Last year alone, roughly $40 billion in taxpayer money was spent fighting our elusive war on drugs, while mandatory minimum sentencing laws--instituted in 1986 by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act--have helped to fuel the largest public and private prison construction and operations boom in American history, a phenomenon which has fairly been described as the evolution of the prison-industrial complex.

No less than 500,000 of the two million human bodies locked away behind concrete walls and steel bars in America are there because of drug-related crimes. By comparison, in 1980, the number of drug offenders doing time from coast to coast was just 50,000. According to the Bureau of Justice, if recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated 1 of every 20 persons will serve time in a prison during their lifetime.

The launch of a new web site on Monday, StopTheWar.com, aims to channel some of the outrage about the drug war being generated by Steven Sondenbergh's widely acclaimed drama, Traffic.

Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, the hit movie has generated heated discussion about the complexity and the ultimate futility of the U.S. government's current seek-out-and-destroy approach to stemming the drug supply that flows across our borders with impunity. With a dazzling screenplay written by Stephen Gaghan--who recently admitted to his own, personal struggles with regular hard drug use in an interview with the New York Times--the film offers a compelling, if sometimes cliched, look at the degradation of drug addiction and the ultimate incomprehensibility of addressing recreational and abusive use of drugs with military might and lengthy prison sentences. (California's Proposition 36, which will go into effect on July 1, will finally sentence many first- and second-time drug offenders to treatment instead of prison.)The new, flashy site, created by the New York-based non-profit drug policy institute,