Here is a nice bit on the real costs of the war:
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During the debate, Representative Thomas Upton Sisson (D-Mississippi) most bluntly articulated the purpose of the Harrison Act: "The purpose of this bill—and we are all in sympathy with it—is to prevent the use of opium in the United States, destructive as it is to human happiness and human life."
The destruction to "human happiness and human life" by pre–Harrison Act opium and coca use has been dwarfed—by orders of magnitude—by the destructiveness of the post–Harrison Act drug trade.
The Harrison Narcotics Act paved a global road to hell. Not just for the United States (from kids slinging drugs in the Chicago projects to overdosed celebrities in Los Angeles), but for Afghanistan, where the Taliban has propped itself up on the opium and heroin trade; for Myanmar, where an abusive military dictatorship funds itself by being the second-largest source of opium poppies and a new powerhouse of meth and ketamine production; for Laos, where geography and new highways make the country an ideal smuggling nexus for everything and the locals have developed a recent fondness for meth; for the favelas of Brazil; for Morocco, where I have personally seen hillsides covered in marijuana plants "protected" by bored-looking teenagers toting around AK-47s; for the Dominican Republic, which has become a major transit point for cocaine and heroin bound for the U.S. via Puerto Rico; for Colombia, where cocaine production has paid for a brutal 40-year war between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, the government, and narcos (the war has displaced 3.3 million people from their homes, or 7.2 percent of the country's population); for Ghana and Mali and other West African transshipment points for European-bound cocaine; and for pretty much every other country on the planet.
Observers such as Dominic Corva, a geographer at the University of Washington who has done extensive research on the cocaine trade, predict that as the Colombian and Mexican meat grinders become more violent, more troublesome, and less profitable, the cocaine production and smuggling market will move from Latin America to Africa.
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http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the- ... id=6163374
A bit I particularly liked from the link:
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A few days later, I'm talking to a retired Coast Guard captain who spent much of the 1980s working in the Gulf of Mexico busting drug smugglers. The Coast Guard, which had previously focused heavily on search-and- rescue and fisheries patrols, stumbled into the drug interdiction business by accident. "We'd go out to rescue someone," the captain says, "and there would be all this pot on board." On March 8, 1973, the Coast Guard cutter Dauntless, ported in Miami, found over a ton of marijuana on an American sailboat called The Big L. That was the beginning of the big time.
"People were generally ho-hum about search and rescue," he says. "Not that search and rescue was a ho-hum thing—it could be very dramatic—but if you brought in a big boatload of pot, it was a big news story." More importantly, it attracted serious money from the federal government, which was cranking up the drug war. "Commanders of Coast Guard vessels said to themselves, 'With drug busts, we're getting more mission recognition and more resources—and this is kind of fun!'"
He was a dedicated soldier in the drug war. "We'd get worked up about 'darn pot-smoking hippies trying to poison our schools' and all that," he says. "It was during the first Bush administration, and we just got pounded with that message." But then he found himself having to let go of crew members he liked and wanted to keep working with because they'd tested positive for marijuana. "I'd have good crew members, good sailors—good citizens who caused far fewer problems than people who abused alcohol—who, through drug testing, got caught in the net. And you begin to think, 'Well, this doesn't fit the stereotype we're hearing.' But then we'd come home from sea and watch Miami Vice and it would glamorize what we were doing, so it all fed into itself."
As his career went on, the captain—who happens to be my father, Ned Kiley, who had a 30-year Coast Guard career and retired as an O-6, the equivalent of a colonel in the army—started having quiet doubts about the ballooning bureaucracy around the drug-war industry, and the contractors and lobbyists encouraging the government to waste huge amounts of money on boats and airplanes and radar surveillance systems that weren't very useful. "Customs saw all this money and all these toys the Coast Guard was getting and wanted some, too—but they couldn't even take care of their boats. They were always broken. It was just bureaucracy run amok."
Then there were the people he was arresting at sea. "We'd get some actual bad guys," he says, most of them Americans. "Real low-life Gulf Coast types who were probably causing problems in other areas. But mostly you'd just get poor fishermen, poor Colombians, poor Hondurans. And you'd get some middle-class types who were just trying to pull some shit—we caught some poor couple's sailboat with 200 pounds of marijuana, which was a fairly small amount compared to what we were seeing."
