Introduction
This chapter presents a comprehensive reckoning of one of America's longest-standing, most controversial, and least successful efforts in foreign and domestic policy. It focuses on the history, impact, and logic behind America's war on drugs. It also considers the entirety of the evidence amid a deeply polarized and highly selective discourse of the policies, controversies, failures, and successes on the war on drugs of the past several years. The chapter talks about the cost of the drug war that reached more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, which is roughly ten times the price tag of the Gulf War or three times that of World War I. It emphasizes how drugs produced domestically and abroad continue to proliferate despite decades of effort to eradicate them.