally, there is a way to determine whether or not all of our country's efforts and resources are worth continuing or does our government need to reevaluate their strategy.  

Back in the late 19th century, when the majority of illegal drugs of today were legal, the principal consumers of opiates were middle-aged white women, using them to cure aches and pains when few other solutions were available. However, nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put "Grandma" behind bars. All of a sudden, when an influx of Chinese started showing up, working hard on the railroads and the mines, and then kicking back in the evening just like they had done in China with their opium pipe, that's when the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada occurred. Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, considers this to 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 cocaine and forgetting their proper place in society (Nadelmann)." This brings up the complicated issue of race into the conversation. Nadelmann declares, "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 (Nadelmann)." This may lead some to wonder was the War on Drugs a War on Race. David Downs, a journalist for Harper's Magazine, examines this very topic. 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? 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. And therefore, decriminalizing drugs may result in improving race relations within the United States. 

One factor of the War on drugs is the demand side. When we consider what addicts are we tend to classify them as 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. 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 (Hari)." 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 (Hari)." 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 plethora of other rats. 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. (Hari) 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. (Hari) 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 main conclusion that this panel came up with was to "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 (Hari)." 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. Sixteen years since that experiment began, injecting drug use is down in Portugal, by a whopping 50%. Overdose and even HIV are both drastically down among addicts. (Hari)

For some, decriminalizing all drugs may be an extreme. However, America's opinion about the drug marijuana is shifting. Dr. Sanjay 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, Gupta argues that he sees a wide change everywhere when it comes to the use of marijuana. 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 or 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, would we still get them from our local dealer, or neither. I discovered an article entitled "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 highlight what he is discussing. Carden writes, "The more effective prohibition is at raising costs, the greater drug industry revenues are. 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)." It is like trying to fight a disease that keeps adapting to every kind of medicine, antibiotic or tactic we take to destroy it, so in order to destroy or cure the disease doctors must learn more about the disease itself. Which is what I believe Carden is saying, our government needs to acquire more knowledge and background about the war they are so desperately trying to win. This leads me to the supply side of the War on Drugs. 

Business Professor Rodrigo Canales examines the supply side of the War on Drugs by studying three specific cartels in Mexico; Los Zetas, The Knights Templar, and finally the famous Sinaloa Cartel. In his TED entitled "The deadly genius of drug cartels," he illustrates the big players in the drug trafficking and producing world. Canales states, "However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand (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. 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 over time, 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 order to reduce or even eliminate the threat caused by drug cartels, our government needs to reconsider the strategies and tactics they are taking to win this war. 

In conclusion, the decriminalization of drugs will lead to the War on Drugs being won. 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. 

