America has been in a drug war since the Nixon Administration in 1971, a battle that has clearly gone in favor of the drug purveyors, since all the drugs that America traffics in are readily available and have been so for nearly fifty years. According to rand.org, utilizing 2010 dollars for a national survey in January, 2012, that: "… national estimates of market sizes for four illicit drugs: cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine (meth)," it was estimated that " … that drug users in the United States spend on the order of $100 billion annually." In addition, as estimated by huffingtonpost.com that: "… the U.S. government spent between $40 billion and $50 billion each year fighting the war on drugs." This signifies that all the king's men and all the king's horses has produced little or no lasting damage to the infrastructure and trafficking of illicit drugs in this country, despite the sophistication and experience of our drug and police forces, as well as America having a robust and respected rule of law.
So too, this implies strongly that there are really only two distinct possibilities, for the war on drugs to have been such a complete and thorough failure in America, to which the first is that our policing, our drug interdiction forces, and our justice, are completely ineffective in the tasks assigned to them, by virtue of the fact that the drug lords have more money, weaponry, and are more sophisticated in their trade, which is a theory that is absolutely absurd. The second possibility, and the only real possibility, is that the monies involved in successful drug trafficking are so great, so high, so wide, so prevalent, and so pervasive that those that are in the position to stop, to prevent, and to interdict drugs, find that the lure of easy money or its equivalence is a siren song that cannot be resisted.
The bottom line is that the corruption of drug money in America reaches into the pockets of so many of those that have the authority and knowledge to do something significant about it; that those very people are the ones that have been compromised, willingly or not, in such a way that their abiding interest is now in seeing that the drug flow continues and is sustained because their lifestyle depends upon it. It is that lure of making a quick and easy buck that makes so many of the enforcers in the drug trade turn the other way, because they cannot resist the benefits of their illicit gains.
The drug war in America will never effectively end, because the two sides that ostensibly oppose each other, are actually intertwined with each other, and because each side benefits greatly, at the expense of the good taxpayers, good health, and of those that play by the rules, the drug peddlers are permitted free reign to ply their trade as long as they pay tribute and abide by certain rules that are sanctioned by the drug overseers wearing governmental and policing hats.
It is not possible in a country as rich, as sophisticated, and as brilliant as America, that drug traffickers can have the run of this country, unless those that can stop it, discover that the monies involved are just too rich and lucrative to refuse, and why not, just as long as the users of such, are principally the dregs of society, and far, far away from the imperial money elite.