Here is a good short discussion about our continuing failure in the “war on drugs.” The money quote:

The reporter places no emphasis on the most astonishing (if true) fact in the story: grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That’s about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the “French Connection” days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.

I’m one of those pro-legalization people who doesn’t think heroin should be on the list. There is nothing good about it, period. I do believe in a decriminalization of drugs in general, and a real investment in the health care entities which provide treatment for addiction. The blog also notes

Heroin, even more than cocaine, illustrates the near-futility of trying to use drug law enforcement to control drug abuse once a drug has found a mass market. Prices have been dropping (about 80% in inflation-adjusted terms for cocaine, much more than that for heroin) even as the number of dealers going to prison has soared.

Talking about the drug war makes me want to bang my head on the table. Really. In almost every way, it is an example of how our society “gets it wrong;” on race, on law enforcement, on drug policy, on health care. I could go on for pages and pages about the damage this failed war has done to this country, and volumes after that about who and what has been ruined by it.

I honestly believe that, like gay marriage, the upcoming generation will be the one to finally have the conversation we need to have on drugs, and will elect politicians who are finally willing to look at the facts. My generation knows our parents did drugs, we did drugs ourselves, and we watched our friends and neighbors struggle with addiction, crime, and police violence and hypocrisy. I know now is not the time for a major national candidate to speak openly and factually about drugs, but that makes me so depressed. Because while we let the Wise Old Warmongers in Washington tell us about what is “sensible” a whole new generation of addicts is being created, and a whole new generation of terrorists are getting funded with addict dollars. I understand the problem is even worse in Europe, being a little closer to the newly refined flow of heroin. Perhpas we will find some answers to our own problems in the European example, as they battle in this war with different methods.