The house at the center of this week’s Big Drug Bust sits next door to Elva Wilson’s home in a rural stretch of Middlesex County.

Police say an ethnic Vietnamese gang secretly grew more than 1,000 marijuana plants in the basement under high-intensity lamps. Three were arrested, and police were still searching for three more.

And yet, Wilson was unfazed. She was cleaning her house Thursday in blue rubber gloves when she was asked about it.

"To me, it’s no big deal," she said. "We smelled it before, but we thought it was just kids partying."

Such is the fear that marijuana now strikes in the heart of America. The latest Gallup Poll shows nearly half of all Americans want to legalize the use of marijuana. Close to 100 million have tried it.

And when you look at any objective measure — death, violence, disease and addiction — alcohol ranks as the more dangerous drug of choice by far.

Still, this attempt to stamp out marijuana use through police power goes on, year after year.

Sen. Nicholas Scutari, who serves as a municipal prosecutor in Linden, sees it up close.

"If you talk to my detectives, they’ll tell you they’re just pushing it from one corner to the next," he says. "Really, we’ve just created a whole lot of crime by making such harsh laws on marijuana."

The Vietnamese suspects face up to 20 years in state prison. If all six suspects are caught and convicted, the prison time alone would cost New Jersey taxpayers almost $6 million, half that amount if they all win early parole.

This crew was not particularly smart, nor menacing. Police were tipped off when a local officer smelled marijuana, apparently the unusable portions of the plant that the suspects burned in the fireplace. Police found no weapons in the house, or in the other five houses they raided later.

Still, with $10 million worth of pot and $60,000 in cash recovered, no one would have been surprised if weapons had been found. And that does make some of the locals nervous.

"My kids play outside here," said Jen Moody, another neighbor.

To Ethan Nadelman, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, we are repeating the mistakes of the Prohibition era.

"This bust is going to have no impact on marijuana use," he said. "There’s not one kid or adult who will not use marijuana because of this."

We spend $10 billion to $15 billion enforcing marijuana laws each year, he estimates. FBI reports show police arrested more than 800,000 people on marijuana charges last year, 90 percent of them for possession. And yet in surveys, high school students say it is easier to buy pot than alcohol.

In Linden, Scutari sees the steady traffic of marijuana cases and wonders what the point is.

"People can’t imagine not having a drink after work on a Friday," he says. "And alcohol is a much stronger drug."

The politics of the drug war remain emotional, but they are clearly shifting towards greater tolerance. Fourteen states, including New Jersey, have legalized marijuana for medical uses, and 14 more are considering it. Several states are considering bills to decriminalize marijuana, and California is poised to put the question to a referendum.

Scutari sponsored medical marijuana law that was approved in January in Trenton. But it was a tough fight, and the law in New Jersey is a strict one that limits use to a small list of severe diseases. Unlike in California, no one will be riding a skateboard to the clinics here.

As for decriminalizing marijuana, Scutari says New Jersey is a long way off.

"Our state is not moving in that direction," he says. "Down the line, some way, some day, I would think we’ll revisit this."

In the meantime, it appears the thousands of non-violent drug offenders behind bars in New Jersey Thursday will be joined by a few new recruits. Again, just like Prohibition.