THE FINAL WORD
By Buck Sexton
T he drug war has raged on for decades at an incalculable cost in lives destroyed, money spent, and effort wasted. Ever since the Nixon administration declared the “War on Drugs” in 1971, the expenditures in its name have only gone up. America has tried – and failed – to destroy the suppliers and has locked up millions of users in the process. What we have accomplished with all of this is a subject of intense debate, but what we have lost is obvious in its ongoing devastation.
In many ways, the current opioid crisis is a repudiation of a prohibition-first approach. America now finds itself in the worst drug overdose epidemic in its history – 76,000 dead, mostly from opioids, in 2017. While prescription drugs have played no small roll creating the initial market, the Mexican cartels have become the primary supplier of illegal heroin and opioids like fentanyl and carfentanyl.
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March 2019
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