The war on drugs has been a failure largely because we have not clearly identified the enemy. We spend billions of dollars trying to eliminate the flow of drugs into our country. This strategy has proven to be an abject failure. Drugs continue to pour into the U.S. because of simple microeconomics: supply and demand. We focus most of our resources trying to eradicate the supply of drugs, but it will never make a difference as long as the demand is high.
High demand when the supply is insufficient, no matter what the cause, only drives prices higher. This results in more untaxed dollars going into the coffers of organized crime and less into the legitimate economy. Furthermore, it emboldens some users to commit even more crime to secure drugs. Fully 80 percent of our incarcerated population, (2.3 million in 2019 or 0.7 percent of the U.S. population) are imprisoned secondary to drug- and alcohol-related crimes. This does not include those being supervised on parole or probation. The direct and indirect annual costs of incarceration are estimated to be as high as $1.2 trillion.
Perhaps, the biggest tragedy is that little or nothing is being done to address the causative factors underlying this mass incarceration, or to prepare those incarcerated for release back into society by helping them address and overcome their alcoholism and/or substance abuse. Continuing the war on drugs and not addressing the demand side of the equation is expensive, foolhardy, costs lives, and ruins families.