Jun 28, 2017
Ted Cruz recently asserted that the United States military needs
to be sent to Mexico to attack the drug cartels head-on.
This is a bad idea. But so is the drug war itself, both
constitutionally and logically.
Forty-six years and one trillion dollars after its start, President
Richard Nixon's War on Drugs is still going, with 300,000 people
currently in jail on drug charges. Meanwhile, 26 times as many
people suffer from alcoholism as do heroin abuse, and eight times
as many die from alcohol abuse as do heroin.
Many who support the war do so with the best of intentions, but has
it really helped? Or has it done more harm than good, like the
Prohibition of the 1920s? Is this war even legal in the first
place?
James Harrigan and Antony Davies discuss these questions in this
week's Words and Numbers.