ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 sums up the arguments in the book. Despite a century of war on drugs, the United States remains one of the largest consumers in the world of legal as well as illegal drugs. The U.S. population makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s total population, but Americans consume 80 percent of all opioids produced in the world. The chapter explores the two major policies or strategies adopted by the U.S. government: demand reduction and supply reduction. As the chapter and the book notes, more emphasis (and money) has been directed toward these two sets of policies than for prevention/treatment. The chapter looks at dimensions of the drug war, such as the role of the mass media, race, the impact of the criminal justice system, political considerations and motivations, and the costs of the drug war. The drug war costs include not just how much was spent on building prisons and incarceration but its social costs on different communities. Instead of war on drugs, the focus should be on addressing the opioid epidemic as a public health problem requiring public health solutions.
