[elkfersupper]

The “War on drugs(TM)” needs to go.

Agreed.

Even so, the damage done has creeped into every segment of society and every aspect of everyone's daily lives.

It's like un-ringing a bell. The damage simply cannot be undone.

[damondonion]

The so-called "war on drugs" is an abysmal failure and should be ended. The dollars worth of drugs one druggie uses a day is costing him hundreds of dollars a day and since he is dealing at a 10% fence, he's having to commit thousands of dollars a day worth of crime to get the hundreds to buy the dollars worth of drugs.

That is a dollars's worth of chemicals being translated into several thousand dollars worth of crime times the number of those idiots out there times 365, all through the magic of stupid laws.

No nation on Earth including ours can afford that. A rational drug policy would:

• Legalize marijuana and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than alcohol on the same basis as alcohol.
• Provide heroin, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances at cost at govt. centers to present addicts while keeping those items illegal for sale on the street, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
• Provide major criminal penalties for the sale of LSD, PCP, and other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.
• Provide major penalties for selling any kind of drugs to children.

Do all of that, and all meaningful drug problems and 70% of urban crime would evaporate in two years. In fact you could do that and keep the present prison system intact. You could end the war on drugs and declare a war on fraud on the same day. Every druggie thrown out of prison would be one more prison cell available for a democrat.

Nonetheless that is just an ideal solution; you'd be better off legalizing it all than doing what we are.