Concluding Thoughts and a Tentative Way Forward

This chapter emphasizes how 23 million Americans between the ages of twelve and sixty-five are illicit drug users despite the billions of dollars spent on prevention, treatment, law enforcement, and interdiction. It talks about marijuana use among Americans increasing steadily from 13.9 percent in 2016 to 15.9 percent in 2018. It also elaborates how the United States was buckling under an enormous drug abuse and addiction problem, with 15 million troubled users of alcohol and several million others regularly abusing illegal drugs. The chapter looks at an official Pentagon profile titled “Operation Martillo Drops the Hammer on Smugglers”, which detailed progress on the new initiative to interrupt the Florida/Caribbean channel that South American kingpins were using to transport cocaine. It recounts how four years after the Pentagon report, the Pentagon's official website headline touted Martillo as still hammering away at drug trafficking.