Drug use will never be completely eradicated, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and do nothing. We need to get back to what should have been the goal of the War on Drugs all along: a society where drug abuse is as rare and as manageable as we can make it.
Liberals often insist that the president cannot be blamed for current trends they dislike. Yet in most areas where Obama's defenders attempt to pass the buck, the president enjoys wide latitude.
The first time I met with Sheriff Allman, in his office full of valor citations and flanked in the hallway by framed photos of every other county sheriff since Mendocino's 1850 incorporation, he told me that, in his view, "maybe five percent" of medical cannabis claims were legit.
On Thursday, September 6, the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity will arrive in New York City on its voyage across the United States calling for an end to the failed drug war that has left more than 60,000 dead in Mexico in the last five years.
This year, exactly three decades after both Democrats and Republicans first focused on creating the office that today leads drug policy efforts, both parties should co-lead today's drug challenges based on what we know can work.
Of the many issues that national politicians routinely gloss over during campaign season, one they're least likely to touch -- and haven't, in any real way, since the 1980s -- is drug policy. But the country ignores the issue at its own peril.
After waging a futile war on drugs for more than four decades, while causing horrific unintended consequences both here and abroad, it is well past time to try a different approach.
We spend billions of dollars on the war on drugs while communities are collapsing because of unemployment, yet neither Republicans nor Democrats will even discuss the failed punitive prohibitionist policies of the drug war.
In just this one song, Prince Ea summarizes a book's worth of information into a clear and powerful argument against marijuana prohibition.
It's time to stop gambling away taxpayer dollars on the failed drug war and start implementing rational, evidence-based, cost-effective, humane criminal justice policies.
Prohibition brings ruin and degeneration wherever the policy is enforced. Every human being on Earth loses in this war.
If this is truly going to be a "base" election, then Obama will need to excite Democratic groups who might not bother to vote this time around.
Perhaps we can get the attention of the parties by focusing on five less obvious yet dreadful byproducts of the drug war, conditions that millions of Americans are forced to live with daily.
Last year, President Obama recognized the progress against the HIV epidemic, but it was dealt a serious blow in January, when Congress reinstated a ban on federal funding of syringe exchange programs.
It makes sense to devote our time and resources now to stopping drug use before it starts, intervening on early use, treating addiction, and enforcing our laws justly and smartly.