The Drugs Won

The War On Drugs, is starting to look like the Wars on Vietnam and Iraq: unwinnable, expensive and frankly we're wondering why we started 'em in the first place. Speaking personally I've been wondering about the efficacy of the war on drugs for years. I come from a gene pool with a tendency toward addictive behaviors and some of my relatives have hurt themselves with legal drugs like alcohol, while others have hurt themselves with illegal drugs, and the availability and damage has been roughly the same in either case. Furthermore, fear of the breaking the law hasn't had any effect.

Except for me, by the way. It seems to have skipped a generation in my case, though I've got a jones for sugar that even I can't believe.

Anyway, making certain drugs illegal has only had the effect of raising their price while depriving the state of a chance to earn tax revenue from them. For this reason cash-strapped California is throwing around the idea taxing marijuana sales; further ideas about this can be found here. It would be great if nationally we could just relax drug laws and make them legal and safer. We'd have more resources to devote to violent crime, and more luxury tax money besides.

Would it cause an increase in drug use? Don't think so. People who don't want to smoke crack now aren't going to say, "well, now that it's legal maybe just this once." People who don't drive while they're drunk around going to smoke joints on their commute home. Besides, I'm perfectly fine with the idea of THAT being illegal. If we use alcohol laws as the template to regulate ALL recreational drugs, I bet we'll be a much stronger country.