The events occurring with organized crime in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States have led us to evaluate the effectiveness of the so-called “war on drugs.” Our main contention is that strategies based on decentralization abound and are prone to be costly failures with long-lasting consequences. We stress that phenomena with an “aggregate” or national character should not be handled with decentralized strategies. The types of questions we try to answer are the following: What costs does a society incur when some phenomena