The War on Drugs was launched on false claims that drugs are addictive
and entice crime. Yet, drug policy has reduced neither the availability
or use of drugs but fosters global devastation. At home, it has caused
a national pain management crisis that penalizes tens of millions of
American pain sufferers, fosters crime and corruption, and compels
the arrest of over a million drug offenders each year. In producer
countries, guerrillas and terrorists exploit the lucrative illicit
drug trade wrecking their fragile legal, political, and legislative
infrastructures while trampling on the human rights of the poor and
disenfranchised.

Hence, maintaining such a failed and globally harmful policy is driven
by prohibitionists. moral, economic, or political self-interest many
of who propose to further increase penalties for transgressors; a tried
and failed approach. Alternatively, most drug policy reformers offer
halfway measures that, failing to address the causes of addiction and
the link between drug criminalization on one hand and drug trade-related
crime on the other, will not reverse drug policy failures or its
devastating outcomes, which only its repeal can achieve.

Today's policy makers should exhibit the wisdom and courage of American
legislators of the 1930s and repeal the far more egregious and socially
disruptive global War on Drugs.

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