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That's ridiculous.

By that standard, you could say "we don't really try to stop murders; if we did, we'd go around videotaping the entire population, fingerprinting everything, etc".

For that matter, you could even say that most wars aren't real wars - in how many wars was a nuclear weapon used? Was the Vietnam war not at "real war" because the US wasn't dropping atomic bombs and poisoning Vietnam's population? Was it just using the equivalent of "paintball guns"?

Everybody understands that "war on drugs" does not literally mean a war, and that there are some lines which no one would agree to cross, including pretty much everything you wrote above. Everybody understands this is true in most situations, including in war. The object isn't to win at any cost, nor is it to entirely kill off the enemy population. It's to achieve strategic goals using an acceptable amount of force.

We have not declared a "war on murder" so maybe it is the idea of a "war on drugs" that is ridiculous.

As I mention down thread, the Vietnam (American) War was not ever a declared war. I don't think the USA has declared war on any country since WWII. There is a good argument to be made that it would be better if the USA didn't use military force unless it declares war first.

I am not arguing in favour of any of these ideas, but that we have never actually declared war on drugs so the idea of failure is meaningless

This is a very interesting comment. I had not considered this perspective before and I haven't really heard anyone else use this line of thinking before either - so I appreciate what you wrote.

But if you look at a bit of the historical context of the war on drugs, you see that a significant part of it was originally racially motivated. Having a pseudo-war instead of a real war gave the people in control more leverage to selectively target the consequences of banning certain substances like Marijuana or Cocaine.

Yes the “war on drugs” has been a sideshow of the forever war on the underclass.

Ugh, I wish that weren't the truth.

It comes up frequently in such discussions, in my experience. Usually when someone cannot any longer argue that the current war on drugs is anything but a failure, but still feels that drugs need to be driven from society by force. Usually the poster has some pretty abhorrent views about the value of human life and 'druggies'. (Note I am not saying that's the case here, it appears at least on the surface to be a devil's advocate type of argument.)

Usually it's a simple call to either poison or execute "them". To which the answer is usually "what the hell gives you the right? These are people we're talking about".

The other trope in this direction is someone will suggest drug use centres where people can access all the drugs they want, but they get locked in forever, and can thus take all the drugs they want until they die, hopefully soon. People proposing such things appear to be entirely devoid of either empathy or understanding of drugs and addiction.

Such things should be anathema to anyone with the slightest shred of decency.

The current war on drugs 'cure' is worse than the disease by far. Those actions you describe are the actions of a state that believes it owns its citizens and can exterminate them at will.

The Phillipines are getting close on point 3, having allowed anyone to literally get away with murder if they say the victim was a drug dealer. Most people I know consider that policy to be a monstrous.

I would hope that in most democratic countries we would see open revolt against the government, though I know in reality that authoritarianism and rule by a 'big' or 'strong' man does have mass appeal. Humans are such weird apes, and will often gladly watch the 'other' die for transgressing entirely arbitrary rules.

tl;dr - it reeks of a "final solution"

You can't fight your own population the same way you fight a foreign population.

Could you imagine what would happen if it got out that the US government was doing any of these options? There would be armed riots in the street the next day. It would trigger a civil war and you might damn well lose.

You can't hide a conspiracy of this magnitude. The only way anyone in America could possibly prosecute the drug war in the way you are suggesting would be if the population at large was also in support of scorched earth drug war.

I am not advocating for any of these policies, just that this is what a real war on drugs would mean.

I think you might be surprised how much public support such policies would have. You only have to look at the Philippines to see the wide support even the crudest of these ideas has.

You might not be advocating for those policies but it's disingenuous to use them as arguments for why the war on drugs was not a real war.

The United States could have won the Vietnam War overnight by dropping nuclear bombs over every inch of Indochina and then repopulating it with new citizens. Just because the United States didn't do the "obvious" solution to win a war doesn't mean the Vietnam War wasn't real.

Waging and winning war has little to do with all out tactics. It's funny because the brains behind the American Vietnam War did almost everything SHORT of dropping nuclear bombs on indochina and still failed. Proof that hearts and minds often matter more than threats of violence.

The Vietnam (American) war is a very good analogy - it was never a formal war and fought under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [1] to explicitly avoid the declaration of war. If the US had declared war on North Vietnam I suspect the outcome would have been different even without the use of nuclear weapons - either the US would not have fought in the first place (the most likely) or if they did they would have fought a total war like in WWII.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution

I know you're not advocating them.

I'm saying your hypothetical policies couldn't possibly be enacted because it would be suicide.

I've been to the Philippine's and talked to Duterte supporters. It is perhaps more fair to describe the situation as extremely anti-meth rather than generally extremely anti-drug. The reason this position is popular to begin with is because of a broken court system. People are choosing quick-and dirty summary justice over the perceived no justice of the court system. The "death squads" are tolerated because there are a lot of legitimate targets for this brand of illegitimate justice. Its a case of hate the principle, love the result.

In general the Filipino people are not irrationally rabid about private, responsible, recreational drug use.

even if taking your hypotheticals seriously:

1) which drug supply? what exactly constitutes a “drug”? (IMO this has been actually the worst part of the “drug war” - the linguistic confusion the very term itself causes within the general public)

2) comes back to #1. Some drug tests check for metabolic byproducts, etc. As the number of substances falling in the “drug” category go up, so will false positives. It simply doesn’t scale

3) ok sure. But see 2 and 1, and you’ve already almost accomplished this goal with 4.

4) again if technically possible, only for a small subset of possible “drugs”

So you’re right, no one has tried this because it’s nonsense, just like the “war on drugs” has always been.

tldr; it has always been about money and power and excuses for control. The Opiod crisis has started slapping us across the face with this fact daily.

Along the same lines:

> 1. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.

No there aren't. Drugs are super strong, concentrated, and great at being drugs. They have varied and various manners of consumption, and can be purified on-site of many adulterants. You'd be looking at a bevvy of poisons, each one easily thwarted. Fentanyl or something of its ilk is a better solution. Those drugs are also used in niche communities with connections to their distributors, they would notice people dying.

This is before we look at at the giant, unending, economic incentives for criminal cartels to avoid this poisoning.

> 2. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.

Sounds awesome, wanna know why it won't work? Even if the absurd costs of administration & enforcement could be handled, we do not have the money for testing at that level. More importantly the metabolic processing rates for drugs are very different. Cocaine, for example, is only 3 days. Storage of materials required for post-facto processing is also a huge cost. And even if any of this were viable we have the issue of sister chemicals and the ongoing testing war with cheap chinese chemical producers, an arms race we are losing and would lose harder and faster.

To be concrete: random USADA testing of two athletes ranges in costs from $50,000 to $100,000 for 7 to 8 weeks. Even that is highly circumvent-able if you were only looking for short-acting drugs.

> 3. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).

Cruelty always makes social change easier, but let's look at any historical example where this has been tried... ... did it stop drug use? No.

Not to mention how nice it would be to put some THC oil into the food of my enemies and then have them executed by the state...

Not to mention the GDP costs...

Not to mention that in the real world the death penalty costs more money than lifetime imprisonments...

> 4. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).

That's not really how drugs work, that's not really cogent of how designer drug development works, and whenever I hear suggestions requiring man-hours enough to build the pyramids by hand... well... I think they're about as likely as us building all the pyramids over again by hand.

Aaaand again I find the idea of being able to murder people from easily attainable substances and well understood chemical compounds that can be readily be put into foods or aerosols kinda fun, and definitely something that would work out well in practice...

Naturally, the impacts on GDP would make this about as likely as Trump making real estate illegal.

The first one, spiking he drug supply with poisons, was mandated by the US government before and increasingly during alcohol prohibition. They weren’t sneaky about it, and they were doing it to industrial alcohols, but those were the same alcohols that the gangs were taking and re-distilling and reselling to people and they knew it. It was apparently controversial at the time.

I’ve linked the snopes article because the situation was more nuanced than how I’d seen it represented before. But it does display the kind of callousness that would be needed to undertake any of the measures you outlined.

https://www.snopes.com/government-poison-10000-americans/

This is what war means. I am not arguing for a war on drugs, just saying that this is the sort of actions that a real war on drugs would mean doing.

The issue with this line of thinking is that it is based on the assumption that a "war" is the appropriate solution because the cause of drug related problems is just people's weaknesses and moral failings. The hard Right of course thinks that, and they have pounded this metaphor into society's head ever since the Reagan era. If the real motivation for a "war" really was a matter of public health, then alcohol would be banned immediately. But ... so much money is involved...

As commenters here, and Rat Park [1], and "Drug Warriors and Their Prey" [2] explain, such a simplistic notion about the causes is not correct, along with the assumptions about the government's true motivations. There are more complex reasons, based in psychology and sociology, that explain why people have drives to alter their consciousness and why government policy is not actually what it seems a lot of the time.

This metaphor of a "war" is deliberately misleading, but simplistic enough to be jammed into people's heads - it is the 20th century equivalent of "Reefer Madness". Thus it is no surprise the Right is so fond of this, even now... they are obsessed with trying to mold society into what they want, versus trying to actually understand and solve problems appropriately. Thus their stereotypical dismissal of 'science' and all that...

But as I heard recently, conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. US society is now evolving and legal marijuana is never going to go away now - primarily because of the money involved (and that is another essay)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drug-Warriors-Their-Prey-Police/dp/...

What if - I like this inversion of expression - what if it really is a war on drugs, not against? After all, amphetamin was popularized under the Nazis, e.g. The CIA supplied cocain to vietnamese contras. Soldiers are fully dependent on supplies so who knows what's mixed into the food as preservatives. But it's unlikely the hard liner conservatives are just fooling everyone, rather it could be an ironic slogan indeed to reinforce the idea of sheer will. But still the only thing more important to conservatives is the economy and the cold war was an economic war (in hindsight?). Point in case, the CIA experimented with LSD. The population is seen as human capital and perhapsits everyones own responsibility to abstain. Quite naturally, controled selection is able to increase fitness overall, e.g. in terms of fitness and apprehension. (edit: So there is incentive for control and thus also to fight against uncontroled supply.)

It's called dope, after all - if you don't know what I mean I invite you to learn what doping in semiconductor fabrication means.

I'm highly paranoid, probably, but you know what they say, being delusional doesn't imply noone were pursuing ulterior motives. And actually I would find that kind of covered honesty hidden in plain sight quite sympathetic in terms of plausible deniability. I mean it's only fair because ashamed drug users try the same, being too ashamed to admit, but too proud to lie - and too sophisticated until not.

> The thing about the “War on Drugs” is it has never been a real war,

Like the “War on Poverty”, the “War on Drugs” was using a popular metaphor in domestic policy, it wasn't intended to refer to a literal war (though, in fact, there have been real literal wars—international armed conflicts—tied into that domestic policy.)

Yes one of the great ironies of the “war on drugs” is about its only “success" is to cause real wars in poor countries.

>Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis

Not every molecule has the potential to induce an immune response. Otherwise lots of cures would exists. Opioids being not especially big molecules, this sounds like pure dream to me.

You can make an immune response to anything by attaching it to a larger molecule that is immunogenic. There are already vaccine to morphine induced by immunisation [1].

Of course all the vaccines developed to date have been aimed at blocking the morphine reaching the brain (an approach that won’t work), but there is nothing to stop someone developing a vaccine that induces anaphylaxis instead (other than ethics).

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3773503/

Murdering the drug abusing population would be frowned upon by anyone with a sense of morality.

You're absolutely correct though that it would be a "final solution" in the "War on Drugs" but implementing it would face a horrendous backlash; although there are quite a few of the population who would support it.

I would consider anyone who is ok with murdering citizens who take drugs as completely out of connection with the reality of drug use/abuse.

To be clear, that would be a war on drug users.

The confusing point about the "War on drugs" is that "drugs" is not a real belligerent.

What about the actual fighting with weapons in Central/South America? Is that not a war?

Well it is war caused by drugs, just not a war on drugs.

The same could be said for "The War on Terror". If we really wanted to fight "terror" we'd keep everyone unconscious with drugs so they couldn't feel terror.