Yeah, take a real close look at what led to our needing RICO (another non-sensical law): prohibition of alcohol and gambling. Without those two legal battles, the mob would have still been shaking down the corner grocer for a couple of bucks protection money (which our country's law enforcement should have been taking care of, instead of chasing down bootleggers and betting operations).

Watch Ken Burn's documentary on prohibition and soak in all the parallel's to today's war on drugs: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/

"organized crime" to the level that necessitated the RICO act only came about because of the war on drugs (in that particular case, alcohol was the drug in question).

While it's true that organized crime grew up during the bootlegging era, organized crime was on the upswing in the 1960's and 1970's, at a time long after prohibition had ended and before the modern drug war had started. Clearly, the fuel to feed organized crime existed without prohibition. Given that fact, it's hard to say that those organizations wouldn't have grown bigger and more sophisticated during that period anyway (just like corporations did, for reasons that had nothing to do with prohibition).

The modern drug war was well underway in the 1970s (watch Donnie Brasco again). It just had not yet morphed into the crack epidemic (an epidemic whose roots lay partially in the skyrocketing cost of cocaine due to the war on drugs).

Exactly my point. Prohibition was definitely part of this country's long-standing war on "illegal substances".