The War on Drugs fails—and is doomed to perpetual failure—because it is directed not against the root causes of drug addiction or of the international black market in drugs, but only against some drug producers, traffickers, and users. More fundamentally, the war is doomed because neither the methods of war nor the war metaphor itself is appropriate to a complex social problem that calls for compassion, self-searching insight, and factually researched scientific understanding. The question is not why the War on Drugs is being lost, but why it continues to be waged in the face of all the
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