Do law enforcement agencies and police really want to end it?
Considering how many of them actually
constitute the upper echelons of the trade, I seriously doubt it.
Your suggestion, presumably tongue-in-cheek - implies naïveté with the nature of the situation.
As with many other "wars", this is a situation where all the collateral damage occurs on the ground, and in this case more than others, the damage is pretty much
entirely collateral.
Drug users "use" because it provides them comfort they do not experience otherwise. In order to achieve this, they will resort to cheating, stealing, prostitution and anything else of modest and easy profit, very occasionally to threat of violence. As a result of such activities and the criminalisation of drug possession, they frequently end up incarcerated where they are brutalised and taught the finer points of the criminal profession.
The progression from "user" to "user/dealer" and up the hierarchy entails successively greater expectations of violent control, above a certain level of which it is impractical to achieve for someone who
is drug-dependent.
The only real "war" is waged on the consumer. Supposed drug "busts" serve to slightly narrow the supply, justifying increases in the going price which means - more profit for fewer goods, a
particularly good business mode. One has to ask - why are or were these drugs proscribed in the first place? Not for the "safety" of the common person, to be sure as this clearly has no benefit whatsoever, but in order to consolidate the excise stream from the "legal" soporifics, notably alcohol (after prohibition of
that turned out to be such an unmitigated and outright social and economic disaster).
The only way to win this "war" would be the Vietnam solution.
{Disclosure: Infrequent alcohol and zero caffeine use; never used illicit drugs. A significant aspect of my professional work is however in opiate Harm Minimisation program.}
