Despite an increased emphasis on treatment and prevention programs in recent years, the Obama administration in its 2013 budget still requested $25.6 billion in federal spending on the drug war. Of that, $15 billion would go to law enforcement, interdiction and international efforts.
The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. Over four decades, the group says, American taxpayers have dished out $1 trillion on the drug war.
What all that money has helped produce -- aside from unchanged drug addiction rates -- is the world's highest incarceration rate. According to the Sentencing Project, 2.2 million Americans are in prison or jail.
More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010,according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011. Despite more relaxed attitudes among the public at large toward non-violent offenses like marijuana use, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses spiked from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones -- even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.
A chart produced by the American Civil Liberties Union shows just how staggeringly large the US prison population has grown.
Cons of the Drug War:
http://www.businessinsider.com/32-reasons-why-we-need-to-end-the-war-on-drugs-2012-7
The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) reported in its Nov. 2004 report titled "Fifteen Years of Guidelines Sentencing - An Assessment of How Well the Federal Criminal Justice System Is Achieving the Goals of Sentencing Reform" that:
"The typical male drug offender has twice the odds of going to prison as a similar female offender....
Women have been shown in previous research to receive sentences at the bottom of the applicable guideline more frequently than men ... and to receive proportionately larger reductions when granted a downward departure.... Analyses of data and case law have suggested that judges’ paternalistic attitudes toward women might hold women to be more vulnerable and sympathetic and less responsible than men....
Judges may seek to mitigate the effects of strict application of the guidelines rules based on female offenders sometimes being dominated by more culpable male accomplices. There is also reason for judges to believe that women are more instrumental in raising their children than their male counterparts..., and may suffer more from imprisonment than do men due to greater separation from their families caused by the relative scarcity of prisons for women."
Nov. 2004 - United States Sentencing Commission (USSC)
Heather MacDonald, JD, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote in her Spring 2001 article titled "The Myth of Racial Profiling" for the City Journal that:
"According to the racial profiling crowd, the war on drugs immediately became a war on minorities....
Between 1976 and 1994, 64 percent of the homicide victims in drug turf wars were black, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of FBI data. Sixty-seven percent of known perpetrators were also black. Likewise, some 60 percent of victims and perpetrators in drug-induced fatal brawls are black. These figures match the roughly 60 percent of drug offenders in state prison who are black. Unless you believe that white traffickers are less violent than black traffickers, the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment rate for blacks on drug charges appears consistent with the level of drug activity in the black population....
The notion that there are lots of heavy-duty white dealers sneaking by undetected contradicts the street experience of just about every narcotics cop you will ever talk to—though such anecdotal evidence, of course, would fail to convince the ACLU, convinced as it is of the blinding racism that afflicts most officers.... The cops go where the deals are. When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, still dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting. Recently, however, big shipments have been going to minority neighborhoods; subsequent arrests will reflect crime intelligence, not racism."
2001 - Heather MacDonald, JD
John Derbyshire, columnist, in his Feb. 19, 2001 column for the National Review titled "In Defense of Racial Profiling: Where Is Our Common Sense" wrote that:
"Law-enforcement officials are simply employing the same stereotypes as you [and] me.... They do this for reasons of simple efficiency. A policeman who concentrates a disproportionate amount of his limited time and resources on young black men is going to uncover far more crimes-and therefore be far more successful in his career-than one who biases his attention toward, say, middle-aged Asian women....
A racial-profiling ban, under which police officers were required to stop and question suspects in precise proportion to their demographic representation (in what? the precinct population? the state population? the national population?), would lead to massive inefficiencies in police work. Which is to say, massive declines in the apprehension of criminals."
These articles made good points about government and the big players in the drug war, The drug war has its good and its bad. It started in 1971 and still goes on today. Its such a big deal because people die from the war but people also die from war.
