Do the Math: Drug War Costs will never be fully recovered

Counting the Costs:

• Amount spent annually in the U.S. on the war on drugs: More than $51,000,000,000
• Number of people arrested in 2012 in the U.S. on nonviolent drug charges: 1.55 million
• Number of people arrested for a marijuana law violation in 2012: 749,825
• Number of those charged with marijuana law violations who were arrested for possession only: 658,231 (88 percent)
• Number of Americans incarcerated in 2011 in federal, state and local prisons and jails: 2,266,800 or 1 in every 99.1 adults, the highest incarceration rate in the world
• Fraction of people incarcerated for a drug offense in state prison that are black or Hispanic, although these groups use and sell drugs at similar rates as whites: 2/3
• Number of states that allow the medical use of marijuana: 20 + District of Columbia
• Estimated annual revenue that California would raise if it taxed and regulated the sale of marijuana: $1,400,000,000
• Number of people killed in Mexico's drug war since 2006: 70,000+
• Number of students who have lost federal financial aid eligibility because of a drug conviction: 200,000+
• Number of people in the U.S. that died from an accidental drug overdose in 2009: 31,758
• Tax revenue that drug legalization would yield annually, if currently-illegal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco: $46.7 billion