by RAND Corporation

About the author: The RAND Corporation is a public policy research organization with headquarters in Santa Monica, California.

One doesn’t hear much these days about the war on drugs or the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s that provoked it. A major reason the bellicose rhetoric has subsided and drug-related crime stories have migrated to the inside pages of the nation’s newspapers is that the number of people using cocaine has dropped sharply—from more than 12 million in the early to mid-1980s to 5 million in 1992. Are we to conclude that the threat, if not over, is at least contained and that society has emerged the winner"

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Despite the large decline in the number of users and the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars on law enforcement...