Title: How America Lost the War on Drugs - Rolling Stone
Headings: How America Lost the War on Drugs
How America Lost the War on Drugs
After thirty-five years and $500 billion, drugs are as cheap and plentiful as ever. An anatomy of a failure
1. After Pablo
MarijuanAmerica: Inside America’s Last Growth Industry
2. The Making of a Tragedy
3. Brainiacs & Cold Warriors
4. The Young Guns
5. The Lobbyists & the Mad Professor
6. The General & the Adman
7. The Harvard Man
8. Helicopters & Coca
9. The Temple of Hope
10. The Return of Don Berna
11. The Water Balloon
12. The Privateers

Content: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s — and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail. Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed — those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences — did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was “absolutely nothing” that examined “how each program was or wasn’t working,” says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.
But after Escobar was killed in 1993 — and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels — doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn’t. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn’t been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn’t. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know