The U.S. war on drugs: Still failing at enormous cost to taxpayers

Preparing bags of medical marijuana - AP Photo

 With much of the news cycle dominated by the war over health insurance reform and dirty pool politics, my “marijuana” Google alert has been fairly quiet, except for news of big and small marijuana drug busts.

So even though there’s not a lot of “newsmakers” on the politics of marijuana, the war against drugs continues to ruin lives at an alarming rate and at great expense to this nation, when we’re arguing about where to get the money to provide all Americans with health care insurance, or how to make sure every child gets the best education available in the world, to fix our crumbling infrastructure, or maybe even to extend the successful economic stimulus program “Cash for Clunkers.”

According to statistics from Drug Sense.org, as of today at 12:05 p.m.:

The federal government has spent $12,187,400,000 on the failed war against drugs. That’s over $55.2 million per day.

The state governments have spent $18,707,665,000, over $84.8 million per day.

The total combined expenditure year-to-date to fight drugs in the United States is $30,895,065,000 or over $141 million per day.

That seems like a small price to pay to save Americans from the horrors of drug addiction, right? The problem is that it is not doing that. In fact it seems that all the money being spent, tens of billions of dollars per year, is actually increasing drug use among young and older Americans. We are among the countries with the highest numbers of drug use per capita in the world. Substantially higher than a country like the Netherlands which though technically still illegal in effect has legalized marijuana.

That’s merely a look at the dollars that don’t make sense. What about the social cost to Americans who get caught up in the web of America’s war on drugs?

So far in 2009, more than 1.1 million people have been arrested for drug offense crimes in the United States. This comes at a tremendous cost to U.S. taxpayers when you factor in the costs for law enforcement, the court system, and the prison system to incarcerate those convicted. Shocking as that number may sound, 47% or 531,812 of those arrests have been for marijuana. And though the government would like you to believe they only target smugglers and traffickers, the majority of the arrests are for simple possession.

While 2009 is ahead of 2007 numbers for total drug arrests, so far the percentage of marijuana arrests compared to total drug arrests is identical with 47.4% in 2007 and the same this year. So if you take the 2007 numbers for possession at 88.8% of total marijuana arrests, year-to-date we would have over 472,000 arrests for simple marijuana possession this year. (2007 numbers based on figures from (drugwarfacts.org).

Since 1995, the U.S. prison population has grown by more than 43,000 inmates per year. On average about 25% of those new inmates are for drug offenses. We continue to incarcerate as opposed to treat substance abuse individuals. We continue to treat drug addicts as criminals instead of sick individuals. Because we take this hard stance, instead of federal funding for a clean needles program, junkies share contaminated needles and that causes about 10 new preventable HIV infected individuals each day.

Why should we pay for a junkie’s needles? Junkies need medical help, not incarceration, and they need clean needles to stop the spread of AIDS. To pay for clean needles is in the long-run cheaper than to pay for medical treatment of ten new AIDS patients per day.

It’s hard to change our way of thinking, drugs = jail. But history has shown that a hard-line law enforcement prohibition strategy has failed miserably over the last few decades, and unless we can overrule the Puritan, Conservative mindset to stamp out everything we don’t agree with, through legislation, prohibition and incarceration, this expensive, ineffective crusade will continue to cost us billions of dollars per year, continue to ruin lives, and continue to be counterproductive.

Don’t miss Florida’s tough stance on marijuana later this week on this page in the Examiner.

Photo Credit: In this May 20, 2009 photo, Tom Romero packs one-eighth-ounce bags of medical marijuana at The Green Door dispensary in San Francisco. Since California became the first state to legalize the drug for medicinal use, the weed that the federal government puts in the same category as heroin and cocaine has become a major economic force. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)