Why? We love war. We’d rather attack with a macho battle cry like “Damn the torpedoes full speed ahead!” than listen to a warning from historian Kevin Phillips: “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant, wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, ultimately burning themselves out.” Which dominates our Congressional deficit-hawks? Which is China’s military strategy?

Admit it, we love war. Marine Corps posters grabbed me as a kid. Trained me as an aviation weapons system tech. I volunteered for Korea. And I couldn’t resist Erik Sofge’s edgy thriller, “China’s Secret War Plan,” about a China-USA war. Like a fast-paced Tom Clancy thriller. Leaked to Popular Mechanics: One of my favorites as a kid working in a small-town magazine store. Yes, war’s “popular.” Locked in our DNA long ago. Sofge’s thriller was based on war games played by Pentagon generals and Rand Corporation strategists.

Admit it, Americans love war. Can’t resist videogames, war movies: Hunt for Red October. Platoon. Dirty Dozen. StarWars. Terminator. War turns us on, a testosterone virus in our brains. Blinds us to costs, collateral damage, unintended consequences, new debt for our kids. Besides, they’ll grow up “loving” war. DNA is passed on. Can’t resist. That hot button gets pushed by photos of China’s first Aircraft Carrier, or its new Stealth Bomber exposed during the state visit of China’s President Hu Jintao. Sofge’s thriller begins:

August 9, 2015, 0400. China’s war for “Taiwan starts in the early morning. There are no naval bombardments or waves of bombers … 1,200 cruise and ballistic missiles rise from heavy vehicles on the Chinese mainland … Taiwan’s modest missile defense network … a scattered deployment of I-Hawk and Patriot interceptors … slams into dozens of incoming warheads … a futile gesture … The mass raid overwhelms the defenses as hundreds of Chinese warheads blast the island’s military bases and airports.”

Do taxpayers have a choice? No? Just plan for big wars? Bigger deficits? No retirements.

The GOP wants to cut America’s massive debt. But “off-the-charts” military spending is “off the table.” Back in the forties WWII consumed 57% of our GDP. Today, war eats up about half America’s budget. We’re sinking under Iraq war debt. Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz estimates Iraq at $3 trillion, with $2 trillion for future costs, like VA medical. The Afghan war maybe another $3 trillion. Plus endless terrorist threats. Future wars are “planned” years, even decades in advance, strategies based on Pentagon-Rand wargames.

America talks peace. But deep inside our collective brain is a dark monster: We’re little kids who love playing war. Later fighting real wars. Age ten I had a collection of model fighter planes, played air wars. Age fifteen, owned three guns for hunting. Then the Corps. Like a moth to the flames, Americans cannot resist our destiny in war …. read more about this China-U.S.A. war in my column in MarketWatch

News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”

The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation say the billionaires. Too many people! Yes, over-population is the world’s #1 problem. And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren’t even trying to solve the world’s “over-population problem.” G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth’s population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the UN. And what about those billionaires and their billions? Can they make stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world history will do it. Here’s why.

Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prizewinner and author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.” Other voices are darker, shrill: “We’re past the point of no return.” “It’s already too late.” “The end is near.” As with Rome’s collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it “WWIII—the Population Wars.” A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues” Population unrest would then create “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” And “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond’s 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the ‘demographic bulge’ with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people.” And if the “bulge” stops for any reason, game over. Economic “growth” ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond’s equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables driving what we call the “WWIII-Population Wars” equation. We’ve expanded on Diamond’s source data.

One.  “WWIII-Population Wars:” the “Over-Population Multiplier”

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: “Official [UN] projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.” Still, that’s 23% more than today’s 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Population’s the new “third-rail” for politicians. So they ignore it. Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America’s population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

Two. “WWIII-Population Wars” equation: “Population Impact Multiplier”

Diamond warns: “There are ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population.” But he adds, they “consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it’s current impact.” And yet, that’s exactly what happens with “all Third World inhabitants adopting First World standards.” Folks, we oversold the “American Dream.” Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3 billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

“What really counts,” says Diamond, “is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.” First World citizens “consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World.” So the race is on: “Low impact people are becoming high-impact people” aspiring “to First World living standards.” The American Dream is now the “Global Dream.” Warning: The “Impact Multiplier” will drive the global “WWIII-Population Wars” equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond’s masterpiece, Collapse, the two key variables are what we call the “Over-Population Multiplier” and “Population Impact Multiplier.” Now let’s closely examine Diamond’s other ten variables that are driving our “WWIII-Population Wars” equation:

1. Food. Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They “have collapsed or are in steep decline” forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The UN calls the global food crisis a “silent tsunami.” Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day. In “The End of Plenty,” National Geographic warns that even a new “green revolution” of “synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds” may fail. Why? A joint World Bank/UN study “concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor.” Meanwhile, a Time cover story warns that America’s “addiction to meat” has led to farming that’s “destructive of the soil, the environment and us.” 

2. Water. Diamond warns: “Most of the world’s freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being used for irrigation, domestic and industrial water,” transportation, fisheries and recreation. Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: “Today over a million people lack access to reliable safe drinking water.” British International Development Minister recently warned that two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries by 2015. Water will trade like oil futures as wars are fought over water and other basic essentials noted earlier in Fortune’s analysis of the Pentagon report predicting that warfare will define human life in this scenario of the near future.

3. Farmland. Crop soils are “being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation,” much higher in forests where soil-erosion rate is “between 500 and 10,000 times” replacement rate. And this is increasing in today’s new age of the 100,000-acre mega-fires.

4. Forests: We are destroying natural habitats and rain forests at an accelerating rate. Half the world’s original forests have been converted to urban developments. A quarter of what remains will be converted in the next fifty years.

5. Toxic chemicals. Often our solutions create more problems than they solve. For example, industries “manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals” that break down slowly or not at all. Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.

6. Energy resources. Oil, natural gas and coal. Pimco manages $747 billion: equity, bonds and commodity funds. Manager Bill Gross recently described a “significant break” in the world’s “growth pattern.” He’s even betting we’re past the “peak oil” tipping point, heading down. Consumer shopping will continue declining as economies grow very slowly in the future and “corporate profits will be static.” In a recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal warns of the “7 Myths About Alternative Energy.” Are biofuels, solar and nuclear the “major ticket?” No, “they’re not,” never will be.

7. Solar energy. Sunlight’s not unlimited. Diamond: We’re already using “half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity” and we will reach the max by mid-century. In “Plundering the Amazon,” Bloomberg Markets magazine warned that Alcoa, Cargill and other companies “have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world’s largest rain forest … robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming.” Free market capitalism may be the enemy of survival.

8. Ozone layer. “Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere” where they can destroy the protective ozone or absorb and reduce solar energy.

9. Diversity. “A significant fraction of wild species, populations and genetic diversity has been lost, and at present rates, a large percent of the rest will disappear in half century.”

10. Alien species.  Transferring species to lands where they’re not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects, “preying on, parasitizing, infecting or out-competing” native animals and plants that lack evolutionary resistance.

In spite of the clear message in Diamond’s 12 time-bombs, he still says he’s a “cautious optimist.” What fuels his hope? Our leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”

Unfortunately, history tells us that cautious leaders are myopic, driven more by self-interest and nationalism than courage and long-term thinking. Eventually they’re caught off-guard and their worlds collapse, fast. They only respond to crises. And yes, out of crisis may come opportunity. And as Nobel economist Milton Friedman put it in his classic, Capitalism and Freedom: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change” because in the aftermath of crisis “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Too many, however, delay and respond to crises with too little, too late.

Bottom line: The betting odds are 100% that global leaders will wait for a Pentagon-style “black swan” crisis before acting. Unfortunately, that delay positions the “WWIII-the Population Wars” dead ahead. G-20 politicians will ignore the UN’s 9.3 billion population prediction. And Bill Gates well-intentioned 8.3 billion forecast also falls far short, by ignoring the “Population Impact Multiplier.” Wake up world, a global disaster is dead ahead: droughts, poverty, pandemics, global warming, wars everywhere. But is this a “Black Swan?” No. Why? Because this crisis is in fact 100% predictable using Diamond’s simple 12-timebomb equation. Failure to solve his equation quarantees triggering the “WWIII Population Wars.” Bet on the odds.

But even worse for investors, Javers says the CIA is “in one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in ‘deception detection,’ the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.” Yes, and how to deceive and manipulate Main Street America’s 95 million investors.

The Politico piece comes from Javers’ new book, ‘Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.’  Javers says this “never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to connect the ‘dots,’ this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253 … Sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries.

The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll. A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.” Once again, money and individual greed win out.

Warning: Under the cover of secrecy, the lure of huge salaries, and likely a few discrete campaign donations, we ‘re seeing one more sneaky trick hedge funds, Wall Street and the “Happy Conspiracy” octopus are using to take control of America’s government.

“The purpose of psychological operations (PSYOP) is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives. Psychological operations (PSYOP) are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. PSYOP are a vital part of the broad range of US diplomatic, informational, military, and economic activities. PSYOP characteristically are delivered as information for effect, used during peacetime and conflict, to inform and influence. When properly employed, PSYOP can save lives of friendly and/or adversary forces by reducing adversaries’ will to fight. By lowering adversary morale and reducing their efficiency, PSYOP can also discourage aggressive actions and create dissidence and disaffection within their ranks, ultimately inducing surrender.”

“Psychological Operations Warfare”
by Major Ed Rouse (Ret.) <psywarrior.com>

“Psychological Operations or PSYOP are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals. Used in all aspects of war, it is a weapon whose effectiveness is limited only by the ingenuity of the commander using it. A proven winner in combat and peacetime, PSYOP is one of the oldest weapons in the arsenal of man. It is an important force protector/combat multiplier and a non-lethal weapons system.

“Psychological Operations (PSYOP) or Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR) is simply learning everything about your target enemy, their beliefs, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Once you know what motivates your target, you are ready to begin psychological operations. Psychological operations may be defined broadly as the planned use of communications to influence human attitudes and behavior … to create in target groups behavior, emotions, and attitudes that support the attainment of national objectives. The form of communication can be as simple as spreading information covertly by word of mouth or through any means of multimedia.

“A psychological warfare campaign is a war of the mind. Your primary weapons are sight and sound. PSYOP can be disseminated by face-to-face communication, audio visual means (television), audio media (radio or loudspeaker), visual media (leaflets, newspapers, books, magazines and/or posters). The weapon is not how its sent, but the message it carries and how that message affects the recipient.”

“Capture their minds, and their hearts and souls will follow”

Actually, the real problem’s much deeper … deep in our culture, psyche and brains: America is a warring nation. Yes, we love war, any kind. War defines who we are. War makes us feel powerful. Wars solve our ideological problems. War makes special interests very rich. War keeps our self-perpetuating Pentagon war machine eating up about 40% of our national budget.  The same ideology and DNA that drove us into an unnecessary war in Iraq, the “worst foreign policy blunder in American history,” led us into creating a “War on Drugs.” But a war strategy is not working, just the opposite, it’s fueling and accelerating the problem. As O’Grady aptly puts it: “Violence along the border has skyrocketed ever since Mexican President Felipe Calderón decided to confront the illegal drug cartels that operate there.”

Last year my column, “Drug wars: Big Pharma, Afghan, Mexican cartels” got a huge positive response from American police officers who agreed: “The truth is, there is no ‘War on Drugs’ to win, nor to lose, just millions of addicts who need help.” We are a “Nation of Addicts,” and a costly “War on Drugs” down in Mexico won’t solve our addiction problem up here in America, we are wasting enormous taxpayer dollars. In short, until we grow up and drop the macho “War on Drugs” mindset, violence will accelerate, expanding here in America, as we fail to lessen demand. Here’s my analysis from MarketWatch:

Mexican drug lord “El Chapo” made the Forbes list of billionaires in 2009. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up: He runs the Sinaloa cartel, a major supplier of cocaine to the United States. He’s an assassin, another bin Laden … and Forbes honors him right up there with the world billionaires. But that got me thinking: In legitimizing “El Chapo” isn’t Forbes edging us toward decriminalizing all illegal drugs? Farfetched? Or maybe signaling a fundamental shift in America’s attitude toward illegal drugs? Suppose I were back at Morgan Stanley, asked to write a securities report for America’s healthcare industry, on Big Pharma? Review competition, market share, new profit opportunities when decriminalization of marijuana expands to other illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin, a megabuck market.

Yes, I said “when.” Eventually it could happen. Think of states like California. They’re going to vote on it. They’re facing a $42 billion deficit. They see their $14 billion marijuana crop as a new source of tax revenue. Legalize it. Tax it. Psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef saw the trend coming a couple decades ago: We’re a “Nation of Addicts … our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate.” Why? We refuse to face the real problem: Demand. Legalizing it will. 

We refuse to face the real problem: It’s not the supply chain, it’s demand. Psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef saw the trend coming a couple decades ago: America is a “Nation of Addicts … our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate.” We’re losing the war. In a “nation of addicts” it doesn’t matter if drugs are legal or not … where the drugs come from … who gets hurt … nor if we have to waste hundreds of billions fighting ineffective wars to protect suppliers … a corrupt Afghan government, the source of 95% of the world’s heroin … or Mexico, the main traffic route for wholesalers feeding America’s addicts … or Big Pharma the biggest pusher for prescription drug addicts … when a “nation of addicts” needs a fix, they always find it.

New, bigger profits if Big Pharma expands into illicit drugs?

There’s so much money being made in illegal drugs that the legalization of pot really is a sign of what’s ahead. More drugs will be legalized and controlled. Big Pharma will want in the action. Why not? They’re public companies: They must satisfy stockholders with new products, new markets, higher earnings and stock prices. Big Pharma’s strategy is clear, they have more salesmen than scientists developing new drugs, and their efforts to kill healthcare reform speaks volumes. So why not legalize all drugs, for new profits?

Seriously, drugs are a mega-business … America spends about $2.5 trillion on healthcare annually … including $315 billion Big Pharma revenues last year … they must be secretly exploring the untapped market in illicit drug traffic that siphons off an estimated $400 billion annually … plus keep in mind another $175 billion on alcoholic addiction.

If Big Pharma can capture part of the market share that’s now going to competing Mexican and Afghan drug warlords, then they can feed their shareholders addiction to earnings, feed their CEOs’ addiction for mega-million paychecks, while capitalizing on the American addicts need for a fix. We just need to end our moralistic charade, decriminalize and control all illicit drugs. Plus it’ll generate new tax revenues.

You can bet this opportunity is being actively explored deep inside Big Pharma, purely for economic reasons, and secretly, of course, like the tobacco industry’s studies of carcinogens in cigarettes. So if I were back at Morgan Stanley preparing a securities report on the implications of expanding Big Pharma’s market share when more drugs are legitimized, there are three studies that must be highlighted:

One. Failed drug policies breeding new terrorists and narco-states.

Things are worse today than two years ago when Foreign Policymagazine used the work of 100 experts in their “Third Terrorist Index …instead of treating the demand for illegal drugs as a market, and addicts as patients, governments continue to pursue policies that have boosted the profits of drug lords and fostered narcostates that threaten all of us.” Like Afghanistan: Narcotics is a cash crop. Unfortunately, Washington and the Pentagon fail to see that we’re feeding our disease, matching our addiction to illegal drugs here in America (demand) with the entrepreneurial spirit of Afghan government bureaucrats, farmers, Mexican traffickers and the Taliban (suppliers), while misusing our military. The Washington Post says “the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter,” a source of financing making them “richer and stronger by the day.”

Two. America’s 40-year “War on Drugs” is a “dismal failure”

About the same time Forbesrewarded “El Chapo” with the star status, the NY Timesreported: “Three former Latin American leaders,” ex-presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Columbia, “called on President Obama to rethink America’s campaign against illegal drugs, which they blame for helping to foment crime, corruption and political instability in Latin America while failing to reduce the availability of drugs in America.” America’s been in a misguided “War on Drugs” for since the Nixon era, and it just gets worse. Still we hang onto a failed policy that costs hundreds of billions, drives drug traffic underground, raising the price of a commodity that costs pennies. We’re creating the opposite result, increasing demand. Maybe that’s exactly what Big Pharma wants, more addicts to feed its business model. And exactly what our “nation of addicts” wants, a steady fix … maybe it’s time to accept reality, stop fighting it, work with it.

Three. Mexican drug cartels using Harvard B-School corporate models

In a confidential report to Big Pharma you’d also find a summary of Guy Larson’s brilliant assessment, “How the Cartels Work” in Rolling Stone.The subtitle suggests tacit market-sharing and territory-splitting deals involving Big Pharma, domestic healthcare firms, and foreign drug cartels: “Mexican drug lords have transformed the narcotics trade in America – and the DEA appears powerless to stop them.” America powerless?

“One of the strangest things about the drug war that is tearing Mexico apart is how little of the bloodshed has spilled over the border,” says Lawson. “On one side of the Rio Grande is Ciudad Juárez, one of the most violent cities on the planet, with 1,600 drug-related murders last year. On the other side is El Paso, Texas, the third-safest city in America, with only 18 killings. The 100-to-1 disparity in murders underscores a little-understood reality in the War on Drugs: The current crop of Mexican drug lords is not a bunch of Scarface-style lunatics high on coke and hell-bent on violence. Instead, they are highly sophisticated executives, pursuing profit by the cheapest and most efficient means possible.”

Yes, they’re using Harvard-style B-School models: “Rather than resort to violence in U.S. cities, the Mexican cartels have outsourced street-level grunt work to an army of illegal immigrants.” Forbes’ light satire oaints “El Chapo” as a B-movie bandito with a price on his head. By comparison, Lawson’s chilling piece reads like a first-class press release about a Wall Street CEO: Mexican cartels are run by “highly sophisticated executives, pursuing profit by the cheapest and most efficient means possible. Torturing rivals and beheading victims serves a purpose in Mexico, where drug-related violence has killed 12,000 people in the past three years; narcotraficantes routinely use brutality to subdue competitors, eliminate witnesses and frighten off police recruits.”

Meanwhile, “north of the border, the drug lords are as corporate and hyperorganized as Walmart replacing the top-down approach of their Colombian predecessors with a new business model – one that outsources the street-level grunt work to an army of illegal immigrants,” says Lawson. It’s a business model that works so well they don’t want to upset it: “With business booming – prices are steady and demand remains high – unleashing a Mexican-style rampage in this country would only risk riling up U.S. law enforcement.” In that way, the Mexican cartels resemble Big Pharma’s efforts to kill healthcare reform in America, neither wants to upset a very profitable business model.

“War on Drugs” is dead, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars … time to change our policies

The truth is, there’s no “War on Drugs” to win, nor to lose, just millions of addicts who need help. I’ve been in recovery thirty-six years. Back in the eighties I worked professionally with hundreds who went through places like Betty Ford Center. Statistics show that over 10% of Americans are physiologically predisposed to addictive behavior. That will never change. It’s in our DNA. “El Chapo” sure sees the profit potential. The military only sees an enemy. So we keep wasting money fighting ineffective “supply-side” drug wars places like Mexico, Afghanistan and Columbia. Instead of helping addicts. We’ve learned so little since Prohibition. The real problem is demand, not supply. So we’ll keep losing our “War on Drugs” till we fundamentally shift our policies.

Mexican MBA types get it: “Mexican cartels aren’t fighting the War on Drugs in the United States for a very simple reason: They’ve already won,” concludes Lawson. Given that painful reality, Big Pharma should wise up and get ahead of the legalization trend. Lead it. If Big Pharma capitalizes on their unique experience, they can capture new products and new markets driven by the relentless demand for a fix. Lead in the development of a new national policy shifting away from military action to treatment, decriminalization and regulation, generate new sources of tax revenues, and help millions of addicted Americans.

In MarketWatch: “Drug wars: Big Pharma, Afghan, Mexican cartels.” 10.13.09