By Carl M. Cannon

America’s "war on drugs" did not start in a vacuum. It did not even start as a campaign against drugs, but as a holy crusade against saloons and alcoholic drink......

...On Capitol Hill, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., has been joined by a Republican House member from his delegation named Jim Ramstad in trying to divert some of the federal money going to interdiction in Columbia to drug treatment at home. "Our priorities have been misplaced as a nation, when we're spending only 16 percent of our funding on treatment," says Ramstad

...Frank K. Martin, a prominent defense lawyer from Columbus, Ga., who has represented many defendants in drug cases but who also served as his city's mayor for four years, echoes that view. "I don't know what the answer is, but I do know this: The money and effort we've spent on this has not produced the result we had hoped for—which is lowering drug use in society," Martin says. "What the police told me [as mayor], and what they tell me now, is that as soon as you send [a dealer] to jail, someone else takes their place. The reason they do it is the money."