The Drug War is a failure, an incredibly profitable failure.  The battle field is littered with casualties while the prisoners from this conflict crowd our jails, and four decades on, the carnage continues unabated.  The only people with a vested interest in this debacle’s continuation are the profiteers, the violent drug cartels who indiscriminately sell an unregulated, often adulterated, potentially lethal set of products, and the banks and corporations that launder their money for them on the one hand, and the military, legal, correctional, industrial, private contractor complex that profits directly and indirectly from this traffic in human misery, all in the name of the law, on the other.  Like the Global War on Terror, the War on Drugs stems from a kernel of real concern, surrounded by a massive, calcified, counterproductive architecture of futility and disastrous unintentional consequences.

And what choices are we given as a community?  It always seems to be all or nothing, some libertarian dream land where everything is legal or the present system, that’s it.  You’re either with the hippies or the law and order types.

At least some people are thinking about rational drug policies.  Too bad the Obama administration has dismissed this report out of hand.

Global Commission Report English.