Michael Cameron – Waikato University Economics Dept – wrote an interesting piece on his blog about Economics and the war on drugs. He refers to an article by Tom Wainwright in the Wall Street Journal on “How economists would wage the war on drugs”. Essentially, the war on drugs is being lost. Badly. As Wainwright notes:
The number of people using cannabis and cocaine has risen by half since 1998, while the number taking heroin and other opiates has tripled. Illegal drugs are now a $300 billion world-wide business, and the diplomats of the U.N. aren’t any closer to finding a way to stamp them out.
This failure has a simple reason: Governments continue to treat the drug problem as a battle to be fought, not a market to be tamed. The cartels that run the narcotics business are monstrous, but they face the same dilemmas as ordinary firms-and…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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