Compulsion and punishment are not necessary. In the case of illegal drugs, compulsion and punishment have proved to be both excessively costly to society and ineffective as deterrents to drug use. Interposition against the illegal drugs would employ means generically similar to those used in the above example, to the benefit of users of illegal drugs, rather than to their punishment and disgrace. The cost to the public would be vastly less than the currently employed, failed measures. Libertarian proponents of drug legalization define drug prohibition, with its excessive reliance upon police measures, as futile.
Interposition defines such measures as both futile and counterproductive.
Nevertheless, interposition can be effective in control of the illegal drugs, even in the environment of current prohibitionist policy measures. Consequently, it can no longer be argued that society must legalize drug commerce in order to abate the high costs and social wreckage of prohibitionist drug wars.