NOT A METAPHOR

The National Research Council, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, has issued a report pointing out that we have almost no reliable statistics on whether the ‘war against drugs’ is actually working. The report also points out one extraordinary fact: the $30 billion spent in 1999 by federal, state and local governments in the drug war was twice the U.S. cost of the Gulf war of 1991. The number of people arrested in 1998 for drug offenses was triple the number in 1980 and the number of people in jail in 1998 for drug offences was a staggering 12 times greater than 1980. But at least we know we got Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.