How much has the War on Drugs Cost in TOTAL?

I don't have any idea on the amount, but I like what your planning on doing here, and will be keeping an eye in this thread (ill take a look for a total $ as well) keep it up man.

 

We spend way to much. The U.S. Gov doesn't care about citizens, they care about themselves.

 

Drug War Clock | DrugSense

Not exactly what you want because it's money spent this year but I think you'll find it useful.

 

You can't ever quantify a total cost, because there are things that can't be calculated exactly. Things that most people don't even think about.

For example, take all of the people locked up for marijuana violations. Not only do they cost the state a certain amount of money to be locked up, but assuming they had jobs when they were arrested, they certainly aren't working them anymore. They're not working, so they aren't paying income taxes. That's another hit for the state. Then when you think about it, what do people do with money? They buy shit. When you buy shit, the state gets a cut of it: sales tax. They aren't participating in this either. And by buying shit, you support businesses, which pay other sorts of taxes as well, besides sales taxes. We're talking about maybe a couple dollars a day here. But multiply that by tens of thousands of people, and multiply that by several years, and the loss is significant.

And then there are smaller things, like not being able to register your car if you're locked up. That's about a $50-$100 loss to the state, per person. And you can't buy gas, which is a little different from the sales and business tax issue, because gas includes a tax to help improve and maintain the roads. Which means the state itself has to shell out more money to fix roads.

If you start looking hard enough at all them money the government funnels out of individuals, that they can't when they're locked up, the cost per year becomes truly phenomenal and unquantifiable.

 

20 million americans in jail since 1965.