This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

“The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting ‘a war on drugs,’ a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he told the paper. “We’re not at war with people in this country.”

Kerlikowske’s statement signals the Obama administration is likely to moderate a policy that has taken heat from social activists, as effectively targeting poor and minority Americans. “Prior administrations talked about pushing treatment and reducing demand while continuing to focus primarily on a tough criminal-justice approach,” the Journal adds.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron believes that legalizing all drugs, not just marijuana, is the only way to eliminate drug-related violence.

Miron argued during an appearance Monday on CNN, “Prohibition … hasn’t prevented kids from getting access to heroin, including very, very cheap heroin. … At the same time, we’re getting all the ancillary costs of drug prohibition, such as the violence in Mexico that spills over into the United States.”

“Some people will misuse drugs even if it’s legal,” Miron acknowledged, “but the magnitude of negative things would be vastly reduced.”

[The] crisis is located in Mexico, which is in free fall, its state institutions under threat as they have not been since at least the Cristero uprising of the late 1920s and possibly since the Mexican revolution of 1910. While the Obama administration is obviously aware of what is happening south of the Rio Grande, the threat simply does not command the attention that its gravity requires.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and others have been investigating whether Texas billionaire Allen Stanford was involved in laundering drug money for Mexico Gulf cartel, ABC News reported on Wednesday, citing federal authorities.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday charged Stanford and two executives of Stanford Group Co with an $8 billion fraud.

Mexican authorities detained one of Stanford’s private planes as part of the investigation, which has been ongoing since last year, ABC reported citing unnamed officials.