QUOTE

A study by analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California research organization, suggested that if marijuana were legalized in California and the drug spilled from there to other states, Mexican drug cartels would lose about a fifth of their annual income of some $6.5 billion from illegal exports to the United States.

QUOTE

These findings suggest that expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing."
...criminalising drugs had "gifted one of the largest commodity trades on earth to organised crime".

QUOTE

The Home Office said drugs were illegal because they were dangerous.

QUOTE

Quickest way to fix our economic mess would be to end the drug war.

QUOTE

The F.D.A.’s long resistance to added restrictions on the drugs underscores what critics say is its continuing struggle to address the complexities of the painkiller problem in its often conflicting roles — one as a regulator that approves drugs and the other as a drug safety watchdog.

QUOTE

In 1986, the US Defense Department funded a two-year study by the RAND Corporation, which found that the use of the armed forces to interdict drugs coming into the United States would have little or no effect on cocaine traffic and might, in fact, raise the profits of cocaine cartels and manufacturers.

QUOTE

During the early-to-mid-1990s, the Clinton administration ordered and funded a major cocaine policy study, again by RAND. ...  the report said that treatment is the cheapest way to cut drug use, stating that drug treatment is twenty-three times more effective than the supply-side "war on drugs".

QUOTE

The National Research Council Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs published its findings in 2001 on the efficacy of the drug war.
...
"The existing drug-use monitoring systems are strikingly inadequate to support the full range of policy decisions that the nation must make.... It is unconscionable for this country to continue to carry out a public policy of this magnitude and cost without any way of knowing whether and to what extent it is having the desired effect."

QUOTE

Richard Davenport-Hines, in his book The Pursuit of Oblivion, criticized the efficacy of the War on Drugs by pointing out that:

   "10–15% of illicit heroin and 30% of illicit cocaine is intercepted. Drug traffickers have gross profit margins of up to 300%.  At least 75% of illicit drug shipments would have to be intercepted before the traffickers' profits were hurt."

QUOTE

At least 500 economists, including Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman, George Akerlof and Vernon L. Smith, have noted that reducing the supply of marijuana without reducing the demand causes the price, and hence the profits of marijuana sellers, to go up, according to the laws of supply and demand.

QUOTE

Despite over $7 billion spent annually towards arresting and prosecuting nearly 800,000 people across the country for marijuana offenses in 2005 (FBI Uniform Crime Reports), the federally funded Monitoring the Future Survey reports about 85% of high school seniors find marijuana "easy to obtain". That figure has remained virtually unchanged since 1975, never dropping below 82.7% in three decades of national surveys.

QUOTE

Penalties for drug crimes among American youth almost always involve permanent or semi-permanent removal from opportunities for education, strip them of voting rights, and later involve creation of criminal records which make employment more difficult.  Thus, some authors maintain that the War on Drugs has resulted in the creation of a permanent underclass of people who have few educational or job opportunities, often as a result of being punished for drug offenses which in turn have resulted from attempts to earn a living in spite of having no education or job opportunities.

QUOTE

In his 2015 budget request, Obama is asking Congress for $25.4 billion, $200 million more than the government plans to spend in fiscal 2014.

In Obama's 2015 plan, about 43 cents of each dollar will be spent on programs aimed at reducing Americans' demand for drugs, a part of of the president's health strategy—what the administration officially calls drug "demand reduction."

The rest of the funding—about 57 cents of each dollar, or a total of $14.4 billion—will be spent on "supply reduction," federal efforts to root out drug producers and sellers. That includes $9.2 billion to support domestic law enforcement's anti-drug actions.

QUOTE

Or maybe the law has become addicted to the never-ending stream of increasing cash they get from this racket.

QUOTE

The U.S. military is closing in on the end of its long war in Afghanistan, and Washington has spent $7.6 billion trying to reduce the production of poppy, the brilliantly blooming plant whose resin is made into heroin and other opioids.

The legacy thus far? Poppy cultivation was at an all-time high of 209,000 hectares last year, it grows in numerous parts of the country where it once did not, and U.S. officials blame Afghanistan’s government for failing to stop it.

Those are the key findings of a new report released Tuesday by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

QUOTE

Before Commissioner Bratton first took the reins of the NYPD in 1994, the department had been arresting only about 2,000 people a year for possessing pot, or about 34,000 total from 1981 to 1995.  

But under Bratton’s “broken windows� theory of policing, which targets low-level crimes to establish a sense of law and order, low-level marijuana possession became an NYPD focus in high-crime neighborhoods. Bolstered by dramatic drops in crime, such arrests soon reached over 50,000 a year, and Bratton was celebrated as the top cop in the country.

QUOTE

Remarkably, 2 Chainz manages to silence Grace by relaying an incident where police stopped the rapper's tour bus after they smelled marijuana emanating from the vehicle. A miniscule amount of pot residue was found onboard, resulting in the police filing charges against the rapper's security team. The charges that were ultimately dropped, resulting in "a waste of taxpayers' time and money."

QUOTE

Health departments in Alabama, Mississippi and New York have issued alerts this month about more spice users being rushed to hospitals experiencing extreme anxiety, violent behavior and delusions, with some of the cases resulting in death. Similar increases have occurred in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, New Jersey and Texas.
The total number of fatalities nationwide this year is not available, health officials said. One person in Louisiana died Wednesday and two others were in intensive care, said Mark Ryan, the director of the Louisiana Poison Center.