Why not treat this drug habit as a health problem and not criminal behavior. Im sure a re-hab would be cheaper than 5 years in prison. In jail she will be able to buy as many drugs as she can afford, which is exactly the proof that the drug war has failed. How do we expect to keep drugs out of the country when we can't even keep them out of supposed secure facilities.

Meanwhile we are funding terrorism and making criminal dealers rich while we spend $69 billion a year fighting the war on drugs. I do not condone the use of legal or illegal drugs.

Albert Einstien said the definition of insanity was " To keep doing something the same way over and over again and expecting different results"

Thant's exactly what the government is doing with the drug war.

Western nations have been fighting a war again illicit drug use for more that half a century. Governments have made decisions, usually on public health grounds, that using certain drugs is a bad thing. The strategy to stop illicit drug use has been to criminalize its production, distribution and use.

This is clearly not working.

If anything, the criminalization of the illicit drug trade has fostered a new and more danger evil in the form of organized crime. It was the same during the prohibition in the 1920s.

It is time to try something different. It is time to start treating the use of certain drugs as a public health issue.

Governments should intervene to either the supply drugs or license suppliers. Drug should be available on prescription at prices that cut the dealers out of the market. Converting users from criminals into patients would go some way to make drugs uncool and provide greater opportunities for treatment and remediation at an individual level.  

The success of such a reform might be estimated by reference to the impact of the removal of Prohibition in 1933 and the experience in countries like Denmark and the Netherlands. In both cases substance abuse continued to some extent. But a lot of the nasty side affects went away.

We have to ask ourselves, would decriminalization of the illicit drug industry make things worse than they are now?

Richard Oakes

Wouldn't cost nearly as much as a space program.

Transcript: Well I could probably say the most about healthcare because that’s an area where, again, I devoted approximately the last five or six years really intensively to kind of try and understand the puzzle of healthcare. And in healthcare I think we have every opportunity to truly transform the value equation in healthcare if we actually are able to go back and step back from the incremental changes to what we have today, and ask ourselves what would it take for us to create a dramatically higher value system. So again I’ve written a lot about this lately and talk about it incessantly now. But you know, things like just how you organize care; things like how you measure success. These things sound very, very simple, but our best guess is that we can get double the value from the amount of money we’re spending today. Or we can get pretty much the same value for half the money we’re spending. That’s the order of magnitude and transformation, and I’m very optimistic about healthcare because I now see enough grassroots, bottom up effort, and enough belief in the basic framework of that value as how we need to think. And the patient perspective is what we should care about. I can see a line in sight to a healthcare system that we’ll be proud of, and it will lead the world, and it will be affordable.

Recorded on: 6/11/07