War on Drugs is a joke! Fight the Addiction not the Addicted!

The U.S. federal government spent over $19 billion dollars in 2003 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $600 per second. The budget has since been increased by over a billion dollars. Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy State and local governments spent at least another 30 billion. Source: National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University: "Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets," January, 2001.

Arrests for drug law violations in 2006 are expected to exceed the 1,678,192 arrests of 2003.Someone is arrested every 20 seconds.Source: Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation

In 2002, 45.3 percent of the 1,538,813 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 697,082. Of those, 613,986 people were arrested for marijuana possession alone. This is a slight decrease from 2000, when a total of 734,497 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 646,042 were for possession alone. Source: Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Nearly 4,000 new HIV infections can be prevented before the year 2006 if the federal ban on needle exchange funding is lifted this year.About 10 new cases could be prevented every day.Source: Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, University of California, San Francisco