The United States of America has been engrossed in a so-called War on Drugs policy since the mid-nineteen seventies. Since the founding of the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973 under then President Richard Nixon, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Reagan in 1988, the United States has found themselves in a winless war and in debt a tremendous amount of money. The reason that the United States has found themselves in this current state is due to one simple thing: the failure to respect the basic concepts of economics. The United States failure to realize the simple concept of demand and supply has found the nation digging itself a hole and only going deeper. The United States has spent countless amounts of money in trying to prevent the use of illegal drugs and has since faced many repercussions in doing so, leading to more taxpayers money being spent on a winless cause.

A simple look into the basic economic laws of supply and demand will clearly show why the current War on Drugs is a battle that cannot be won. Prices in a free market are determined by supply and demand. This includes anything from cars,

III. Inelastic Demand Curve For Illegal Drugs

V. Externalities of the Drug War

to televisions, to illegal drugs. The natural forces that drive these products result in a graph that will show the supply, demand, and price for the products that are being sold. When the supply for a product is high, and the demand for it low, the price will be low, and vice versa. The intersection between these two lines shows the prices at which the product will be sold (See Graph One). According to the Office of Nations Drug Control Policy it is the national governments goal to eliminate the supply for illegal drugs through the use of customs agents and border patrols, while decreasing the individuals demand for drugs through various treatment and education programs (Lynch 2). This goal of the national governments has required billions of taxpayers' dollars and for the most part has gone to waste. The reason that the money has gone to waste is due to the fact that the government has failed in recognizing that the demand for illegal drugs is inelastic.

IV. The Opportunity Cost Of The War On Drugs

Possibly the biggest failure in the governments attempt to control drugs is the opportunity cost that goes hand in hand with the great number of resources that are already being put towards drug control. In a speech given by David Boaz in front of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, he claimed that the DEA cost $22 billion in the Reagan years, $45 billion in the Bush years, while another $16 billion was spent in 1998 in drug control programs only to be raised to $17.9 billion the next year. While on the state level, an additional $15.9 billion was spent in 1991 alone, which was a 13% increase from the previous year (Boaz 2). This money that is being spent on the governments attempt to stop drug trade, is way out of proportion and should be spent on other measures of society that are far more important. Funding for many other departments is extremely low and they need more money. These are also causes that are winnable, unlike the War on Drugs. For example, if some of the money is spent into AIDS research, the world may be closer to a cure than we are today.

The money that the government gives to the Drug War appears to be a large amount, but is actually much larger when analyzed further. Numerous outside factors simultaneously occur due to the great emphasis that the government has on the drug war. Currently there are 400,000 drug offenders in jail, and over 80% of the prisoners from 1985 to 1995 were in jail on drug convictions alone. This made up of 56.2% of all federal prisoners, while compared with violent offenders who made up only 12.4% and property offenders 8.4% (Boaz 2). Due to that, in 1991 state and federal governments

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