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As the drug war escalated in the 1980s, mandatory minimum sentencing and other Draconian penalties boosted our prison population to unprecedented levels. With more than 2 million people behind bars (there are only 8 million prisoners in the entire world), the United States—with one-twenty-second of the world's population—has one-quarter of the planet's prisoners. We operate the largest penal system in the world, and approximately one quarter of all our prisoners (nearly half a million people) are there for nonviolent drug offenses—that's more drug prisoners than the entire European Union incarcerates for all offenses combined, and the EU has over 90 million more citizens than the United States. Put another way, the United States now has more nonviolent drug prisoners alone than we had in our entire prison population in 1980.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0429-09.htm
It's time for change. Treat drug abuse as a medical problem, not a judicial one.