War On Drugs: Cocaine Purer, Cheaper
Yet another sign that we need some new ideas about how to address the issue of drugs in America.
(AP) Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped and the drug’s purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5 billion spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia’s drug industry, the White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key senator.The drug czar, John Walters, wrote Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that retail cocaine prices fell by 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to about $135 per gram of pure cocaine — hovering near the same levels since the early 1990s. In 1981, when the U.S. government began collecting data, a gram of pure cocaine fetched $600. [...]
Declining prices and rising purity could also suggest weakening demand, but several household and school-based surveys show that America’s cocaine consumption has barely budged since 2000, and demand in Europe has increased.
And do note, that this $5 billion was spent in the last six years under Bush’s Plan Colombia, which was supposed to stop the flow of cocaine into the country.
So what are we going to do? Ignore the reality or start to shift our focus onto addiction prevention and away from locking up addicts?
Regardless, we’re losing the “war” on drugs and after 20+ years that’s a sad statement. We need to get real on this issue before we waste any more money trying to get rid of something that has been with us since…well…a long time…
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4 Responses to “War On Drugs: Cocaine Purer, Cheaper”
Even after all the evidence like this that the current approach doesn’t work, there is no way in hell any politician is going to get elected by proposing the alternatives that are obviously needed to make a real impact. I love my country but on issues like this I beat my head on a wall at their stupidity.
This is old news.
The war on drugs, poverty and terror have all been total shams. Just ways to suck money out of the public treasury and put it into the hands of large donors.
That’s because voters complain about how wrong the War on Drugs is and then go on to the vote for politicians who support this disastrous policy. Consider the current batch of presidential candidates. The “top tier” candidates in BOTH parties support the War on Drugs, and yet the vast majority of the American people (including those here at TMV) will go on to vote for one of them. Rudy Giuliani is a particularly staunch supporter of the War on Drugs, and yet he has the reputation of being “liberal” on social issues.
Three presidential candidates have gone on the record as being against the War on Drugs: Republican Ron Paul, Democrat Dennis Kucinich, and Democrat Mike Gravel. Unfortunately, none of them have a shot at winning the presidency. Democrat Bill Richardson supports the decriminalization of medical marijuana–a rather mild position–but one in the right direction nonetheless.
The Libertarian and Green parties also strongly oppose the War on Drugs, and they’ve been fielding candidates for years now.
Frankly, the problem isn’t that there aren’t any candidates running who oppose the War on Drugs. They are candidates running, but the majority of the American people (including those here at TMV) refuse to vote for them because they’re not “top tier” candidates.
Nick,
That’s because of their other mental quirks, like Libertarianism.