Decriminalization of Drugs Going Mainstream?

I caught the end of Charlie Rose on Bloomberg earlier this evening, and I found the final three minutes very interesting. The topic was the State of Latin America and the panel was the Chair of NYU's Latin America History Department, the Dean of International Studies at Columbia, a policy wonk for a think tank devoted to Latin American studies, and a former high-ranking Costa Rican official (I apologize for not remembering names or details 100% accurately).

As was to be expected, there was disagreement among these men on a litany of topics. Yet when Rose brought up "non-State players", as I believe he so aptly put it, there was universal agreement among the panel that the War on Drugs was an absolute failure, needed to be amended, if not shut down, and that it was the single most devastating policy Washington, D.C. had enacted on Latin America in the past forty years.

Obviously such things won't happen for many years, if they happen at all. But it is encouraging to see such well-respected intellectuals of various ideologies and backgrounds all taking this position.