“Sessions’ plans ignore one crucial thing: that unlike most crimes, narcotics trafficking works within a market, ruled by the laws of economics. That bare fact was the undoing of the last War on Drugs, where a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money was spent on a fruitless effort. You can win a war against people. You can’t win a war against a market, which adjusts to disruptions in supply and recovers. You can pluck out a drug dealer, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, but so long as demand is constant the market will react and another one or ten or hundred or thousand drug dealers will appear. Therein lies the ultimate tragedy of the War on Drugs: imprisoning a drug dealer almost never stops people from getting drugs. We have given up freedom and treasure without helping anyone very much.”