This is so because if cocaine were reduced to the same price as crack, the abuser, acknowledging the higher rate of addiction, might forgo the more intensive high of crack, opting for the slower high of cocaine. Crack was introduced years ago as offering an alluring new psychoactive experience. But its special hold on the ghetto is the result of its price. We have read that ninety million Americans have experimented, at one time or another, with illegal drugs. This gets to the issue of actual availability.
Drugs are everywhere, simply everywhere.
In terms of availability, drugs might just as well be legal as illegal. Now it has been argued that legalization will create a different social climate, a more permissive, more indulgent climate. But the central point is that human beings in all cultures tend to seek out means of altering their mental state, and that although some will shop around and lose the powers of self-discipline, most will settle down to a base rate of use, and a much smaller rate of abuse, and those rates are pretty much what we have in the U.S. right now. That figure includes alcohol, by the way, and the figure remains fairly constant. We see at work here a major feature of the human response to drug availability, namely, the inclination to moderation.