One of the biggest problems with the war on drugs and with traffic fines is that they create perverse incentives for law enforcement and for local governments, because revenue generation then becomes coupled to the way laws are written and enforced. Everybody knows how this works with traffic "offenses", local governments use red light cameras, speed traps, and speeding ticket quotas as a source of income. This then converts a significant portion of the resources that should be used for keeping people safe into effective tax collection.

The same thing happens with the war on drugs due to asset forfeiture laws. On the one hand you have a police officer tasked with the hard and often thankless job of enforcing the law, investigating unsolved crimes, meticulously sorting through evidence, walking a beat, etc, etc. On the other hand you have a police officer tasked with the comparatively simple jobs of, say, pulling over "suspicious" looking drivers on the highway and looking for pot in their car, or executing exciting no-knock raids on, in the average case, un-armed drug dealer's houses. In the process generating enough revenue through the seizure and auction of vehicles and houses to pay for raises, more officers, new guns, helicopters, swat teams, armored personnel carriers, etc. The natural equilibrium is going to be that as many officers as possible spend as much time as possible in those typically easier and more glamorous and exciting jobs that generate revenue. This is hardly hypothetical, as over the course of the war on drugs we've seen a dramatic shift in the amount of effort the legal system puts forth in enforcing drug laws and prosecuting drug crimes and we've also seen a dramatic increase in the militarization of even small-town police departments. Assault rifles are more common. No-knock raids are more common. SWAT teams are more common. Use of APCs is more common. And this despite no significant increase in drug dealers becoming more heavily armed or more violent over that time period (except in Mexico which is in a drug-gang induced civil war).

The law should be pragmatic not dogmatic. The law should be molded to aid society not to mold society into some perfect, moral vision. Whenever the law tries to overstep those boundaries the result has always been strife and disaster.