Common Sense on ...

The "War on Drugs"

MERICA'S DRUG POLICY is riven by inconsistency and outright illogic.

The only legal justification for any prohibition is the public good. And since it is irrefragable that alcohol has caused more public misbehavior, more crime, more health impairment, greater harm to the workplace through absenteeism and illness and more cumulative evidences of derangement in its addicts than all illegal drugs combined, it would appear by far the most logical candidate for de jure prohibition.

And I think we all know how well Prohibition worked.

If any one fact about drug law has made itself utterly clear, it is that prohibition simply does not work. The real answers are the hoary truisms: education and harm reduction.

Twenty-four years America has spent, together with hundreds of billions of dollars and incalculable wasted human potential, in fighting what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll rightly calls "The War on Some Drugs." And at the bitter end, how much have we gained?

For we may never know how much we have lost.

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