In recent years, marijuana has become largely accepted in modern society. After decades of misinformation and irrational demonetization, the drug is slowly being brought into the mainstream. Since Colorado legalized recreational use of the substance, cities across the country are realizing its multitude of medical benefits. Hypocrisy is displayed by the government by denying their citizens the right to a substance that is for all intents and purposes less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Despite the social progress surrounding marijuana, it is still classified as a schedule one drug, next to legitimately harmful substances such as heroin. Last week, the DEA shot down an attempt remove cannabis' status as a schedule one substance, refusing to acknowledge the medical value of marijuana. Cannabis helps cancer patients handle the pain of chemotherapy as well as those that struggle with PTSD, while simultaneously making it nearly impossible to pursue research on its effects.

The 'War on Drugs' has been an utter and complete failure in every sense of the word. Roughly, the same amount of people uses illegal narcotics than before the war, while mass incarceration skyrockets as a result of police arresting hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, all the while violent drug cartels grow rich off of the distribution of narcotics.

The War on Drugs was declared by President Nixon in 1971, allocating approximately 1 billion dollars to go towards curbing the drug addiction rate in America. Today we have gone from one billion in federal drug control spending to a staggering 40 billion seven hundred million dollars spent to combat drug use, 15 billion spent by the federal government and 25 billion spent by state and local governments. To add insult to injury, drug use has increased in America since the Nixon years with roughly 20 million Americans regularly consuming illegal drugs today.

Since the war began, our prisons exploded causing incarceration rates to rise to 700%. America contains only 5% of the world's population but has 25% of the world's prison population. Nearly 50% of inmates in the U.S prisons are incarcerated for drug offenses while African Americans and Caucasians use drugs at approximately the same rate. African Americans are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites. While one in every 15 African American males are incarcerated today, only one in 105 White males currently occupies a cell.

These facts serve to prove without a reasonable doubt that no amount of money pumped into this failed war can or will stop the American people from smoking, inhaling or injecting illegal substances should they so desire. However, despite the mass incarceration rates, the billions of taxpayer dollars squandered and the millions of lives ruined simply for choosing to consume a substance the government deems illegal, one entity has managed to profit greatly The Cartels.

The Mexican drug cartels have been primarily responsible for the 164,000 civilians murdered in Mexico between 2007 and 2014, a higher civilian death rate than those of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. The cartels are in the midst of a bloody war with both the Mexican government and each other prompting many families to flee to America in hopes of escaping the grisly war ground that used to be their home. These Cartels make 64.34 billion dollars from selling narcotics to US citizens.

This prohibition on drugs has not been beneficial for the American people, they have paid billions of tax dollars for an ineffective war, which led to the mass incarceration of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, who they then pay for, all the while letting Cartels make billions off of drugs sold in the US. There is a solution to all of these problems, which would strip the cartels of their power, lower the obscene incarceration rates in the US, all the while saving the tax payer billions, and getting more money to the communities that desperately need it, the US needs to legalize or at the very least decriminalize the vast majority of narcotics.