Sen. Aiken's solution looks better by the day.

The Drug War Toll Mounts:
"Today, federal and state governments spend between $40 and $60 billion per year to fight the war on drugs, about ten times the amount spent in 1980 -- and billions more to keep drug felons in jail."

So says Radley Balko of the Cato Institute. His gloomy analysis reminded me that back in the heyday of the Vietnam war, a Republican senator from New England suggested that we should just declare victory and quit. I thought it was the wrong answer then for Vietnam, but as an exit strategy for the war on drugs, it has growing appeal.

For all that the war costs, surely we must have some progress to show for it. Here is how Balko presents the evidence of that progress:
"The illicit drug trade is estimated to be worth $50 billion today ($400 billion worldwide), up from $1 billion 25 years ago. Annual surveys of high school seniors show heroin and marijuana are as available today than they were in 1975. Deaths from drug overdoses have doubled in the last 20 years.
"According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the price of for a gram of heroin has dropped by about 38 percent since 1981, while the purity of that gram has increased six-fold. The price of cocaine has dropped by 50 percent, while its purity has increased by 70 percent."

Balko reminds us that alcohol prohibition had similar effects in corruption of public officers, encouraging a large segment of the population to behave as outlaws, and pumping huge amounts of money into the hands of criminal syndicates. However, prohibition did make alcohol a little harder to get and there were some claims of reduction in alcohol-related diseases. The drug war, however is an unmitigated disaster. The profits don't just fund common criminals (the way bootleg alcohol made a rich man of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.), much of it ends up supporting Marxist revolutionaries in places like Colombia and destabilizing numerous foreign governments in Latin America and Asia.