The cost

Detroit News editor Nolan Finley is not going to take it anymore.

You want to know why kids are being killed in Detroit? Because drug dealing is a $100 billion enterprise in the United States. All of that money moves through the criminal underground, where it is untaxed, unregulated and untraceable.
The only way to stop the drug trade from consuming our children and our communities is to take the profit out of selling dope.
For more than 30 years, we’ve tried to do that by kicking in doors, rounding up street corner dealers, cutting off international supply lines and filling our prisons. And it hasn’t worked.
It will never work. Those determined to destroy themselves with drugs will find a way to do so, just as those who prefer to ruin their lives with alcohol or gambling, vices the government decided that, if we can’t beat ’em, we might as well tax ’em. […]
A drug-free America is an impossible dream. Our stubborn determination to press this lost cause is killing people. […]
When babies die in their beds, we have to start challenging the premises of the drug war, and asking whether the fight is worth the cost.