Current U.S. drug policies have produced mediocre results, at best. Pessimists say that trying to eradicate drug use by making it illegal has failed altogether. Even optimists mostly view the prohibition approach as just holding the line, which is a polite way of saying that we are mired in an ugly status quo, in which […]

There’s really nothing wrong with existing U.S. drug policy, except that all but one of its underlying ideas is false. The one true idea is that drug use can be a dangerous activity for drug-takers and others, both because people under the spell of intoxication partially lose control of their behavior and because people under […]

How to lower both the prison population and crime—at the same time.

The American "war on drugs" is more than 35 years old, and we're losing it. Some proposals to turn the tide.