Over the 50-odd years the global war on drugs has been fought, it’s been a catalogue of failure on pretty much every level you’d care to examine – bar the bank balance of those profiting from the outcome. In his latest book, Legalizing Drugs: The Key to Ending the War, Steve Rolles, a senior policy analyst on drug policy with the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, provides a brief history of the global war on drugs, outlining the cost five decades of the policy has had on public health, the economy and human rights, and then goes on to suggest how the market should instead be “managed by governments, not gangsters”.