Cost/Benefit of The War On Drugs

[tonyeveland]

Every decision is a cost/benefit analysis.

The cost of the war on drugs is pretty well known. It's trillions of dollars, thousand of lives, and personal freedoms.

The benefit of the war on drugs is harder to determine.

I believe that I could manage to procure any drug I wanted. I know pot and coke would be easy and I suspect everything else is obtainable.

If I'm right about this then it seems to me that the benefit of the war on drugs is very small and not worth the cost.

Thoughts?

 

[Thoreau72]

Every decision is a cost/benefit analysis.

The cost of the war on drugs is pretty well known. It's trillions of dollars, thousand of lives, and personal freedoms.

The benefit of the war on drugs is harder to determine.

I believe that I could manage to procure any drug I wanted. I know pot and coke would be easy and I suspect everything else is obtainable.

If I'm right about this then it seems to me that the benefit of the war on drugs is very small and not worth the cost.

Thoughts?

The only benefits to the war on drugs is to the various enforcement agencies involved. Annual budget increases and more hired personnel are benefits to the bureaucracies. One might compare our policy of drug prohibition to be the bureaucratic version of the Goose That Lays Golden Eggs.

 

[charliebrown]

We criminalized drugs, we increased law enforcement to unsustainable levels. We increased incarceration to unsustainable levels. We increased lawyers and judges to unsustainable levels and now after forty years, we are trying to correct a problem created by our government and the original problem still exists!!!