War on Drugs

The war on drugs has been a dismal failure.
The war on drugs is responsible for the formation of Mexican drug cartels.
The war on drugs is responsible for ¼ million fentanyl deaths.
The war on drugs is responsible for nearly ½ million unjust incarcerations. (The United States has less than 5% of the earth’s population, while our prisons hold 25% of the prisoners.)
The war on drugs has raged on for 50 years, it has not worked. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”-Albert Einstein.

Ending the war on drugs would reduce financial harm to addicts
Ending the war on drugs would end unknown dosing and end most accidental overdose deaths
Ending the war on drugs would end the criminal drug market and the chaos it’s caused
Ending the war on drugs would fix our overcrowded prison population problem.
Ending the war on drugs would save us millions of dollars a year in law enforcement and prison expenses.

Legalization and regulation doesn’t lead to an open market. It is because drugs are risky that they need to be legally regulated each drug according to risk.  

We must not abandon this need to the criminals.
We must prioritize public health, human rights, security and development. 
We must do this not because drugs are safe, but because they are not.
We must manage and reduce the risks. 
We must deal with reality not some imagined utopia. 
We must treat drug addiction as a health problem instead of a crime problem.
We must provide robust addiction treatment to anybody ready to quit.
We must regulate to reduce overdose deaths and the spread of diseases.

For individuals addicted to opioids or suffering from chronic pain, a war on drugs has never been a prescription for improving wellness.
We fail and fail again. Recent Drug Overdose Homicide laws seek to hold drug distributors criminally responsible for overdose deaths. Believed to target major drug traffickers, these laws are actually resulting in friends, family members, romantic partners, and co-users of overdose victims being charged for their death. This is a war with too much collateral damage.