[sterwill]

You can't win a war against something that can't die or surrender, so you can't win a war against drugs. You can win a war against people. Is that how the US should solve its health problems? With war against its own people?

[corbulo]

You're letting semantics shape your reality. Simply because a police action is called a 'war' doesn't mean when it refuses to go away forever there was a failure or its hopeless to have any enforcement action whatsoever.

Crime of many categories will always exist, that doesn't mean we should give up on policing.

[sterwill]

I'm "letting" semantics shape my reality? The war metaphor for drug policing was chosen 9 years before I was born. It's been used my entire life to normalize the violence and societal costs associated with criminalizing drug usage.

I'm not talking about policing or crime in general here, or "giving up on policing" or whatever you're implying. This seems like a non-sequitur.

I want us to reshape our conversations about drugs to focus on health impacts, and throw away the dumb war metaphor that has twisted a public health problem (drug abuse can hurt you) into a multi-generational, multi-billion (-trillion?) dollar "police action" that has shown no path to a solution.