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The global war on drugs failed. Vast expenditures failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories are negated by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Incarcerating millions has filled prisons without reducing the availability of illicit drugs or the power of criminal organizations. War on Drugs policing has failed in its stated goal of reducing domestic street-level drug activity: the cost of drugs on the street remains low and drugs remain widely available.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment, indicates that more than 46,000 people in the United States die each year from drug abuse, compared to around 35,000 deaths in automobile accidents and 33,000 deaths associated with firearms.

All three categories saw declines in 2024, continuing a positive trend from pandemic-era peaks. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's early estimates projected that 39,345 people died in traffic crashes in 2024, representing a decrease of about 3.8% compared to the 40,901 fatalities reported in 2023. Between January and December 2024, an estimated 44,400 people died from gun-related injuries, which is 4% fewer people than had died during the same point in 2023.

Provisional data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics indicated there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024, a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023. This represented a dramatic decline after years of increasing deaths.

The amount spent annually in the US on the war on drugs is more than $50,000,000,000. The region with the world’s largest illicit drug market is North America, though no region is spared. Like other sectors of activity in which goods or services are traded for a profit, the illicit drug economy is governed essentially by the law of supply and demand. Thus cocaine and heroin retail for many times their weight in gold, while their potential legal price may be similar to that of coffee.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 (P.L. 100-690) stated: “It is the declared policy of the United States Government to create a Drug-Free America by 1995.” Drug abuse is no longer framed as a problem to be controlled but a problem to be eradicated. The war on drugs is now a national effort to reduce to zero the demand for illegal drugs in the United States.

In the United States, it is worth noting that, although marijuana use is still illegal in most states, changes in public opinion were reflected in the 2012 vote to legalize that substance in two states and most citizens agree that marijuana should be legalized and regulated.

When President Nixon in 1971 declared war on drugs, he directed 60 percent of the funding to treatment. President Ford followed suit, President Carter declared war on drugs, President Reagan did, President Bush did. Congress has declared war on drugs. The Democrats have declared war on drugs. The Republicans have declared war on drugs. By 2007 President Bush allocated a 94 percent share to disrupting the supply, mainly through environmentally hazardous spraying in Latin America and the Caribbean that alienates local farmers. From the beginning, the United States has pursued a strategy focused on the supply-side of the issue, emphasizing eradication, interdiction, and incarceration and has pressured the government of Mexico to employ the same strategy at every opportunity. However, over the course of time, the U.S. and Mexican governments have pursued the strategy dictated by Washington to relatively little effect.

The criminalization of large swathes of the population may have pernicious consequences in the sense of “naturalizing” crime and transgressions of the law in an ever larger segment of the population, in addition to the “normalization” of criminal activities as the illegal drugs economy expands, whereby both phenomena undermine social cohesion. Making illegal activity “natural” and violating the rule of law are two ways of eroding adherence to standards and institutions.

The domestic results in the US are an enormous increase in the incarceration of young, disproportionately minority Americans, resulting in the creation of a prison culture that converts nonviolent offenders into hardened criminals. Although race is not an inherently suspicious characteristic, research studies reveal that race is a factor in probable cause and reasonable suspicion for pretextual traffic stops, arrests and civil seizures involving thousands of African-Americans and other minorities. These traffic stops occur with such regularity that they are known in minority 65 communities as a moving violation for "driving while black" (DWB).

Young male African-Americans and Hispanics are especially vulnerable to such traffic stops due to certain racial profiling characteristics, such as driving late model or expensive cars, traveling at night and especially in the wrong part of town or in an affluent neighborhood, driving with two or more minority males in the car, "leaning," wearing gold jewelry, expensive clothing and dark glasses, having gold or diamond-studded teeth, sporting vogue or cultural hairstyles, listening to "hip-hop" and other loud music, and carrying beepers.

US law-enforcement officers increasingly use pretextual traffic stops to interdict drug traffickers along the nation's interstate highways known as high volume connectors in the drug trade, such as along the Interstate 95 corridor from New England to Florida. On the stretch of I-95 in Maryland, black drivers accounted for only 14 percent of the drivers but represented 73 percent of those stopped and searched.

The market for illicit drugs is expanding inexorably around the world. More kinds of drugs are becoming more available in more places than ever before. But the drug trade is not only growing, it is changing in character. It has ceased to be a marginal area of criminal activity and has now become a major global enterprise controlled by formidable interests that threaten much more than the health of drug users. Moreover, the immense wealth that has been amassed from selling drugs has given the principal trafficking organizations enormous power to corrupt and intimidate public officials and government institutions. In 1997, Paul Stares presented a compelling portrait of the global drug market and the consequences of this international plague. He explains that there are good reasons to fear that the global market for drugs will continue to expand in the coming years: profits to the traffickers are huge; the revolutionary advances in communications, transportation, and information technology facilitate smuggling, as do the lowering of border controls and trade tariffs and the trends toward privatization and deregulation. Meanwhile, the expanded volume of global trade, travel, and financial transactions makes it harder for customs and police authorities to detect and stop illicit activities. Added to the growing incentives and opportunities to supply illicit drugs, the level of demand is increasing in many new areas of the world, particularly in formerly communist countries and many areas of the developing world. What can done about this growing problem? One option is legalization, but Stares contended that its implementation would be problematic while its benefits remain unclear. Yet, continuing on the present course will not work either. Stares argued that reducing both the supply and demand for illicit drugs required a fundamental shift away from the current overwhelming emphasis on negative sanctions to deter and deny their production, trafficking, and consumption. Instead, he called for more positive control measures that primarily relied on persuasion and cooperation. He advocated the creation of a global drug monitoring and evaluation network, a global drug use prevention program, a global drug treatment training program, and an international drug crisis response program. According to Stares, the effectiveness of reorienting drug control policy to curb the global habit will ultimately depend on the international community's willingness to address much larger concerns to which the drug problem is inextricably linked-- including overpopulation, environmental degradation, poverty, illiteracy, ethnic strife, and disease. Only by recognizing the fundamental relationship between these larger issues and the global drug problem can meaningful progress be made.