The annual cost to the United States of illegal drugs, both monetary and human casualty costs, is comparable to the total 10-year cost of the Vietnam War, and with many of the most serious costs - political corruption, white collar crime, moral disintegration, and breakdown in family units - not included in the totals. A disturbing aspect of these statistics is their cumulative nature. Many of the costs, e.g., addiction recovery, special education needs of drug-impaired children, AIDS cases caused by drugs, would continue even if the flow and use of drugs were instantly reduced to zero. A third insight from these figures is that most of the problems are associated with the use of the drugs, not with the fact that they are illegal. Unless the Nation's efforts are pursued in the same carefully planned way in which the Gulf War was pursued, the drug warlords will remain undefeated, and America will be subjected to the same problems of corruption and economic dislocation that plague Colombia and Mexico. Footnotes, tables