A new Zogby poll finds that three out of four Americans (86 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Republicans, and 81 percent of independents) think the drug war is failing. But most Americans still don’t favor legalization. Only 27 percent favor legalizing some drugs. Failing Drug War
I have always had mixed feelings about legalization, but there is little doubt that our drug war is a complete disaster. Not only is it criminally unfair (while blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate in this country, blacks are ten times more likely to be jailed on drug charges), but it is ineffective. As I write in the introduction to America Anonymous, “Politics and profit-seeking continue to have more to do with how we combat addiction than does science or rational thinking. How else to explain that the two deadliest substances in America–nicotine and alcohol–are legal, while marijuana, which kills virtually no one, remains the obsessive focus of our staggeringly ineffective drug war.”
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