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Let's correct that and estimate it ourselves: The War on Drugs was launched in 1971, so that's 46 years it's been going on. And the average household size in th
by m12k 9y ago
Let's correct that and estimate it ourselves: The War on Drugs was launched in 1971, so that's 46 years it's been going on. And the average household size in the US was 2.58 in 2010 and 3.11 in 1971 according to census - let's take the higher number to get a conservative result that is generous to the US. That comes out to $10000/46/3.11 = $69.9 annually per citizen on average. It's a pity they muddled it up by comparing apples to oranges, because it's actually very favorable for Portugal if you compare apples to apples.
- shasheene 9y agoThat's a reasonable estimate. While the journalist used 'household', I don't think there was a reason to. Looks like there was a lot of news articles published between 2010-2015 with the $1 trillion figure being cited (haven't found a break down of that yet though). Anyway for fun here's my estimate: The mean US population between 1971 to 2015 (inclusive) was 262.1 million [1]. There were 44 years in that period (inclusive). Therefore: 1E12/(262.1E6*44) = $86.71/person annually [1] http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table http://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table and a spreadsheet