What are some of the most harmful consequences of the war on drugs?
Franklin: The two most harmful consequences of the war on drugs are: 1. Death is obviously number one. It doesn’t get any worse than that for there is no return from it. Addictions are bad and so are prisons, but addictions are beat and prisoners released – death is final. We’ve lost approximately 20,000 lives in Mexico over the past 3 to 4 years. Not many arrests have been made and virtually no prosecutions. In the States, our neighborhoods have become killing fields for anyone who gets in the way of the drug slinger’s market-share. We lose thousands of people every year to prohibition related homicides. 2. Imprisonment at unprecedented rates to where we out pace some of the most oppressed countries by far. The European arrest rate is at 150 or below per 100,000. In 2008, arrest rates in the US had soared to 1,009 per 100,000. Even more alarming, African Americans are around 14% of the US population, use drugs at relatively the same rate as whites, but they are arrested and convicted
