Funny thing. In the early 1960s I was going to Brooklyn College at night, and was taking a required rhetoric course.
This editorial was nearly identical on the general subject of Prohibition supporting organized crime. The only thing missing at that time was the name: "War on Drugs", and the violence scale. However, the prohibition-era US gangsters were just as ruthless as the Mexican drug cartels.

It's bad enough that we have drunken drivers on the road. To enable drug users would be disastrous. You could never legalize all drugs. There are some that are just too dangerous to even use once. The cartels would offer legal drugs at reduced prices and would only invent new drugs. Sorry, I can't agree with this logic at all. The only answer is to stop consumption whatever that takes. When consumption drops, so will the violence.

Pat: "The cartels would offer legal drugs at reduced prices and would only invent new drugs." Cartels would not offer legal drugs at reduced prices because the market would drive the price down far enough that they would be losing money. Besides, consumers will be buying drugs from legitimate businesses they can trust. This is the same reason why moonshine doesn't sell well at any price.
Also, cartels don't invent new drugs. Drugs have historically been found naturally in the environment or synthesized in the labs of the worlds major pharmaceutical companies. If all these years of drug prohibition have taught us anything it's that we cannot stop consumption no matter what we do. I apologize Pat, but I cannot agree with your logic.

Well written, I liked it. Now if only people like Pat and the politicians that think like him would realize it.
If we could get rid of consumption of these products you're right they would disappear, but a realistic look at it reveals that drugs have been with us since the beginning of history, that all the cultures of the world have used some intoxicating substance, so consumption is a moot issue as it's a cultural constant.
Even beyond that the lost uses for these products is saddening, early in American history farmers where required to grow a certain percentage of hemp and where even allowed to pay taxes in it. This was for its industrial and not its recreational properties.
Not to go all new age on you, but the shear number of products that can be made from hemp is staggering and it's mind boggling why although the benefits are widely known and acknowledged (medical, industrial, recreational), when even a cursory comparison to legal drugs (tobacco, alcohol, many pharmaceuticals) indicates it's way more useful and better for us, that it remains illegal.
Just my 2 cents.

Hi John Stossel. I found your article to be very logical and the best reasoning to end prohibition on drugs.

The arguments made in the article against violence etc are all valid, of course, but the "war on drugs" idiocy goes much further than that.

The number of Americans that are in jail now for non-violent drug offenses counts in the hundreds of thousands; the sheer cost of that in money is staggering, to say nothing of the pointlessness of jailing drug victims.
Enforcement costs for drugs etc are also in the tens of billions.

With most drugs legalized and the rest of them decriminalized, the government could tax the drugs, and the cost for them could be brought way way down, making the need to commit crime to afford them go away as well. That would bring in tens of billions in tax income instead of the current tens of billions in money drain to try to enforce a health issue through the justice system. Drug related crime and the drug related criminals would see their income source cut off overnight, with enormous consequences for society as a whole.

If the US had a decent single payer healthcare system those tax funds could even be put to use to treat the poor suckers who decided to become drug addicts, thus mitigating the drawbacks of easily available drugs.

So basically yes, there are a massive quantity of reasons for legalizing and precious few against, except of course that people have been brainwashed into a knee jerk reaction of "drugs = bad" and its going to be an uphill climb to make people realize that legalization is absolutely necessary and, in the long run, unavoidable.

LOL, John Stossel is an idiot.

RT
www.anonymity.es.tc

Stossel and Croft... it's all been said before, and it's blatantly clear. However, denial and ignorance continually prevail. I would add that prohibition also provides a means to maintain our country's institutionalized classism/racism... and at some level, this is not perpetuated by ignorance, but by design. You gotta love propaganda! What a sad commentary.