This has had the effect of diverting attention away from the dire social and health consequences of legal drugs, principally alcohol, tobacco,and inappropriately prescribed tranquillisers. Between them, these cause the loss of thousands of lives every year and much pain and disability for both users and non-users of these drugs. The legal drugs, principally tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs are widely promoted through advertising, sponsorship and corporate pressure. As a result their use is generally accepted by society and efforts to control usage largely rely on a mixture of taxation, education, restriction of sale and use to adults or certain places, and voluntary restraint. Under prohibition, illegal drugs are made not only more attractive to some, but also tend to be more poisonous and expensive.
Consequently users become more unhealthy and more likely to steal and deal.
The cost of enforcing prohibition is becoming increasingly untenable. Unlicensed and unregulated events, kept underground by prohibition, are held regularly in overcrowded venues or inappropriate sites that fail to meet health and fire regulations, at which ventilation and provision for refreshments are inadequate and to which the emergency services would be unable to gain access if needed. The popularity of these events and their proliferation in spite of attempts to suppress them makes the adoption of a more liberal approach coupled with a system of regulation a matter of highest urgency. DU106 Small scale farmers in the underdeveloped South often rely heavily on the hard currency they can receive from drug crop harvests. Strategies by rich, drug-importing nations to eradicate drug crops, such as cash compensation, have proved woefully inadequate and are usually jeopardised by corrupt bureaucracies.