According to the Associated Press the United States has spent $1 trillion dollars in the past 40 years in its war on drugs.
The Obama administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
It all began in the Nixon Administration with the first budget allocating $100 million to the effort. The budgets has increased steadily since then. In those 40 years:
- $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.
- $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
- $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
- $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
- $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.
But that hasn’t been all the costs. The Justice Department reports that “an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction” — cost the United States $215 billion a year.
Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use but it’s costing the public a fortune, according to Jeffrey Miron, an economist of Harvard University.
Patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft — and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas. None of that has stopped the drugs.
330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are sold in the United States every year.
2,600 people were killed last year in cartel-related violence, making the city of 1 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, one of the world’s deadliest. Not a single person was prosecuted for homicide related to organized crime.
The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem, it needs to do something about Americans’ unquenching thirst for illegal drugs. Obama has committed to doing just that. About $5.6 billion would be spent on prevention and treatment.
So why persist with costly programs that don’t work?
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