I have yet to read a stronger indictment on the War on Drugs than this one. Misha Glenny details what a enormous failure the effort is worldwide:

Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s poppy crop. But the success of the illegal narcotics industry isn’t confined to Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, the Middle East, Africa and across the United States.

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

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The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail.

The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs. The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs badly enough, they’ll stop doing what they’re doing. But instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state’s only contact with it is through law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers, distributors or users. But so vast is the demand for drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has anything approaching the ability to police the trade.

Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once traffickers get around the business risks — getting busted or being shot by competitors — they stand to make vast profits. A confidential strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet and later leaked to the media offered one of the most damning indictments of the efficacy of the drug war. Law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the 700 tons of cocaine and 550 tons of heroin produced annually. According to the report, they would have to seize 60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable for the traffickers.

Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin is plummeting in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. As for cocaine, according to the UNODC, the street price of a gram in the United States is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a threefold drop.

Hear this:  I have never used any drug for recreational purposes, nor will I ever.  I understand the terrible damage this can have on a person’s life.  I am not advocating the use of drugs.  I cannot think of a more effective way of destroying your life.  But prohibition of an activity does not stop it.  It only move it into the hands of criminals.  Ending the failed War on Drugs would do more good than harm.

The common argument is that legalizing drugs would lead to wide-spread addiction.  But I ask you this:  is there a lack of availability now?  Hardly.  Those who don’t do drugs now don’t do them because they can’t find them.  They don’t do them because they know the hazards.   And if they did, for some reason, try them when they are legal, the taxes from the sale could go towards any rehab they might require.

Prohibition of alcohol lead to the rise of the American mafia.  Prohibition of drugs has done that on a world-wide scale.  Take the power out of the criminal’s hands and turn them legit.