The "War" On Drugs

When I read this chapter from Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (which I highly recommend) I was shocked (as I was through most of the book.) In this essay, Mike Levine, a former covert drug enforcement agent and one of the country's leading court experts in everything related to drug trafficking, reveals three truths about the war on drugs: 1. the war is a failure, 2. the media has obscured this fact, and 3. the government doesn't want to win the war. The first is obvious, the second is frustrating, and the third, if true, is profoundly disturbing. I realize this sounds like an absurd conspiracy theory, and I myself would be extremely skeptical of such a statement, but after reading the piece it is hard to come to any other conclusion.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of drug enforcement laws we should all be able to question the utility in devoting extraordinary amounts of money into a policy that does not work. That this policy might be deliberately undermined by our government and that the media would obfuscate the issue is even more unsettling.