Kristof says: "Drugs Won the War "

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”
As if that weren't enough, I keep hearing that the price, $1 Trillion over 10 years, is the main hangup in passing health care reform. Where ever can we come up with that kind of money? A clue can be found in Nicholas Kristof's column that appeared in the NY Times on June 13, 2009:
"... we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)"
Over ten years, that's $441 billion, almost half of the trillion they say we'll need. Revenue from taxation from legal sales & income taxes from those who work in the many new industries that cultivation of the very versatile hemp plant will foment, will more than make up the rest.
What is keeping that from happening? As John McLaughlin made Eleanor Clift admit a couple weeks ago, "The Democrats are craven." All of them from, Obama on down to Gabrielle Giffords, lack the political courage to address the issue.
If the libertarian wing of the Republican party had the sense & the courage, they could revive their party by adopting a plank calling for the legalization of hemp as the fiscally responsible thing to do. But they think that being tough, even if it's stupid & counterproductive, is the conservative thing to do.
Real conservatives know that prohibition is antithetical to a free nation.