The Utopia called "Drug Legalization"

"The goal of legalizing drugs is to bring them under effective legal control. If it were legal to produce and distribute drugs, legitimate businessmen would enter the business. There would be less need for violence and corruption since the industry would have access to the courts. And, instead of absorbing tax dollars as targets of expensive enforcement efforts, the drug sellers might begin to pay taxes. So, legalization might well solve the organized crime aspects of the drug trafficking problem. On average, drug use under legalization might not be as destructive to users and to society as under the current prohibition, because drugs would be less expensive, purer, and more conveniently available." -- National Institute of Justice

With legalization would come reduced violence and corruption. Expensive enforcement would vanish. Finally, the manufacturers of drugs would pay taxes, as would the drug dealer.

With drugs less expensive, purer and conveniently available, maybe users would moderate their habits and not be given to excess by also going into therapy to treat the tendency of some addicts to go to excess due to psychosocial issues which precipitated their substance abuse.

If America was so enlightened, then the State's experience with pushing alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical drugs could be applied with gusto to recreational drugs; but the only reason why drugs will remain illegal is because media hype would die down and moral reprehension would cease.

Yes, the only reason why drugs are illegal are to sell product. In this case, it is the demon called "drug addiction" which barely accounts for 10% of users of any drug.

And, contrary to the hype, when 100 people take a drug, about 10 will get hooked, depending on their background, motivation, and peers.

Alas, this utopia of drug legalization will never come to pass because neither statistics nor medicine enlighten the voter. Only education of the harm of drug prohibition will do so.

So in essence, harm reduction implies eventual drug legalization. For that would reduce the stigma and the costs of a senseless and stupid war.

'Moral panic' of drug laws isolates users and fuels crime

MOST people who take illegal drugs do not cause any harm to themselves or anyone else, according to a study which calls for the current "crude" ABC classification system be abandoned.

The two-year RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs argued that Britain's drug laws should be replaced by a system which recognises that drinking and smoking can cause more harm.
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Current laws are "driven by a moral panic" and a more effective drug policy would focus on harm reduction rather than cutting crime, the commission's report concluded.

The report said: "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful. The evidence suggests that a majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others."

The flaws in drug policy are demonstrated, it claimed, by the categorisation of ecstasy along with heroin and cocaine as a Class A drug. Such a classification "probably does most to undermine the credibility of our drug laws in the eyes of that section of the population that is most likely to use drugs: namely, the hundreds of thousands of people for whom 'dance drugs' are a routine feature of a good night out," the report said. - The Scotsman, March 9, 2007

Substance use is not solved by criminalizing use based on morals, but based on education and harm reduction.

By using moral panic, drug laws criminalize drug users as traffickers, and the way laws are written, serve to manufacture drug criminals.

Thus drug war policies only cause harm and worsen drug use.

Only education and harm reduction are necessary, not draconian drug laws.