97 years apart and the headlines are identical so nothings changed since 1911!
"Of all the nations of the world," Dr. Hamilton Wright, who knows more of the subject than any other living man, told me the other day. "the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita."
1911 NEW YORK TIMES
Dr. Hamilton Wright
UNCLE SAM IS THE WORST DRUG FIEND IN THE WORLD
How can anyone rationalize the fact that the United States,with only 4 percent of the world's population, consumes two-thirds of the world's illegal drugs?
2007 CNN (Cable News Network)
Lou Dobbs
The war within, killing ourselves
Maybe we should try a surge but we all know that's already been done numerous times before and always failed. Using the Police in the Drug War is like using Cops to Cure Cancer it makes no sense.
War on Freedom
Although the War on Drugs has been a dismal failure since it's inception America's drug policies are no longer even debated in Washington, D.C. The only decision they now have to make is how much more of our money should they waste on the failed drug war in fact just last year alone they decided to only flush 69 Billion dollars of our hard earned tax money down the toilet.
Dr. Hamilton Wright USA Opium Commissioner
One might imagine that if our government were truly serious about reducing the flow of illegal drugs, it would have learned something after a century of failure and pursued a different strategy.
The 100 year old Law Enforcement and criminalization strategies that still characterize the failed War on Drugs have never been effective in stopping the manufacture, use, and trafficking of illegal substances. The costs of the enforcement and interdiction strategy are staggering if one considers their failure to adequately address the root causes of the problem of drug trafficking and abuse, and the other purposes to which all this money could have been put into good use such as drug treatment.
A 1988 report by the American Bar Association noted:
Police, prosecutors and judges told the committee that they have been unsuccessful in making a significant impact on the importation, sale and use of illegal drugs, despite devoting much of their resources to the arrest, prosecution and trial of drug offenders.
The authors of the report concluded that the drug problem was "severe, growing worse, and . . . Law enforcement has been unable to control it."
How can there be a war on drugs? Can there be a war on stones, on buildings, on aspirin? Surely, wars are on living, not inanimate, objects. And this war is being waged on people. Like every war, it is being waged in wanton disregard of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”—“unalienable rights” with which we are endowed by our Creator, according to the Declaration of Independence.
Benjamin Franklin once said "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" I say after a Century of failure isn’t it about time we tried something else?
DRUG CZAR