Does the war on drugs cost US taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year?
Combined federal, state, and local drug “war” spending “continues to cost U.S. taxpayers more than $51 billion annually,” according to a 2017 report by the libertarian Cato Institute. Drug control spending has amounted to more than $1 trillion since President Nixon formally declared a war on drugs in 1971. Related incarceration expenses add an additional $3.3 billion dollars in costs annually.
Using data from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance arrives at a similar cost estimate, $25 billion at the federal level and an additional $25 billion at state and local levels annually.
In 2010, the Government Accountability Office found that the policy office, established in 1988, has “not made progress toward achieving most of [its] goals."
