How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs

There are few more wasteful and inappropriate federal activities than the seizing and destroying of indoor and outdoor cannabis plants. At the peak of Washington’s pointless war on drugs in 2010 the DEA funded the eradication of 11 million marijuana plants, and has caused 125 million of such “weeds” to be pulled and destroyed since 1990.

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs DSchart

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs DSchart

That’s right. While the taxpayers of Flyover America were being shackled with what is now $20 trillion of public debt, the boondogglers and busybodies of the Imperial City were chopping up harmless cannabis plants in pursuit of the very dumbest and most destructive “war” of the last 50 years.

>We here address the nation’s misbegotten war on drugs first launched by Tricky Dick Nixon in 1971 when he declared illicit drugs to be “America’s Public Enemy Number One.” Like all of Washington’s feckless external wars in the last 50 years it has accomplished nothing — even as it has left societal mayhem and massive fiscal waste and debt in its wake.

In fact, more than $1.5 trillion has been wasted at all levels of government on the war on drugs. Yet notwithstanding this enforcement dragnet, a vast network of brutal criminal enterprises has been spawned to distribute the artificially inflated contraband. So there has been virtually no change in the rate of drug use or drug addiction over all those decades.

In a survey taken since the 1970s, the percent of high-school seniors reporting illicit drug use in the past month has always varied between 25 and 30 percent. Likewise, the drug-use rate for the total population was 8 percent after 25 years of the war on drugs in 2002, but has slowly drifted higher to 9.5 percent in the last few years — notwithstanding record anti-drug spending and enforcement. And as shown by the blue line in the chart below, the U.S. drug-addiction rate has remained +/- 1.5 percent for four decades running.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/how-to-drain-the-swamp-end-the-failed-war-on-drugs-part-1/

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs

How to Drain the Swamp: End the Failed War on Drugs

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