Harold Pollack writes that “this may be the most embarrassing graph in the history of drug control policy”:

Law enforcement strategies have utterly failed to even maintain street prices of the key illicit substances. Street drug prices in the [above] figure fell by roughly a factor of five between 1980 and 2008. Meanwhile the number of drug offenders locked up in our jails and prisons went from fewer than 42,000 in 1980 to a peak of 562,000 in 2007.