More people are locked up in the United States, per head of population, than anywhere else in the world. Incarceration rates for drug offenders have increased twelvefold since 1980. Yet, drug use is skyrocketing and the drug cartels are laughing all the way to the arms dealers. Want to start chanting "USA!" yet?

Our leaders do. Hell-bent and determined for this "war" to fail spectacularly and consistently, President Obama's proposed federal anti-drug budget for 2012 has avoided the spending freeze and emphasises law enforcement and incarceration at the expense of treatment, while drug tsar Gil Kerlikowske claims it does exactly the opposite.

Not surprising. The Global Commission on Drug Policy's report made waves earlier this month by calling for drug legalisation and by describing the war on drugs as the failure that it is. The Obama administration responded with boilerplate about progress and promptly ignored the high-level panel of experts. So much for change.

And, with a sidelong degree of ludicrousness rivalled only by the quickness with which government is ready, willing and able to come down hard on any drug lacking the full weight and force of a powerful lobby, we've got ourselves a new bogeyman: bath salts.

Bath salts are the commercial name for either mephedrone or MDPV and can be bought in many head shops, convenience stores and online. They are the current craze of the legal high market. The effects have been likened to those of cocaine, amphetamines and low-quality MDMA. They're currently legal and unregulated in most states and users have no way to tell which drug they're actually purchasing, where they're sourced or the potency.

Upwards of 600 bath salts-related overdoses (some fatal and some not) have occurred in the past five months. On the face of it, that may sound like a lot, but it's actually relatively few compared to, say, the 120,000 overdoses due to prescription painkillers each year. An exact number of deaths, or even a reliable estimate, is hard to come by, which means it must be markedly lower. The biggest danger posed by bath salts is likely one of excessive use. In other words, a danger posed by any drug.

Yet, sensational reports of deaths are cropping up in local media outlets across the country and the governmental response has been predictably panic-drenched. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York has called for an immediate nationwide ban and, as of now, 20 state legislatures have passed emergency bans to sweep bath salts off the shelves and under the rug.

Wait a second.

Alcohol kills more people than Aids, is far more dangerous to the human body than cocaine or heroin and, in fact, kills more people than all other recreational drugs combined. Then, there are more than 40,000 motor vehicle deaths attributed to alcohol each year in the United States alone.

But there's never any talk of returning to prohibition. Nor should there be. That experiment failed abysmally, on a practical and moral level.

When a new drug enters the spotlight, regardless of its relative danger, we pull out the anti-drug slogans and exercise emergency-scheduling authority as happened with MDMA and as is currently happening with the synthetic THC analogue JWH. It looks like bath salts are next.

As the regime of fear grows, the country is thrown into panic mode, and so we ramp up the amount of money, regulation and angst devoted to a relatively minor problem. Sure, reckless kids who take too many drugs at once are bound for terrible hangovers, paranoid comedowns and, possibly, death. And the fact that these cleverly marketed bath salts are wholly unregulated should give anyone pause: it's always best to know what you're ingesting and how strong it is.

But banning drugs doesn't stop the use or sale of them. Drug use is a choice. And it's one that people will continue to make. Banning drugs simply adds the criminal element. Responsible drug users (and sellers) are forced further and further underground, marginalised, demonised and often incarcerated for nothing more than innocent attempts at fun or expansion of their own consciousness. Keeping drugs underground (or forcing them there) only makes things worse.

Take the case of Patricia Spottedcrow, a 25-year-old Oklahoma mother of four, who's been sentenced to 10 years in prison for the sale of $31-worth of marijuana. She lost her kids for selling the equivalent of a few measly joints. It's heartbreaking and it's wrong and it's going to keep happening.

The nature of the beast is such: keep taking away the right of consenting adults to get high on relatively harmless drugs like MDMA and marijuana, and society's most creative and entrepreneurial will keep developing new and potentially more dangerous drugs for squares to ban and look down upon.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

It's a stalemate and nobody wins.