[Of course, you must realise that the title here shd be ..."none of its PUBLICLY STATED goals". Other than that minor detail, it has been a fabulous success. THS] 


AP IMPACT: US drug war has met none of its goals

By MARTHA MENDOZA (AP) – 1 day ago

MEXICO CITY — After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion
and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence
even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated
Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything,
magnified, intensified."

This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it
causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public
health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.

Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law
enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they
account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.

Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for
the spending to match the rhetoric.

"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem
holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."

His predecessor, John P. Walters, takes issue with that.

Walters insists society would be far worse today if there had been no War on Drugs.
Drug abuse peaked nationally in 1979 and, despite fluctuations, remains below those
levels, he says. Judging the drug war is complicated: Records indicate marijuana and
prescription drug abuse are climbing, while cocaine use is way down. Seizures are
up, but so is availability.

"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made
any difference is ridiculous," Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's
saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have
been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."

___

In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home
from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a
new war he thought he could win.

"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly
among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse
Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the
United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary
to wage a new, all-out offensive."

His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's
amount even when adjusted for inflation.

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and
dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money
went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs
that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for
example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation
increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

_ $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other
prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use
as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug
overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal
drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit
drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported
from Mexico.

_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10
million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to
increase drug abuse.

_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all
federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice
Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — "an overburdened justice
system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental
destruction" — cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for
more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.

"Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use," Miron said, "but it's
costing the public a fortune."

___

From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement — no
matter how well funded and well trained — could ever defeat the drug problem.

Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has since watched his worst fears
come to pass.

"Look what happened. It's an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It
has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia," he
said.

In 1970, proponents said beefed-up law enforcement could effectively seal the
southern U.S. border and stop drugs from coming in. Since then, the U.S. used
patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone
aircraft — and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and
heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas.

None of that has stopped the drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says
about 330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are
sold in the United States every year — almost all of it brought in across the borders.
Even more marijuana is sold, but it's hard to know how much of that is grown
domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug cartels in U.S. national parks.

The dealers who are caught have overwhelmed justice systems in the United States
and elsewhere. U.S. prosecutors declined to file charges in 7,482 drug cases last
year, most because they simply didn't have the time. That's about one out of every
four drug cases.

The United States has in recent years rounded up thousands of suspected associates
of Mexican drug gangs, then turned some of the cases over to local prosecutors who
can't make the charges stick for lack of evidence. The suspects are then sometimes
released, deported or acquitted. The U.S. Justice Department doesn't even keep
track of what happens to all of them.

In Mexico, traffickers exploit a broken justice system. Investigators often fail to collect
convincing evidence — and are sometimes assassinated when they do. Confessions
are beaten out of suspects by frustrated, underpaid police. Judges who no longer
turn a blind eye to such abuse release the suspects in exasperation.

In prison, in the U.S. or Mexico, traffickers continue to operate, ordering
assassinations and arranging distribution of their product even from solitary
confinement in Texas and California. In Mexico, prisoners can sometimes even buy
their way out.

The violence spans Mexico. In Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of drug violence in
Mexico, 2,600 people were killed last year in cartel-related violence, making the city
of 1 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, one of the world's deadliest.
Not a single person was prosecuted for homicide related to organized crime.

And then there's the money.

The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all
commerce on the planet.

A full 10 percent of Mexico's economy is built on drug proceeds — $25 billion
smuggled in from the United States every year, of which 25 cents of each $100
smuggled is seized at the border. Thus there's no incentive for the kind of financial
reform that could tame the cartels.

"For every drug dealer you put in jail or kill, there's a line up to replace him because
the money is just so good," says Walter McCay, who heads the non-profit Center for
Professional Police Certification in Mexico City.

McCay is one of the 13,000 members of Medford, Mass.-based Law Enforcement
Against Prohibition, a group of cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others
who want to legalize and regulate all drugs.

A decade ago, no politician who wanted to keep his job would breathe a word about
legalization, but a consensus is growing across the country that at least marijuana will
someday be regulated and sold like tobacco and alcohol.

California voters decide in November whether to legalize marijuana, and South
Dakota will vote this fall on whether to allow medical uses of marijuana, already
permitted in California and 13 other states. The Obama administration says it won't
target marijuana dispensaries if they comply with state laws.

___

Mexican President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem, it
needs to do something about Americans' unquenching thirst for illegal drugs.

Kerlikowske agrees, and Obama has committed to doing just that.

And yet both countries continue to spend the bulk of their drug budgets on law
enforcement rather than treatment and prevention.

"President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as
Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to
treatment and prevention," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the non-
profit Drug Policy Alliance. "This despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail
that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

Obama is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, about two
thirds of it for law enforcement at the front lines of the battle: police, military and
border patrol agents struggling to seize drugs and arrest traffickers and users.

About $5.6 billion would be spent on prevention and treatment.

"For the first time ever, the nation has before it an administration that views the drug
issue first and foremost through the lens of the public health mandate," said
economist and drug policy expert John Carnevale, who served three administrations
and four drug czars. "Yet ... it appears that this historic policy stride has some
problems with its supporting budget."

Carnevale said the administration continues to substantially over-allocate funds to
areas that research shows are least effective — interdiction and source-country
programs — while under-allocating funds for treatment and prevention.

Kerlikowske, who wishes people would stop calling it a "war" on drugs, frequently
talks about one of the most valuable tools they've found, in which doctors screen for
drug abuse during routine medical examinations. That program would get a mere
$7.2 million under Obama's budget.

"People will say that's not enough. They'll say the drug budget hasn't shifted as much
as it should have, and granted I don't disagree with that," Kerlikowske said. "We
would like to do more in that direction."

Fifteen years ago, when the government began telling doctors to ask their patients
about their drug use during routine medical exams, it described the program as one
of the most proven ways to intervene early with would-be addicts.

"Nothing happens overnight," Kerlikowske said.

___

Until 100 years ago, drugs were simply a commodity. Then Western cultural shifts
made them immoral and deviant, according to London School of Economics professor
Fernanda Mena.

Religious movements led the crusades against drugs: In 1904, an Episcopal bishop
returning from a mission in the Far East argued for banning opium after observing
"the natives' moral degeneration." In 1914, The New York Times reported that
cocaine caused blacks to commit "violent crimes," and that it made them resistant to
police bullets. In the decades that followed, Mena said, drugs became synonymous
with evil.

Nixon drew on those emotions when he pressed for his War on Drugs.

"Narcotics addiction is a problem which afflicts both the body and the soul of
America," he said in a special 1971 message to Congress. "It comes quietly into
homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods and breaks the fiber of
community which makes neighbors. We must try to better understand the confusion
and disillusion and despair that bring people, particularly young people, to the use of
narcotics and dangerous drugs."

Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young users, a
teenager smoking pot and trying "a little blow when you could afford it," as he wrote
in "Dreams From My Father." When asked during his campaign if he had inhaled the
pot, he replied: "That was the point."

So why persist with costly programs that don't work?

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, sitting down with the
AP at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, paused for a moment at the question.

"Look," she says, starting slowly. "This is something that is worth fighting for because
drug addiction is about fighting for somebody's life, a young child's life, a teenager's
life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.

"If you think about it in those terms, that they are fighting for lives — and in Mexico
they are literally fighting for lives as well from the violence standpoint — you realize
the stakes are too high to let go."

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. Drug Abuse & Addiction, Detoxification, Treatment, Opiate Withdrawal. Substance Abuse: Heroin, Cocaine, Marijuana, Crystal meth, Vicodin, OxyContin, Amphetamines, Percocet and others.
All Rights Reserved.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



AP Bombshell: "US Drug War Has Met None of Its Goals"

The Associated Press has just dropped a bombshell on America's longest running war
and the headline says it all: "The US Drug War has Met None of its Goals".

The extensive piece reviews the last 40 years, starting with President Nixon's official
launch of the War on Drugs all the way to President Obama's annual strategy
released this week.

I have been the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance for ten years
and this is one of the hardest hitting indictments against the drug war I've ever seen.
And because the story comes from the Associated Press, it will run in hundreds of
papers around the world, reaching tens of millions of people.

The piece packs a punch from the start: "After 40 years, the United States' War on
Drugs has cost $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what?
Drug use is rampant and violence more brutal and widespread."

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets, and
interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went -- and
found that the U.S. repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did nothing to
stop the flow of drugs. The AP article states that in 40 years taxpayers spent more
than:

        * $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for
example, the United States spent more than6 billion, while coca cultivation increased
and trafficking moved to Mexico - and the violence along with it.

        * $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and
other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug
use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says
drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last
year.

        * $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of
illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke
illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs
imported from Mexico.

        * $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about
10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to
increase drug abuse.

        * $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of
all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

Former Drug Czar John Walters sounds personally insulted by the argument that the
war on drugs has been a failure. "To say that all the things that have been done in
the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," Walters said."It destroys
everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforecment,
treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's
work is misguided."

Yes, Mr. Walters, the tanks, bullets, prison bars and "reefer madness" have been
misguided. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol in the '30s, it didn't work in our 40-
year War on Drugs, and it never will.

It is time for an exit strategy from this failed War on Drugs. Let's make sure that it
doesn't take another 40 years, millions more lives ruined, and billions of wasted tax
dollars before we accept the obvious solution -- ending prohibition. It's up to us - as
people who care about science, compassion, health, and human rights -- to make
sure that the time comes as soon as possible.


Tony Newman is the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance
(www.drugpolicy.org)