Everyone has an opinion on why the war on drugs in our society is failing.  The real reason is obvious.  Taken at face value, the war on drugs is the biggest oxymoron since the development of the term military intelligence.  While drug offenders are arrested in record numbers with little overall effect on the perceived drug problem, the rest of western civilization is being brainwashed by the medical industry to believe that legal drugs are the answer to most of society's ills.  In fact, beginning at birth we are taught that ingesting, inhaling and injecting "legal drugs" to feel better is beneficial and acceptable to society.  If you are caught possessing minute quantities of drugs that have been determined by society to be illegal, however, then your punishment could include, in some states, life imprisonment.

No where is there a better example of a societal mixed message.  The recent decision to allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise prescription drugs on television is a bigger setback to the war on the drugs than the Columbian drug cartel could ever hope to accomplish.  Now after a lecture on the evils of drugs at school, children can go home and watch countless television commercials proclaiming the untold benefits of drugs.  If our society ever hopes to succeed in the war on drugs, then we must accept the fact that we are sending the wrong message to children by proclaiming illegal drugs are bad while we ingest a handful of legal drugs to cure minor ills.

Thousands of years ago, eastern philosophy recognized that the best medicine is preventive medicine.  By exercising and eating healthy foods, most of the common ills that western society tries to cure by taking drugs can be avoided.  If children are taught that taking any drug is a last resort, then society may finally be able to move beyond our current preoccupation with drugs and spend time on issues that will have more lasting benefits to society.