Is The War On Drugs a Waste of Money?

Is the "war" on drugs a waste of money and time? It appears that it is. Just the salaries alone of the people who specialise in drug enforcement has to amount to a pretty penny. I'm talking about DEA agents all the way down to the local "narc." Has to be a huge expenditure. It does not seem that drugs are in any danger of leaving the streets though. In fact, judging by the stoned kids at my school, it seems that they are readily available anytime/anywhere. It really does seem that the "war" is lost.
There are those that bleat that MJ should be legalized. A point they do have. Taxable revenue to all levels of government and taking the power from the "drug cartels" are the prevailing arguments. Seems reasonable to some extent. There is a problem with this though.

Drug enforcement is fun.

Years back, while serving in the Coast Guard, most of my career was as a crew member on a medium endurance cutter out of Port Canaveral, Fl. For the most part, our "work" consisted of tooling along in the Caribbean, Gulf and Coastal Atlantic looking for the elusive mother ship. Back in the early 80's a large amount of MJ (and other stuff) was smuggled up this way. I remember cruising right in the middle of the Yucatan Pass or the Windward Pass on the hunt. Sometimes we made the trek down Jamaica way and the pickings were usually pretty good. Unfortunately we spent too much time in GTMO processing drug busts however. If you don't have to go to GTMO stay away. Some folk disagree there, but I digress. I can tell you one thing. When you have a big one on the line and you are "racing" darken ship for an intercept it is a very interesting feeling. Like a big fish on the line or like closing the deal with a "hoor" in the bar. Not that I would know anything about that.

 It was certainly an adrenaline rush when we came alongside brandishing Uncle Sam's weaponry at a loaded down coastal freighter crewed by disco dud wearing scumbags. No kidding. A lot of those guys seemed to always be dressed like they were in an episode of Saturday Night Fever. Those were interesting and fun days.

Is the war on drugs a waste of resources? Probably.

 But why spoil all the fun for the current crop of enforcement types?