TAXPAYER-FUNDED COCAINE WAR IN COLOMBIA MISSES THE MARK
The federal government spent $4.3 billion of American taxpayers’ money between 2000 and 2008 fighting a “War on Drugs” in Colombia.
Did it work? No … according to a new report scheduled to be published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, it did not. Not even a little bit.
According to researchers Daniel Mejia and Pascual Restrepo, U.S. taxpayers spent $940,000 in Colombia for every kilogram of cocaine taken off of the market.
In other words, our government spent roughly thirty-five times the street price of a kilogram to take that kilo off the street.
Make sense? Hell no …
Did this reduce the price of cocaine? No. According to the latest data from U.S. president Barack Obama‘s drug czar, the price per gram of cocaine actually fell from $205.67 to $182.75 over that time period.
Additionally, the massive expenditure failed to make a dent in the number of Americans using cocaine.
In other words, our government basically took $4.3 billion and flushed it … not unlike the $1 trillion and counting it has flushed fighting the “War on Drugs” over the past four-and-a-half decades.
This website has consistently supported the legalization of recreational drug use – arguing that government has no right to impose on what is essentially a liberty issue (and a free market issue). We’ve also consistently argued that government efforts to impose a short-sighted prohibition against drug use are doomed to fail.
This botched “War on Drugs” in Colombia is further proof of that …