In a Pew poll in 2001, 74% of Americans believe the "War on Drugs" is a failure.  The news media often talk of "drug-related" deaths but many of the deaths are more accurately labled "drug-law enforcement-related."  Drugs didn't kill these people, the drug laws did.  As Italian social scientist Solivetti noted, "the intervention of the criminal law has a very limited effect on a phenomenon whose evolution can be linked with the far more powerful pressure exerted by structural forces that lie at the very heart of the way society is organized."  In the United States alone, the federal government and states and localities spend in excess of $50 billion per year on drug law enforcement.  Drug law enforcement  accounts for one third to one quarter of all arrests - nearly 1.5 million in 2002. 

The following was taken from an article by Phil Smith, entitled Imagining a Post-Prohibition World.  The article appears in the book Under the Influence edited by Preston Peet.