Ending the War on Drugs: A Solution for America

In Ending the War on Drugs, Eldredge makes a case for an alternative policy: carefully controlled legalization, with resulting income used to fund greatly expanded drug education, prevention, research and treatment programs. He addresses head-on such questions as: Would legalization expand drug use? Would it expose more children to drugs?

"Prohibition has spawned, as it always does, a robust black market, which inevitably spins off many social pathologies," he writes, "and is a policy that can only fail because its objective - a drug-free America - is unrealistic and unattainable."

Eldredge examines every facet of drugs in America - from statistics on casual use and addiction, to the workings of the vast smuggling networks of Colombian cartels and Asian opium traffickers, to the often shoddy operations of the Justice Department, FBI and other government agencies. Again and again he reveals the countless ways in which the war on drugs is not working: only an estimated 10% to 25% of illegal drugs are stopped at our borders, despite massive efforts; cocaine, heroin and marijuana actually have increased in purity because law-enforcement efforts have led smugglers to dilute less, thereby decreasing bulk; the number of deaths due to drug trafficking far exceeds those due to drug use; and Ending the War on Drugs is a thoughtful, provocative analysis, supported by facts and sobering anecdotes, that has been praised by William F. Buckley, Jr., Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, and leading members of the medical and law-enforcement communities as an important contribution to helping Americans understand this pervasive problem and to expanding informed public debate on alternatives to present failed policies.

"An important addition to the library of books that illuminate the misdirection of U.S. drug policies."
   --     William F. Buckley, Jr., author of God and Man at Yale and 36 other books since, founder of National Review, host of firing line

"Ending the War on Drugs should make a significant contribution to the understanding of a national dilemma: We in this country will not be able to have it both ways - we cannot be both drug-free and free."
   --     Lester Grinspoon, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

"This is a devastatingly effective and lucid survey of the harm that has been done by the mislabeled ‘war on drugs.’ I recommend it highly even though I disagree with the proposed socialist solution - government distribution of drugs."
   --     Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, former member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board (1981-1988),  Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"Dirk Eldredge provides a detailed history of America’s ill-conceived war on drugs and thoughtful, provocative suggestions for peace."
   --     Joseph D. McNamara, Police Chief (ret.), San Jose, California, and former Chief of police, Kansas City, Missouri; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

About the Author

Dirk Chase Eldredge, was co-chairman for Southern California of Ronald Reagan's successful campaign for Governor of California and was involved in the organization of the new administration in Sacramento. He is a member of the Drug Policy Foundation and author of a policy paper it published, Race Relations and the War on Drugs. He lives in Long Beach, California, and is a founding director of a bank and a successful entrepreneur. He has studied and researched drug policy issues for many years -prompted in part by firsthand acquaintance with addiction through his father, an alcoholic.