The World Health Organization released a study today called “Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use” that has some very interesting findings. For starters, it shows that the United States has higher levels of cocaine and marijuana consumption than any other country, despite our very stringent drug policies.  The second major point is that countries with looser drug policies, such as the Netherlands, tended to have lower usage rates.

This is interesting because the whole point of the War on Drugs was to decrease drug use, but apparently that’s not what it’s doing. Instead we have thousands of people in prison for non-violent crimes, innocent civilians (and police) geting killed all the time, and numerous other problems I don’t care to list right now. I can understand the point of the War on Drugs, but usually when a policy completely fails at its purpose, we try something else. I mean, Prohibition didn’t work despite its good intentions, so we repealed it. But with the Drug War we seem to keep fighting it nonstop, without ever looking back to see really see if it’s working. After 35 years of failure, shouldn’t we be trying something else?