For more than four decades, the United States has been involved in an extensive military and political campaign known as the "War on Drugs." This campaign was established in order to further use law enforcement to “punish users, sellers, and producers of illicit drugs” through “incarceration, eradication, interdiction, extradition, and supply reduction” (Scherlen 67). The effectiveness of these policies, as well as the morality of the extents that the US government has used to enforce them has become subject to an increasing amount of criticism. Along with these criticisms, policy reform movements have continually become more prevalent and outspoken both domestically and internationally. Furthermore, the War on Drugs has been a violent, costly failure after achieving none of its intended goals and instead not only creating extremely controversial domestic impacts but also resulting in resounding social, economic, and even environmental impacts in other parts of the world, especially Latin America. In order to exemplify the extent of some of the War on Drugs’ international impacts in Latin America and argue its ineffectiveness and dire need for reform, I have researched the country of Colombia with a primary focus on the events that took place during the United States’ most recent military initiative in Colombia, known as Plan Colombia. In order to prevent misrepresenting or over simplifying Colombia’s array socioeconomic and political issues, the fact that Colombia has been involved in a civil war between Colombian Armed Forces and paramilitary groups since the 1960s that is directly and complexly intertwined with the drug trade must be acknowledged. Although by no means solely responsible for Colombia’s economic, social, and political struggles, the United States’ involvement in Colombia has been notably assessed as the most severe of all drug war impacted countries. This notion is vividly expressed by the following statement by Former Colombian President and Secretary General of the Organization of American States César Gaviria: “No other country in the world has paid a higher cost than Colombia in terms of lives lost of its political leaders, judges, law enforcement agents, soldiers, journals and tens of thousands of innocent civilians as well as in damage inflicted to its democratic institutions” (Wheeler and Zedillo 12). As explained by an article in The Economist, this reality is greatly due to Colombia’s role in the production and trafficking of illegal drugs, especially cocaine, that subsequently are smuggled and sold in the United States. For example, at several points in time, Colombia has played such an extensive role in the supply of cocaine that it has provided as much as ninety percent of the cocaine sold in the United States (Huey). The devastating social impacts during Plan Colombia, as well as the ineffectiveness of its policies, become illuminated when looking at the hu