On April 3, 2013, the City of New London, and other municipalities throughout New London County were ground zero for a series of drug raids that the Department of Homeland Security called “the largest in State history.”

This 15-month long operation originated in the New London Police Department but grew to involve the U.S. Attorney’s office, the FBI, Homeland Security, the State Police, and the U.S. Secret Service. In all, over 100 arrests were made on state and federal charges.

As then-Mayor of New London, I praised law enforcement efforts and hoped this would be a new beginning in our region’s fight against the often violent trade in illegal narcotics.

Three years later, however, heroin overdoses in our region are soaring and street violence associated with the drug trade continues almost uninterrupted. What, if anything, did we gain? Has the drug war merely become the new Prohibition, as ineffective as alcohol prohibition was nearly a century ago?

This episode in our recent regional history illustrates a fact that many in government and law enforcement have come to believe privately but few are willing to say publically: it’s time to end the war on drugs.

If a public policy initiative’s success is judged on its ability to accomplish its stated goals, then there may be no policy in American history that is a greater failure than the drug war.

This failure isn’t due to lack of enforcement. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, we arrest someone for drug-related offenses every 19 seconds, averaging over 1.6 million arrests per year. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans are in prison, over 70 percent of whom are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Our Democratic society, the “land of the free”, is home to 25 percent of the world’s prison population.

This policy failure is also not due to a lack of spending. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, drug use from 1970-2010 has remained stable, while the costs of the war on drugs have increased from under $1 billion in 1970 to over $20 billion in 2010, a total expenditure of over $1.5 trillion dollars.

These figures don’t include the lost economic productivity and income-earning potential of people who are either currently incarcerated or handicapped by their criminal records. Nor do they include the increased costs of medical care and social services borne by the entire population.

Yet even as costs have soared, and prisons populations have swelled, violence on our streets has escalated. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 2013, there were 11,208 gun related homicides in the United States. Over three-quarters of these were centered in urban areas often associated with young people involved in the drug trade. Our American urban streets are the most dangerous of any western nation.

It’s time to try a different approach. Instead of treating drug addiction as a law enforcement problem, let’s treat it as a public health problem. All narcotics should be decriminalized and drug users should face treatment, not prison time.

In taking this course, the United States would be following the lead of other nations such as Portugal, Spain and Italy, all of whom have seen significant declines in drug use, overdoses, and violence since voting to decriminalize narcotics.

However, U.S. politicians don’t often respond to data, and rarely follow the lead of other nations. They’re more concerned with poll numbers and re-election. Thus drug prohibition will continue so long as politicians believe it will help them win votes by looking moral, upstanding, and tough on crime, regardless of the actual policy outcomes.

As overdoses occur daily in our community and as each soul departs this earth at L&M hospital, I hope the people will demand an end to this nonsensical law enforcement approach to drug use. Only if the people demand change will our elected officials finally change tactics.

Conversely, if we do not demand change, then whenever a bad batch of heroin comes through our region, we will attend vigils, we will organize forums, and law enforcement will round up the usual suspects until the crisis abates. Afterwards, we’ll return to business as usual, and the death toll will grow ever higher.

Daryl Justin Finizio was the mayor of New London from 2012-2015.