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obscene profits. It was actually worse than that. I wasn't just creating a job opening; I was creating a safe job opening because it they tried to get the job while the dealer was still on the corner he would probably shoot them. I would suggest to you that whole armies of police cannot stop drug trafficking when the profits are this immense. A hundred years ago there was not a single federally illicit drug in the United States. In 1914 the US government decided it wanted to justify making certain drugs illegal so it estimated that 1.3 percent of the population was addicted to drugs .21 "We can't have that," they said, and they passed the 1914 Harrison Anti - Narcotics Act. Fifty -six years later the US government wanted to justify a policy starting a war on drugs, so they conducted a survey that showed 1.3 percent of the population was addicted to drugs. After nearly four decades of fueling this war with over a trillion dollars of our taxes and making over 39 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, what are the results? Our court system is choked with the escalating number of drug prosecutions and our quadrupled prison population has made building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry; with 2.3 million incarcerated today and another 1.9 million arrested every year for nonviolent drug offenses. The United States now imprisons 1,009 per 100,000 population, more per capita than any country in the world; 1.6 times as many as Russia (our closest competitor) and 6 times as many as China. Where will it end? The United States has 4.6 percent of the world's population and 22.5 percent of its prisoners' right here in this "land of freedom "! And today, 1.3 percent of the population is addicted to drugs. The only thing that has changed in a hundred years, whether drugs were legal, whether they were illicit, or whether they were illicit and we were involved in a war against them, is that those drugs are now cheaper, more potent, and far easier for our children to access. Drug barons continue to grow richer every year and terrorists now make fortunes on the trade, while our citizens continue dying on our streets. This represents the very definition of a failed public policy. Will Rogers said, "If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging." So what we're suggesting at LEAP is that we stop digging in the hole of a failed war on drugs and start searching for alternative strategies. Now I am now going to make a couple of suggestions that I hope will answer what I think is your obvious question "Is there anything that can be done to stop this scourge on our nation and the world ?" I believe there is. I am going to offer you a policy model I have been working on for some thirty years. However, I am not presenting it to convince you of its worth as much as to open your mind to the fact that workable alternatives to these failed drug policies do exist. If you ever get to hear another LEAP speaker you may get an alternative policy that differs slightly as to how we might distribute drugs once they are legal. All LEAP requires of its speakers is that they believe the war on drugs is a failure and that the speakers support alternative policies that will reduce the incidence of death, disease, crime and addiction by ultimately ending drug prohibition. We speak to thousands of very intelligent people like yourself during our presentations and what we are hoping is that once the public's mind is open to alternative solutions, they will think of workable policies that are much better than any we have yet considered. This then is my suggested solution. 0