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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.

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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".

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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."

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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Marijuana has many useful uses. I have fibromyalgia pain in this arm, and the only thing that offers any relief is marijuana

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Nixon stopped short of granting clemency, which would have seen Mizanskey freed directly. In a statement Friday, he said: 'my action provides Jeff Mizanskey with the opportunity to demonstrate that he deserves parole'.

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"Everything we see points to more accessible, less-expensive heroin all over the country," Frieden said of the joint report by the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration which analyzed national survey data on drug use from 2002 to 2013.

The report found that nearly all people (96 percent) who use heroin also use multiple other substances, and that the strongest risk factor for heroin abuse is prescription opiate abuse.

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According to data from the state health department, the heroin-related death rate in the Garden State is now higher than suicide, homicide, car accidents, AIDS and is on par with cirrhosis of the liver.

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"I don't think there's any sense that if we take marijuana away from them, that will incentivize them to move into other areas," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. "I think they're already incentivized to move into as many areas as they can."

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"I see no reason for (the cartels) to continue to have marijuana as a significant percentage of their business once large-scale legalization is achieved," said Alison Holcomb, one of the architects of marijuana legislation in Washington state.

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Wednesday's landmark Supreme Court ruling would allow four people to grow and consume the plant for recreational use in a country ravaged by a decade of drug violence, but any nationwide legalization of marijuana is likely years away.

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The Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, introduced Wednesday, is modeled after a bill first proposed by Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) in 2013, which was reintroduced this year as the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act.

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Waseso said that crocodiles would be better at preventing drug traffickers from escaping prison as they could not be bribed -- unlike human guards.

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just as mafia groups and bootleggers gave up on illicit moonshine after Prohibition ended in the United States, Mexico's drug gangs would have little interest in a legal marijuana market, especially if it lured in reputable pharmaceutical and tech firms.

"I am not so optimistic to think that a cannabis business in Mexico would not encounter opposition or violence from the cartels. However, their profit margins are being eroded daily, monthly and yearly by the continued expansion of medical and recreational marijuana programs in more and more U.S. states."

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However, even Mexico's established medical industry can operate under constraints.

Mikel Arriola, the head of health regulator Cofepris, said until last year, Mexican doctors only wrote a few dozen morphine prescriptions a month as their home addresses appeared on them and they feared their access to the drug may attract criminal attention. "They were scared."

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The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

— John Ehrlichman, Nixon White House Domestic Affairs Advisor, on the War on drugs in a Harper's Magazine interview in 1994