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Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half.

'American Drug War: The Last White Hope'

A Film by Kevin Booth

Uploaded by TheStraight911Truth

Thirty-five years after Nixon started the war on drugs, we have over 1 million nonviolent drug offenders living behind bars.

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history. The question has become, how much more can the country endure. Inspired by the death of four family members from "legal drugs," Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become such a big failure.

When I suggest to someone that all drugs should be legalized, 90% of the time I am told how evil drugs are and how they lead to more crime and legalizing them would instantly turn the country into a violent hell hole. Anyone with an open mind can be shown how this is absolute nonsense.

After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

More than 1.6 million people were arrested for drug offenses in the US last year, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report 2010, and more than half of them were for marijuana. That's a drug arrest every 19 seconds, 24 hours a day, every day last year. The numbers suggest that despite "no more war on drugs" rhetoric emanating from Washington, the drug war juggernaut is rolling along on cruise control.

Why is the War on Drugs lost? It reflects our failure to learn from history. Drug prohibition has all the characteristics of other well-intentioned, yet counterproductive, government programmes. Specifically, the drug war causes crime; it corrupts the police; it violates civil liberties; it throws good money after bad; and it weakens – even destroys – families, neighbourhoods, and communities.

Street drugrelated deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes

Report of the global commission on drugs says the global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. It suggests to end the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug markets, drug use and drug dependence.

A gruesome and bizarre incident in which one man chewed off most of another man’s face in Miami last month is spurring Congressional action to federally ban a powerful synthetic drug police say might have incited the cannibalistic crime.