Art Eatman
Moderator In Memoriam
Tax dollar cost of the methodology of the War on Drugs is roughly $40 billion a year. This includes all political levels, from local to federal: Enforcement, judicial, incarceration.
Add another $50 billion for such things as hospital costs of crime victims, insurance losses to burglaries and muggings, etc. Lost time from work by crime victims, and other associated costs.
Rough and approximate, of course. An accepted total seems to be around $90 billion, at any rate.
Medical comparisons: Annually, tobacco and alcohol are involved in health problems contributing to some 400,000 deaths, each. For illegal drugs, it runs around 30,000, last data I saw some years back.
We know that much of the gun-crime that has led to much useless gun-control legislation is due SOLELY to the existence of the black market and turf wars therein.
Given the degradation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as well as of the Second, I'm not sure that as a Free Society we wouldn't be better off if every (bleep) illegal drug were absolutely fully legalized. It would certainly free up money to deal with the drug problem in a manner that might have a modicum of success. What we're doing now isn't worth a bucket of warm spit.
Art
Add another $50 billion for such things as hospital costs of crime victims, insurance losses to burglaries and muggings, etc. Lost time from work by crime victims, and other associated costs.
Rough and approximate, of course. An accepted total seems to be around $90 billion, at any rate.
Medical comparisons: Annually, tobacco and alcohol are involved in health problems contributing to some 400,000 deaths, each. For illegal drugs, it runs around 30,000, last data I saw some years back.
We know that much of the gun-crime that has led to much useless gun-control legislation is due SOLELY to the existence of the black market and turf wars therein.
Given the degradation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as well as of the Second, I'm not sure that as a Free Society we wouldn't be better off if every (bleep) illegal drug were absolutely fully legalized. It would certainly free up money to deal with the drug problem in a manner that might have a modicum of success. What we're doing now isn't worth a bucket of warm spit.
Art