"It is hard to think of a contemporary public policy regime more discredited than the "war on drugs." For the past half-century, the U.S. Congress and the legislatures of the fifty states have made it a crime to own, use, grow, or sell a long list of psychoactive substances. Police have stopped, searched, arrested, and jailed tens of millions of Americans pursuant to these laws. Federal agencies have exported and enforced them around the world. And yet it has long been clear that many aspects of this regime, from the specific substances that it targets to the overarching goal of a "drug-free" society that it pursues, lack a coherent scientific or social-scientific basis. The war undermines core tenets of liberalism, from the right to self-rule and the protection of personal privacy to the freedom of religion. It fuels mass incarceration and racial subordination. It costs billions of dollars per year. It breeds distrust in government and disrespect for law. On top of all that, the war doesn't even succeed on its own terms, as rates of drug abuse, drug addiction, drug overdose, and drug-associated violence have only gone up since its inception. Essentially every drug policy researcher agrees that the war has been an "abject failure," the cause of far greater harm than the problem it was meant to solve. In the war on drugs, the curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima "-- Provided by publisher.
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