What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

Spring means budget season for local governments across the United States, and Steve Novick, a city commissioner in Portland, Oregon, has a proposal he thinks could save his city a nice chunk of change: slashing funding for the Portland Police Bureau's Drugs and Vice Division. The division, which largely targets drug dealers, costs $3.9 million annually to operate, and Novick's idea is to redirect a substantial portion of that budget to improving dangerous intersections where pedestrians are killed each year, as well as to better preparing the city for disasters—particularly the big earthquake that could strike Portland any day now.

“I noticed that we're spending about $4 million a year on the drugs and vice unit,” says Novick. “And there seems to be a lot of evidence that pursuing drug dealers is kind of a losing battle, because you arrest one and another pops up.”