Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark is the latest public figure to slam the "war on drugs." As reported by Huffington Post, Booker described the war on drugs as ineffective it

"represents big overgrown government at its worst." "The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence," the Democrat wrote during the Reddit "ask me anything" chat. "We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential." Booker then called drug arrests a "game."

I found this infographic full of useful data, all pointing in one direction: We should legalize use of marijuana by taxing and regulating it. The current approach of subjecting users to the criminal justice system is destructive and immoral.

Reason Magazine has been against the "war on drugs" for decades. Here are many dozens of articles published by Reason regarding the insanity of the "war on drugs." Citing to the New York Time, Reason gives the following evidence that the "war on drugs" is a failure:

Prices match supply with demand. If the supply of an illicit drug were to fall, say because the Drug Enforcement Administration stopped it from reaching the nation’s shores, we should expect its price to go up. That is not what happened with cocaine. Despite billions spent on measures from spraying coca fields high in the Andes to jailing local dealers in Miami or Washington, a gram of cocaine cost about 16 percent less last year than it did in 2001. The drop is similar for heroin and methamphetamine. The only drug that has not experienced a significant fall in price is marijuana . . . Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard who studies drug policy closely, has suggested that legalizing all illicit drugs would produce net benefits to the United States of some $65 billion a year, mostly by cutting public spending on enforcement as well as through reduced crime and corruption.

WTF . . . the head of the DEA can't say whether meth, crack cocaine or heroin are "worse than marijuana." And she looks not quite right (probably for reasons other than marijuana) as she struggles with this really basic line of questions. Oh, I get it. She's not actually saying what she thinks. She's being political, meaning dishonest. She is not going to help American exorcise its long-running and horribly destructive drug war demon. Addendum: Check out the low-wattage amoral head of the DEA. I would have enjoyed seeing Steve Cohen grill her for another hour. And then we should fire her. And then the DEA should publicly apologize for all of the pain they are causing users of medical marijuana.