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Drug prohibition is an effective tool used by the United States' prison industrial complex to maintain the largest per capita rate of incarcerations in the world. There are more black men in US prisons today than there were slaves in 1840 and they are being used for the same purpose; working for private corporations at 16 to 20 cents an hour. Now we are creating private prisons for profit and the owners of those prisons have banded together to hire lobbyists to go to Washington and demand longer mandatory- minimum prison sentences. Prisons for profit do not belong in a democratic society. Step 2: The US government should import or produce the drugs and control them for quality, potency, and standardized measurement. This policy would virtually end drug overdoses. Those deaths don't have to happen any more than the deaths attributed to "bathtub gin" during alcohol prohibition had to happen. These deaths are a result of drug prohibition not drug pharmacology. Consumers of bathtub gin and consumers of today's hard drugs don't overdose because they take more and more of the substance but because they don't know how much drug is mixed with cutting -agent in the concoction. Too much drug and you are dead. It is impossible in illegal market to know what is in the packages being sold on the street. Legalization and regulation of drugs can stop the carnage. And if we can keep from overdosing, those people who feel they must continue to use drugs, perhaps we can wean them off their addictions. And folks, these are our children. They are our parents; our sisters and brothers. We should be trying to help them by bringing them back into our society as productive citizens, not by burying them in prisons years before they should have died. Another important point about governmental production of opium was address by the Senlis Council, a European drug - policy research institution, which according to New York Times writer, Maia Szalavitz, has proposed this "truly winning solution ": [T]he developing world is experiencing a severe shortage of opium- derived pain medications, according to the World Health Organization. Developing countries are home to 80 percent of the world's population, but they consume just 6 percent of the medical opioids. In those countries, most people with cancer, AIDS and other painful conditions live and die in agony. The United States wants Afghanistan to destroy its potentially merciful crop, [of heroin] which has increased sevenfold since 2002 and now constitutes 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product. But why not bolster the country's stability and end both the pain and the trafficking problems by licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Control Board to sell its opium legally? The World Health Organization has said that opioids are "absolutely necessary" for treating severe pain. Senlis estimates that meeting the global need for pain medications would require 10,000 tons of opium a year - more than twice Afghanistan's current production. Because farmers aren't the ones who make the big bucks in the illegal drug trade, purchasing their poppies at competitive rates should be possible. But even if we paid exactly what the drug lords do, the entire crop would cost only about $600 million less than the $780 million the United States planned to spend on eradication in Afghanistan this year. 13