America on Drugs

Pierre Tristam has an outstanding piece: When Admitting Failure Is Forbidden –
America On Drugs. The whole thing is worth reading and quoting. Here’s a snippet.

The country is addicted to the bureaucracy of the war. It keeps prisons in business. It keeps police departments fattening up their ranks. It lets politicians on the stump freebase on tough-sounding rhetoric, cost-free. It is the law-enforcement establishment’s bottomless welfare plan, with more dire results than social welfare ever caused those on the dole. For all its “welfare queen” myths and admitted failures, social welfare programs had their millions of successes, keeping people out of poverty or helping them through bad patches. The drug war is a legacy of victims. Its only true winners are its enablers and dependents — government and law enforcement — who, experiencing its futility first-hand, should have been leading the charge for reform decades ago. But they’re too addicted to 12-step their way out of it.

Rather, the quagmire worsens, implicating America’s already tattered foreign policy along the way.