Johan Hari: Obama Must End the War on Drugs - or Mexico and Afghanistan Will Collapse

Yet remember: opinions are febrile in a Depression. At the birth of the last great downturn, support for alcohol prohibition was high; within five years, it was gone. The Harvard economist Professor Jeffrey Miron has calculated that drug prohibition costs the US government $44.1bn per year in wasted cash - and legalization would raise another $32.7bn on top of that in taxes if drugs were subject to the same rates as cigarettes and alcohol. (All this money would, in a sane world, be shifted to drug treatment.) Can the US afford to force this failing policy on the world - especially when it guarantees the collapse of the country they are occupying and their own neighbour?

Legalization would also be the single biggest blow for civil rights in the US since Lyndon Johnson. Today, 13 percent of American drug users are black, yet they make up 74 percent of the drug offenders in prison. A whole generation of black men has been destroyed by prohibition: Barack Obama could easily have become one of them if the police had walked into the wrong party at the wrong time.

Senator Jim Webb has pointed out what would have happened to the young Obama: "Even as I write these words, it is virtually certain that somewhere on the streets of Washington D.C. an eighteen year-old white kid from the Maryland or North Virginia suburbs is buying a stash of drugs from an eighteen year-old black kid. The white kid is going to take that stash back to the suburbs and make some quick money by selling it to other kids." He will grow up and grow out of it, and one day -- as a wealthy professional -- he will "look back on his drug use just as recreational and joke about it ... just one more little rebellion on the way to adulthood."Jo