Thanks to the war on drugs, nearly 700,000 people were arrested in the United States for possession of marijuana in 1997, while 400,000 currently sit in prison for drug crimes — more than the entire prison population of Britain, Germany and Belgium — for what is a consensual act. Nearly $35 billion a year is spent on arresting, prosecuting and jailing drug criminals in the US — $400 million in Canada — to hammer at a crime which essentially harms no one but the drug user.
