More words about the War on Drugs

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Police Executive Research Forum embraced what Executive Director Chuck Wexler called a ?fundamental shift? in policing drug crimes that would favor treatment over arrests.

That?s certainly good policy; however, the rampant militarization of municipal police forces across the country has created a generation of drug-war foot soldiers more adept with the weapons of war than the tools of harm reduction. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has spent billions of tax dollars over the past decade ramping up the arsenals of state and local law enforcement agencies, and police have a vested interest in not only keeping them, but using them too.

Police aren?t the only ones heavily invested in the drug war. In the 1990s a new prison opened, on average, every 15 days to support the exponential surge in incarcerated drug offenders. A number of small and rural communities now rely on the corrections industry to offset their failing economies.

According to the Congressional Research Service, by 2008 there were roughly the same number of Americans employed in corrections as in the entire U.S. auto industry; and public sector unions such as AFSCME have fought long and hard against policy changes that affect their members. Meanwhile, nearly all new U.S. prisons opened since 2000 are private, according to the CRS, and the growing for-profit prison industry represents another powerful enemy of reform.