The U.S. War on Drugs is a staggering failure, for over 40 years consuming tens of billions of dollars a year, while making not the slightest dent in America's widespread drug problems. Meanwhile, U.S. families are struggling to provide their children with college educations, taking on student loans so big, they will be paying off those loans over many years, almost as if they had mortgaged their children.
To run the War on Drugs has required building new prisons, expanding old prisons and crowding other prisons so badly as to violate U.S. laws and trigger costly lawsuits. Numerous prison personnel have been hired and trained to support a never ending flood of prisoners.
And who are many of those prisoners? Addicts who desperately need medical treatment, not prison. The cost of police to arrest them, labs to evaluate the evidence, judges to try them, prosecutors and defense attorneys to oversee their cases, and sometimes experts to testify, is overwhelming.
But President Nixon launching the War on Drugs, began what is now a huge industry of U.S. federal, state and local law enforcement bureaucracy, which include management, operations personnel, office facilities, retirement plans, etc. And the price in blood of the War on Drugs has virtually overwhelmed the Mexican government and cost tens of thousands of Mexican people their lives, as it has in Brazil, Columbia and elsewhere in Latin America.
So shall we continue this horrific and failed war, or shall we invest in education, the future of our nation? We can no longer afford to do both. My vote is for education of our youth and drug treatment for our addicts.
Dick
Thank you to Anne's and my son Kyle for the title of this piece
1 comment:
Almost every Californian whom I speak with thinks they get taxed enough and that things are plenty expensive here in the Golden State. I agree that given our latest state budget shortfall, programs are going to get cut, including (and sadly especially) education.
Why not cut the spending on the programs that do not work and thusly waste money??? You hit the nail on the head that the choice that has been made is to stick people in prison at the cost of educating those who could have been future business owners.
End the drug war, tax and regulate (a tax boon for California), stop housing people at $40k per year for a victimless crime and use at least some of that new found money to educate the future of our once wonderful state.
Thanks for writing this piece!
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