NEARLY 1.9m people were arrested in America for drug offences in 2006—over three times the number detained in 1980. Around one in eight arrests is now drug related. But what they achieve in the “war on drugs” is unclear, according to a report by The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group. Fewer people take drugs: 14% of people reported using them monthly in 1979, but only 8% in 2005. But arrests are increasingly for more trivial crimes: in 2006 only 17.5% of arrests were made for the sale or manufacture of drugs, whereas some 39% were for the possession of marijuana.

AP