The war on drugs is one that I am very passionate about. In my opinion, it is useless that we have a colloquial phrase: "going to the dogs." There is no greater friend one could have than a beloved dog. The reason they're so loyal is they wag their tails and not their tongues. If you want to talk about going downhill in a morass of filth, scandal, and disgust, we should rephrase the remark, "going to Congress," especially in regard to drug laws and reformation.
I've touched on this topic in my 2013 Prediction Booklet and would like to further express my standpoint on drugs in America. In a nutshell, I believe that the drug war will continue in the Western World and that the United States will, of course, be one of the major victims of this challenging and ruthless evil.
According to a report titled The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society, last published by the Department of Justice in 2011, enforcing illegal drug laws imposes an annual cost on the American criminal justice system of $56 billion; while incarceration of drug offenders imposes an annual cost of $48 billion. This equals an annual cost of $104 billion spent on a two-pronged approach to cease harms caused by drugs. This amount of money, in my mind, is almost beyond reason. We have seen government control substances during Prohibition. And, as movie after movie has shown, it seems that politicians, statesmen and legal representatives can be bought through these costs. So I predict between now and the coming year the public statements of fighting and combating this problem will not see a successful conclusion and will be largely fantasy and deception based largely on enormous costs and budget to fight a war that may or may not be corrupt.
Further, I do predict and need to make a statement about drug treatment centers. As we come to understand these centers and look into their work, I predict that we will come to realize that they've been largely a failure. It will be some day revealed the percentage of individuals on hard drugs that are rehabilitated in such centers, and it will be an extraordinarily miniscule number. That I foresee and also have been shown in a study by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA's) National Survey on Drug Use and Health. According to this survey, 2.6 million people who needed treatment for an illicit drug or alcohol abuse problem in 2009 -- 11.2 percent of those who needed treatment -- received it at a specialty facility. This is not nearly a high enough number, in my opinion, to make an impact on the overall impact on the fight against drugs.
I predict that there will be growing sentiment that the most realistic way to fight this serious war is by legalizing, with strict rules, the purchase of drugs -- but I predict that the effort to do such will be a failure, not simply because of do-gooders who are against the taking of hard drugs, but because of the money that would be lost if such laws were passed. Parenthetically, I am against the use of hard drugs. I'm so against it that I believe that this situation needs to be legalized. The problem is, how in the world could you take drugs out of the hands of such wealthy, powerful, ruthlessly evil salesmen of these substances?
Most importantly, time will prove something I have stated for a number of years... those who join drug-users in purchasing or participate in the setting in which the drugs were taken, whether it be in clubs, private gatherings, etc., are phony friends; empty and so disinterested in a genuine relationship that these "friends" will disappear from their lives once the individual is exposed and in trouble with the law. That's been true with celebrities and with private, non-public citizens. They are no more friends than an alligator resting on the shoreline after a heavy storm.