Sun Tzu on the War on Drugs

Sun Tzu once said (I know, I’m a pretentious prick) that taking one cup of the enemy’s food is worth twenty of your own. In other words, the quickest way to win any war is to strike blows which add to your resources while depriving your opponent of theirs. If true, and it seems obviously so, this means the War on Drugs is the stupidest war in American history, which is really saying something.

For the last thirty years, our government has aggressively criminalized recreational drugs, including the widespread and relatively benign marijuana, which has sent the lion’s share of the enormous profits from its production and sale abroad while simultaneously overburdening American prisons with non-violent criminals who, if not incarcerated, would probably be home copying Grateful Dead bootlegs.

Right now, there are six million people in American prisons and jails, 85% of whom are imprisoned for drug-related crimes. Criminal-for-criminal, that’s an incarceration rate twenty times higher than any other country in the free world. Even Australia, and that whole country used to be a prison.

Obviously, the way to win the War on Drugs, at least in Sun Tzu’s book, would be to do the exact opposite: to legalize marijuana, thereby depriving the Mexican cartels of the bulk of their profits while saving the American government billions of dollars in prison expenditures and creating a rich new source of tax revenues to boot. Then, if our government should decide to continue the war against producers and importers of less benign drugs like cocaine and meth, we are in an eminently better position to do so, while the cartels in Mexico and elsewhere have a lot less money with which to buy weapons, hire mercenaries, and terrorize their local populations into submission.

I’m not saying that this is a new idea nobody else has thought of, but merely that if we are to think of our nation’s drug policy as a war, then maybe we ought to start thinking of it in terms of a war we actually want to win.

Mark Russell is the author of God Is Disappointed in You, published by Top Shelf Productions and available at fine bookstores everywhere.