War on drugs an abysmal failure

I read the recent piece on the lives and adventures of the pot smugglers of Beaufort County in years past (“Gentlemen Smugglers”) with interest.

Most today acknowledge the “war on drugs” that began under Reagan, with George H.W. Bush as the first “drug czar,” has been a complete failure, but it was much more — and worse — than just a failure. In terms of the harm done the country and the public resources it wasted, it was perhaps the worst enterprise our government had ever, up to that point, undertaken in its mostly well-intentioned history. Even Reagan’s criminal scheme known as “Iran-Contra,” plainly unconstitutional though it was, seems trivial when compared to the war on drugs. Only the later vanity war W started in Iraq can “top” it.

Ironically, the war on drugs was the project of a president who claimed that government was unable to fix our problems, because “government is the problem.” Yes, well, the government was certainly the problem where the war on drugs was concerned. It can be seen as a nearly complete paradigm of unintended consequences — unintended, but largely foreseeable. Even the nonsense that was Reagan’s “trickle-down” economics could be seen, back then at least, as more likely to produce some good effect than could the ham-handed prohibition of drugs.

This story was originally published August 17, 2017 at 3:01 PM with the headline "War on drugs an abysmal failure."