Problems relating to the unauthorized use of controlled substances ("drugs") show no signs of abating despite formidable outlays of manpower and taxpayer money in affluent societies such as the United States and Canada. Basic to policies in force in Western societies today is the assumption that drug-related problems are best dealt with in the context of a country's criminal justice system, an assumption not so far questioned in the mainstream media. Perhaps now is the time it should be. Some Western societies have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the incidence of imprisonment in the face of a declining incidence of violent crime. The anomaly means that prisons are filled to capacity -- often over capacity -- with predominantly non-violent, first-time drug law violators, with dubious if any benefit to society.

Critiques of current policy on drug law violations dwell on various issues, including the cost of "warehousing" large numbers of potentially productive citizens, a widening gap between concepts of law and justice, liberties taken with rights that in peacetime are taken for granted but to pursue the War on Drugs are loaded with "exceptions", a perception of disproportionate sentencing that casts disrepute on the criminal justice system in some jurisdictions, and the absence of a reasonable definition of what would constitute a "win" in the War on Drugs. These critiques -- economic, ethical, and semantic -- do not go far enough. Before such intellectual objections lies a sea of human misery -- the confinement of millions drug users worldwide to prison, the destruction of their families, the loss to children of a parent or parents, and the wider loss to a surrounding community. The lot of the Drug War prisoner and the harm done to his or her family and neighborhood takes precedence in our imagination over less immediate, more abstract concerns.