Playing Chess with Checker pieces

This war is actually worse than the one in IRAQ.
Why? Because we have been in this war for more than a decade and the only victors are the politicians who got elected by it's platform. Drugs scare parents and causes them to vote emotionally instead of ensuring the tactics were correct that actually solve the problem, they voted assuming some magical ending. America is fighting the drug war with archaic 1980's techniques. They want to fight this politically as opposed to effectively, similar to the Red Coats fighting the MinuteMen. One could say it's similar to fighting an Urban War with without being familiar with the streets.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price. All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it.

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