In honor of the late great Walter Cronkite, the Most Trusted Man in America, Part I of my look at the War on Drugs focuses on the following snippets from an article he wrote for The Huffington Post in March 2006 (my comments are in orange).

When I wanted to understand the truth about the war on drugs, I took the same approach I did to the war in Vietnam: I hit the streets and reported the story myself. I sought out the people whose lives this war has affected.  Allow me to introduce you to some of them… [there is an entire website dedicated to the innocent victims of the drug war, their ages range from 8 months to 88 years].

…Jan Warren, a single mother who lived in New Jersey with her teenage daughter. Pregnant, poor and desperate, Jan agreed to transport eight ounces of cocaine to a cousin in upstate New York. Police officers were waiting at the drop-off point, and Jan - five months pregnant and feeling ill - was cuffed and taken in.

Did she commit a crime? Sure. But what awaited Jan Warren defies common sense and compassion alike. Under New York’s infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws [recently dismantled by Albany legislature and Governor David Patterson, who is quoted as saying “I can’t think of a criminal justice strategy that has been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller drug laws”], Jan - who miscarried soon after the arrest - was sentenced to 15 years to life…

In Tulia, Texas, an investigator fabricated evidence that sent more than one out of every ten of the town’s African American residents to jail on trumped-up drug charges in one of the most despicable travesties of justice this reporter has ever seen [here is a link to this story, even more info here]….

…[The Drug War] surely hasn’t made our streets safer [see graph below*]. Instead, we have locked up literally millions of people…disproportionately people of color…who have caused little or no harm to others - wasting resources that could be used for counter-terrorism, reducing violent crime, or catching white-collar criminals.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this effort - with no one held accountable for its failure.

Amid the clichés of the drug war, our country has lost sight of the scientific facts. Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we’ve become blind to reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is too expensive, and too inhumane