As a CIA analyst in Shanghai and Pakistan during Americas war on terror, Amaryllis Fox was familiar with drawn-out, intractable conflict. Shed studied the compounding effects of redoubling on failed policies, of redundant good versus evil arguments peddled into a quagmire, costing billions and an incalculable loss of life. But the situation in Americas longest military war, now nearing two decades, paled in comparison to the subject of Foxs post-CIA project for Netflix: Americas costly, decades-longer engagement known as the war on drugs.

The Business of Drugs, a six-part series Fox hosts on Netflix, takes a clear-eyed approach to the futility of drug enforcement: what are the incentives, economic and personal, that keeps the market flow of narcotics churning despite a generational trail of violence and waste? Declared in 1971 by Richard Nixon, the war on drugs refers broadly to the federal governments campaign to control psychoactive substances through draconian legislation, expansion of enforcement agencies, and military aid and intervention to other countries. Drug enforcement policies have long served as cudgels against minority groups the first anti-opium laws, in the 1870s, targeted Chinese immigrants; anti-cannabis measures in the 1910s and 20s aimed for Mexican workers and the current iteration grows from these roots; from mandatory minimum sentences to no-knock warrants, the war on drugs has fueled, in part, the mass incarceration of Americans, especially people of color. Nearly 50 years and $1tn in, the business of drug prohibition has not only not worked, but the problem is worse than it was when the policy began, Fox told the Guardian.

The Business of Drugs plays like a condensed, updated version of the popular National Geographic series Drugs, Inc (also on Netflix), moving from Americas voracious consumption of illicit substances to the global network of supply evading, or dwarfing, interlocking attempts at enforcement. The series six segments are delineated by substance cocaine, synthetics (such as MDMA, also known as ecstasy), heroin, meth, cannabis and opioids and explore substances of wildly varying levels of addictiveness, use and geography. Together, the chapters form a loose condemnation of prohibition as both policy and moralistic stance.

The series is not a matter of admitting defeat in the war on drugs, Fox said. Instead it demands looking at the policies themselves rather than the fight to enforce them, and asking ourselves if in fact prohibition has any logical hope of working, or whether its a residue of a moralistic stance that I think is no longer relevant in our society.

Like its title, The Business of Drugs aims to be straightforward, or as clear as possible on the economics dollars by gram, price increases by mile of transport in shadowy systems for which transparency is a risk. Each episode visits a different hotspot epitomizing the challenges, market and opportunity for positive change for each substance. For cocaine, Fox traces the bloody trail of the wests habit from the plants cultivation in Colombia (a no-brainer for farmers, given the yield and influence of cartels), through Mexican smuggling routes, over the border to Americas draconian incarceration system for possession. Synthetics presents the therapy potential of MDMA, particularly for PTSD, if declassification from schedule 1, the highest classification for drugs of allegedly no medical benefit, would permit serious research. For heroin, Fox visits the ports of Kenya, where the route for smuggling the drug produced largely from opium poppies in Afghanistan has proliferated into an economic boon for some and devastating addiction epidemic for others.

In the installments on heroin (in Kenya) and meth (in Myanmar), Fox meets with government or military officials propagating the line of drugs as good versus evil, themselves firmly aligned with good, despite evidence to the contrary. The cost of prohibition inverts to the cost of unwieldy and haphazard legalization in the case of marijuana in some US states, especially California, where above-board business is cutthroat, onerously regulated, and ripe for consolidation by big business interests. And in an episode on opioids, Fox explores a familiar and devastating story of an American epidemic fueled by big pharmaceutical companies and the inertia of inadequate regulation.

According to Fox, everyone from individual coca plant growers in Colombia to worldly United Nations economists agreed that there were two ways to stop the exhaustive and unending war on drugs: end demand, or legalize and regulate with fair competition. Demand, largely from the US and western Europe, wont be going away, which leaves policy. We think that we can go in and stop it at the point of supply, said Fox, but as long as that demand continues, the reward is high enough that the economic reality is that this is going to continue.

The reality of those economics that for many, the choice to participate in the black market drug economy outweighs the cost of abstaining (if there is a choice to abstain at all) is critical in understanding how to bring an end to this war.

Fox and her team, including partner Zero Point Zero Productions, the company behind Anthony Bourdains Parts Unknown, worked for over a year in pre-production to establish sources willing to speak about participation in illicit, violent networks. The interviews, often anonymous a man who swallowed heroin packets in Kenya to cross into Tanzania, the small-batch cocaine dealer following his fathers footsteps in California, the masked dealer who sees a spate of zombie overdoses on a bad batch of synthetic marijuana as a business opportunity were built on both the desire to effect change through lived experience and, said Fox, the human impulse to share your life, to be meaningful and have the data that youve learned and the expertise that you have spent your professional life gathering be relevant. Maybe its in a criminal industry, but each of the people we spoke to from the smallest grower down the line each of them is a substantive expert in their field.

There is the tendency in the media and in everyday life to think of the drug trade as being driven by the low-level growers and dealers and others who are caught up in it, Fox said. But these testimonies revealed rational calculations of risk versus economic and social security. Many of us, if we found ourselves in the same position, would make the same choices for our family and for our own economic wellbeing, she said.

That realization was, to her, hopeful the continuance of a fight against controlled substances remains frustratingly futile, but an assessment of choices on the ground in favor of drug dealing, growing and trafficking also known, for many, as economic survival demonstrated that its not a good versus evil battle that is going to go on forever, its actually a matter of economics and policy. If we make changes to those things, we can see a different outcome.

The only way for us to tackle this is to have a very logical, adult conversation as a nation about whether theres any possibility of demand going away, Fox said. And if not, what do we need to do in terms of legalization and regulation to bring an end to the violence and mass incarceration that this policy has created?

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The Business of Drugs: inside the economics of America's longest war - The Guardian