There is no war on drugs because you cannot have a war against inanimate objects. There is only war on drug addicts. Which means we are warring on the most abused and vulnerable segments of the population. You can see left and right of the war on drugs and you can see it is not working.
But you know what, I have a different point of view. If decade after decade, after decade, after decade, if the intentions of the policies are not being realized; in fact the opposite is what is happening … maybe it's serving some purpose, the raison d’etre of repressive apparatus is that it can be used against the people when the need arises. Is it really a failure or maybe it has a function of demonizing a certain section of population, that justifies more repression. Maybe it has a function of keeping the legal apparatus going, maybe it has a function of making a money for a lot of people, maybe it has a function of fueling the privatization of incarceration industry.
So maybe it is not a failure at all. And from that perspective, was the Vietnam War a failure? No, not at all. It was militarily. But, the end result was that US took control of the economies of Southeast Asia. Is the Iraq War a failure? Well, it is for the people who died there, for a half a million Iraqis who died it is, but it is not a failure for American oil companies. So that everywhere we have to be careful before we call them failures. Somebody wins. The somebody who wins are the same people who destroy neighborhoods, communities. It is the same system that undermines human health, that undermines dignity, that undermines human connections and makes life less tolerable on this planet.
Now, we don’t have to agree on what the solutions might be. And that’s okay. But what do we agree on is the importance of speaking for truth, but what we do agree is on importance of people getting together and struggling in a healthy way for different life.