The War on Drugs Is Over. Drugs Won.

Now is the time to ask why

The world’s most extensive study of the drug trade has just been published in the medical journal BMJ Open, providing the first “global snapshot” of four decades of the war on drugs. You can already guess the result. The war on drugs could not have been a bigger failure. To sum up their most important findings, the average purity of heroin and cocaine have increased, respectively, 60 percent and 11 percent between 1990 and 2007. Cannabis purity is up a whopping 161 percent over that same time. Not only are drugs way purer than ever, they’re also way, way cheaper. Coke is on an 80 percent discount from 1990, heroin 81 percent, cannabis 86 percent. After a trillion dollars spent on the drug war, now is the greatest time in history to get high.

The new study only confirms what has been well-established for a decade at least, that trying to attack the drug supply is more or less pointless. The real question is demand, trying to mitigate its disastrous social consequences and treating the desire for drugs as a medical condition rather than as a moral failure.

 

Read more: The War on Drugs Is Over. Drugs Won. – Esquire
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