The high cost of losing the war on drugs: New Hanover County

The noted UNC economist, Art Benavie, knows what he's talking about when it comes to the war on drugs. His latest book uncovers its absurdity at all levels of analysis, before it zeroes in on a conservative cost of this waste of national resources. According to Dr. Benavie's analysis, prosecuting the war on drugs is like flushing more than $70 billion dollars a year down the toilet.

To get a glimpse of what that looks like on the streets of North Carolina, I asked the team at MyReporter.com in Wilmington if they could help me understand the costs of the war in New Hanover County. Here's the response they received by email from Charles Smith, of the New Hanover County Sheriff's Department.

I’m sure these numbers are not going to be as helpful as you wish but they are budget numbers for the Detention Facility and Vice & Narcotics Divisions. Obviously, the jail is used for other purposes than the war on drugs. The figures below represent salaries, operating and capital expenses.

• Detention yearly operating budget - $ 14,903,167.00
• Vice & narcotics yearly operating budget - $1,914,485.00

I don't have figures for New Hanover, but the percentage of people nationwide in prison for drug offenses has been around 25% for a few years now. Assuming that's true here, that means approximately $3.7 million is being spent in this one county to lock up drug offenders.

Further, it's likely that nearly all of the vice and narcotics budget is dedicated to the drug war, but let's assume they're also struggling with prostitution. Round off the drugs budget to $1.5 million.

The result: A little over five million dollars is being spend in one North Carolina county alone to sustain a policy which has been proven in every way to be ineffective, destructive, wasteful, and immoral.

Extend that finding across all of North Carolina and it seems likely that the cost of the war on drugs to NC taxpayers would be approaching $400 to $500 million a year or more. And that doesn't even begin to address the related crime that comes with drug offenses: gang violence, robbery, domestic violence, and worse.

There are many good reasons to end the war on drugs, and budget sanity is only one of them.