U S Army War College

Insanity - Four Decades of U.s. Counterdrug Strategy U S Army War College

Publisher Marketing: In the four decades since President Nixon first declared war on drugs the U. S. counterdrug strategy has remained virtually unchanged - favoring supply-reduction, law enforcement and criminal sanctions over demand-reduction, treatment and education. While the annual counterdrug budget has ballooned from $100 million to $25 billion, drug availability of most illicit drugs remains at an all-time high. The human cost is staggering - nearly 40,000 drug-related deaths in the U. S. annually. The societal impact, in purely economic terms, is now estimated to be approximately $200 billion per year. And the global illicit drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet - approximately $320 billion annually. Legalization is almost certainly not the answer; however, an objective analysis of available data confirms that: 1) the U. S. has pursued essentially the same flawed supply-reduction strategy for forty years; and 2) simply increasing the amount of money invested each year in this strategy will not make it successful. Faced with impending budget cuts and a future of budget austerity, policymakers must replace the longstanding U. S. counterdrug strategy with a pragmatic, science-based, demand-reduction strategy that offers some prospect of reducing the economic and societal impacts of illicit drugs on American society