editorial comment Of course it's successful. More deaths and more people on jail are sure signs of progress (well, for the DEA anyway....)

The war on drugs is a war on people. The laws for controlled substances are completely uncontrolled street drugs that are often bulked up with non-drugs to add weight to increase price. Punishment for possession or sale of drugs has filled our already bursting prisons, which has done nothing to slow the supply and demand. The inflated prices of street drugs has driven our addicted citizens into desperate situations that eats up their finances or leads them into doing crimes to support their chemical dependence. Putting these people in jail doesn?t make any sense. It doesn't change their priorities.

Youth gangs accumulated power and money by having kids run the street sales of drugs. Many of these kids have been selling crack and gathering large sums of money by the time they are 12 or 13 years old. Many of these kids carry guns because the older people involved in the street drug culture often attempt to rob them. It is a dangerous job, but lucrative and these young kids only receive a slap on the wrist if they are arrested, but by the time they turn 18, they will start to face hard time and they haven?t learned any other skills to make a life, for themselves, off the streets.

The war on drugs needs law enforcement and underground sales to keep its momentum going. Doctors and pharmacists should handle drugs. If people want to do drugs, it should not impact the rest of the world.

An effective way to end the drug war is to legalize marijuana, and let the physicians treat the drug abusers who are addicted. The same kind of nightmare existed during the prohibition of alcohol. There are nightmarish stories of brews that poisoned some of the buyers and users of the then illegal alcoholic beverages.

I know of 2 victims who used illegal drugs, perhaps for the very first time and died. There lives were snuffed out because of prohibition. Their parents are devastated. There is more and more evidence that drugs should be regulated, rather than the totally uncontrolled black market that is in existence now.

Clusters of drug deaths often occur from batches of poisoned chemicals. These cluster deaths come as overdoses, both fatal and non-fatal and the numbers of these overdoses are rising across our country. Twenty years ago, nationwide, drug related deaths have risen from approximately 2,000 annually to nearly 16,000 last year alone. Is this a successful war on drugs? What do you think?

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