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Not only are they admitting it doesn't work but that it's costing a fortune too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7531860.stm

The criminal justice costs of class A drugs alone are estimated at £4bn a year.
Tim McSweeney, one of the report's authors, said: "We were struck by just how little evidence there is to show that the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on UK enforcement each year has made a sustainable impact."

£4 bn for the lawyers and prisons, millions spent in pointless enforcement is such a waste of taxpayers money.

Legalising Pot and creating a legal taxable source of supply would raise how much a year I wonder?
and harm how many?

More evidence of the total lack of sense in UK drug laws and policies.

FF

Fat Freddie wrote:Legalising Pot and creating a legal taxable source of supply would raise how much a year I wonder?
and harm how many?

If ya think about how many ppl are involved from the minute of an arrest to the final day of the punishment, it's scary. I reckon if pot was made legal and produced a tax, it still wouldn't come anywhere near the fiancial profit margins that lawful society gain from keeping it illegal.

DC wrote:

Fat Freddie wrote:Legalising Pot and creating a legal taxable source of supply would raise how much a year I wonder?
and harm how many?

If ya think about how many ppl are involved from the minute of an arrest to the final day of the punishment, it's scary. I reckon if pot was made legal and produced a tax, it still wouldn't come anywhere near the fiancial profit margins that lawful society gain from keeping it illegal.

DC you make an interesting point but all those people involved in the arrest and incarceration of pot users can just be transfered over to a different area of law enforcement IE real crimes with real victims

Regardless, privatized prisons in the U.S. receive roughly $40,000 to $60,000 each year (varies from one state to another) for each inmate they warehouse in bare-bones facilities requiring very little upkeep once they're built.

Cram two guys in a 6-by-8-foot cell, collect $100,000 in taxpayer money to feed them chum for a year, require them to perform labor from which the prison company profits but inmates receive pennies per day (that's the only separation between indenturement and outright slavery) -- and keep building more prisons, and criminalizing more young people, so the less fortunate folks get cleansed from our streets, and one of the nation's few growth industries continues to flourish.

With all the financial misfortune in this country these days, it should be a great era for prisons.

It's the American way, though people are increasingly fed up with it. Give it 15-20 more years, get the 1960s-to-1980s generations into full power, get the backward-minded old guard out, and drug prohibition will be overhauled. That's just the way it's going to happen. Demonize the old guard, blame them for their prohibition and war stupidity, it wasn't our fault, let's all smoke and make money.

That's the American way, too. (See the 18th and 21st amendments, the latter of which was enacted when people revolted against the former, grew disgusted by the criminalization of alcohol producers and providers, were upset to have a freedom taken away, learned to produce the prohibited product on their own, and took the teeth out of federal law by extended populist revolt.)