$500 Billion War on Drugs a failure by any measure

LIke everything else posted here, it's stolen...

That is a truly one great article every policy maker should have to read. I can’t ever read a word on this topic without remembering how Col Oliver North was involved in smuggling cocaine into the U.S. under Reagan, circumventing Congress to pay for an illegal proxy war, which coincided with the birth of the crack epidemic at the very same time the President had declared a ‘War on Drugs’ (Remember Nancy’s ‘Just Say No‘?) and the great expansion in the building of prisons and increasing sentences that has resulted in the disenfranchisement of generations of disproportionately black would-be voters to this very day. But of course all that was just another unintended but electorally significant consequence of Ronald Reagan’s.