Thursday Night Charts & Graphs – Drug Control Spending and Drug Addiction

From documentary filmmaker Matt Groff, here’s a chart outlining the discrepancy between the ever-increasing amount of money the United States spends to control drugs and the efficacy of that spending. Mike Riggs at Reason.com explains that the chart shows federal drug control spending; the $1.5 trillion dollar number includes state spending and other costs, and may actually be low. Groff has a Kickstarter page devoted to his 1315 Project, a documentary film about how the drug war is in large part about funding police departments and leads to criminalizing the poor and the non-white. Their fundraiser ends this weekend.