I agree, and I think the militarization of the police has been a net negative on the US. It should be police action. East Asian countries have very low drug use rates because they deal with drug use appropriately. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a comparably far richer place, drug use is tolerated and the problem proliferates.
And you don’t need armored vehicles and SWAT teams to get to a better place.
But, making things illegal that (clearly) people will buy anyway just pours billions into criminal enterprises. The vast majority of crime is funded by drug money in one way or another. The same thing happened during US prohibition: people did not stop drinking alcohol, but all the money from alcohol suddenly poured into the criminal economy. This is a well-trodden path and we should know better by now.
Has "the war" worked out? We're several decades in with no win in sight.
There is a war happening because we have waged it. We attacked the symptom with military gusto and ignored the problems that caused it. We made domestic policies that legislated morality and poured billions into the coffers of the cartels. We countered with billions spent in the military industrial complex and by militarizing the police. So yes, there is a war happening. Because that is how we framed it.
Billions of dollars were going to flow into the coffers of the cartels either way; the people want drugs, the cartels are willing to use violence in order to organize who gets to distribute and at what prices they sell. There's no such thing as a peaceful hard-drug manufacturing operation.
This is the kind of thing that only shows how casual and naive is your understanding of this.
The current drug cartel situation is an issue of an unprecedented scale, entire towns work solely on manufacturing and shipping drugs to other countries.
This is not a "oh yeah lol, we should smoke weed and be happy, government is bad", this is an actual war with hundreds of thousands of people, a myriad of different small factions, who also want to kill each other, with modern technology, weapons, who are also involved in all kinds of crime, all around the world.
No way this can be solved with your Ayahuasca trip and a cheesy speech that makes everyone cry and suddenly hug each other.
So many assumptions there about my point of view, which you clearly don’t understand, and about how the cartels exist and are funded. Did I say our support any of the things in your reply? Read again. Some life advice: spend less time assuming, a little more time educating yourself, and a lot less time insulting people.
I have trouble with it. You have no idea where the other person is located (beyond the USA) and offer nothing to support your alternative point of view besides attacks on the other poster. Since you say there is a war happening and imply that you do know the context, perhaps you should share that information.
It shouldn't be a war on anything. Because we insist on treating adults like children, we're taking money that would have gone to tightly regulated pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer[1] and funneling it into violent criminal syndicates.
The "War on Drugs" is just a massive subsidy for the cartels via US markets. A sane approach to actually reduce drug use and fentanyl deaths would be to mirror the policies that have brought American tobacco use to a historic low and invest the tax revenue from legal narcotic sales into addiction treatment centers.
Portugal seems to legally distinguish between distributors and consumers just fine.
Perhaps there's some weight to the idea that demonization of distributors harms consumers—but this doesn't seem to be an ideological barrier between being aware of the harms to users and the obvious economic boon of taking advantage of regulation to exploit the market advantage.
Shouldn't it be War on dug dealers?