Americans don't want to give jail time for possession. But they still want to keep those drugs (besides pot) illegal by huge margins: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/drug-legalization-poll_n_5162.... I haven't seen any polls asking about trafficking specifically, but I think it's fair to take those two data points to mean people want to target traffickers not users. But that is what the vast majority of the drug war is about. 99.8% of federal prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses were incarcerated for trafficking, not simple possession.

Your California stats are misleading. First, you said that drugs are responsible for the "majority" of our prison ills, but your chart shows that 77% of people sentenced for a second or third strike are for property or personal crimes, or gun possession.

Second, California is unusual in that the third strike can be anything (first two must be violent felonies). So people are in for drug possession, but also for other minor things like larceny. In most states, drug possession doesn't trigger the three strikes rule at all.

In any case, three strikes rules weren't created because of the drug war, even in California. It was a response to a guy who murdered a girl. And note that in several states, these rules passed by public referendum with huge margins less than 25 years ago.

> Second, California is unusual in that the third strike can be anything (first two must be violent felonies).

No, not since the passage of Proposition 36 in 2012: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law (see "California")

Right. But the data he's sourced to is from 2005.

> As for three strikes, drug possession was one of the top offenses for which it is applied.

But fundamentally the three strikes rule is a bigger issue there than the drug possession charges themselves, the three strikes remove all judicial flexibility and agency.