It's much more complicated than that.
I agree with you.
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, and the majority of these prisoners are in jail on drug charges.
Yet, we are seen as the beacon of freedom in the world...? How is that? You are only free in America if you are not in jail, or if you are not trying to cross the border into Mexico- those guys in the green fatigues serve to remind me on every trip to Rocky Point that my freedom is merely an illusion sold to me via my cable TV subscription.
So, yes- The problem is complicated. The solution (in my opinion) is not.
Restore the power of choice to the individual, and establish legal precedent that rewards good choices, rather than running around trying to prosecute and incarcerate bad choices.
In my opinion, we focus so much on trying to eliminate "bad" elements from society, that we eventually destroy all good as our never ending legal web eventually turns everyone into a criminal of some sort. Focusing on the freedom of personal choice, and only exercising prosecutorial law only when one person's actions infringe on another person's rights will better serve society and humanity in the long run.
The trade off with such a system is that it enables personal discrimination and favoritism, but we are human being's- favortism and discrimination is part of our nature. Just as every parent believes their child(ren) are more beautiful than anyone else's children, so too non-drug users will favor other non-users for jobs, etc, while drug users will probably equally flock with "their own kind", but don't we already see that today? Isn't Calle 13 a relevant example? By that, I mean that the people who frequent Calle 13 enjoy a "different brand" of Mexico vacation that people who choose instead to spend their vacation on Playa Encanto, right?
In my opinion, neither choice of vacation "style" is wrong- they are simply different and appeal to different personal tastes; but yet you can't look past the fact that there are a lot more Policia and Federales on Calle13 on any given Saturday than there are out on Encanto.
Prosecuting people for making personal choices that impose on no one else's personal rights is worse than stupid. It is immoral. It is unjust. It is untenable, and it is doomed to failure, because society clings to a false logic:
Complicated problems do NOT require complicated solutions. The greater the complexity in any system, the closer that system steadily creeps toward innevitable failure and destruction.
The House of cards... The straw that broke the camel's back. Our lexicon is filled with metaphors that demonstrate this simple concept.
